Emilio looked down between the heels of his basketball shoes, 400 metres to the talus of the north face of the Cima Grande. In the cool, permanent half-dusk of the north face, the outrageous dream, his obsession, had almost killed him twice that morning, once with a broken hold and once with a mishap with a rope. Inspiration from the ghost of his hero Paul Preuss would have been welcome, although unlikely here, in the realm of the pitons Preuss rejected. Up here, Emilio only had himself to depend on, but that was all he had ever wanted anyway. Let his squadristi, the intellectuals in the alpine club or the ancient local guides in Cortina d’Ampezzo, look at him askance. Up here, on the north face of the Cima Grande, it was Leonardo Emilio Comici of Via Bazzoni in Trieste, and none of those men, such as they were, who was la cosa vera, the real thing.
How did he come to find himself here, on the hardest rock wall in the world, alone?
***
In 1915, Emilio followed his mother, Regina, into the Bora headwind that blew from the Carso’s limestone highlands and down through the streets of Trieste. A black mantilla hid her face. On one side, she held the hand of Emilio’s lanky brother, Gastone, and on the other, the hand of his 8-year-old sister, Lucia. They had been to mass at the church of Our Lady of Providence, who guided the ships across the wild oceans and brought the sailors home.
In Austrian-ruled Trieste, the Italian majority viewed the church with suspicion, and there were rumours that the priests were government spies, but Regina Cartago had been born on Italian ground in Verona and had faith. How she arrived in Trieste is lost to history. Tourists came no closer than Venice, a hundred kilometres west. Pretenders to thrones, poets, writers, lovers, criminals, sailors and the nationless continued east to Trieste, where Regina had fallen in love with the handsome shipwright, Antonio Comici.
Emilio inherited Regina’s strong brow, dark narrow eyes, and a head always tilted a little as if amused or skeptical. Antonio was lantern-jawed, broad nosed, tall and muscular. Fourteen-year-old Emilio was pudgy, sickly, slow to show signs of puberty and given to melancholy.
A gust blew Emilio off balance, and his hands caught the rough hemp rope strung along the sidewalk between steel staves. To show the wind his strength, he dropped down and ran into it towards his mother. He wished his father were there to see him, but since the war had begun – a year before, in 1914 – Antonio had worked every day of the week at the Österreichischer Lloyd and Cosulich Società Triestina di Navigazione shipyards. But he wanted his mother to see him beat the wind even more.
Emilio was something of a mammone, devoted to his mother and in awe of the sacrifices she made for her family. For his whole life, she would cook for him, advise him and do his laundry in her fortress and temple, a modest apartment in the safe, humble neighbourhood of San Vito. They were at number six, Via Bazzoni, not too far from the docks for Antonio to walk to work.
Via Bazzoni took its name from the crenellated villa of Palazzo Bazzoni, the headquarters of the Glanzmann family, who had enriched themselves as shippers and importers in service of the hungry empire to the north. Emilio and his friends had often stopped games in the street as one of the Glanzmanns’ shiny automobiles carried women in mink stoles and men in top hats to the opera or smart restaurants on the Corso.
At home, Regina took off her mantilla and shook out her long black hair. Emilio followed her to the kitchen, where she hummed as she broke the dried salted stockfish into a pot with a few unpeeled and wizened root vegetables. Emilio grew up on dishes that were lessons in how, just barely, to survive winters, wars and famines.
Emilio took the mandolin, with its neck worn smooth from his father’s hands, off its hook. He couldn’t remember when he could not play. He sang a tune he had learned with his father and the sailors at the harbour. Regina hummed along until her favourite part, then joined in. Emilio loved how they sounded together, and her Veronese accent with its lilt at the end of each word made even her curses sound like poetry.
“Trieste sleeps,” sang mother and son, “the sea is still, the shining stars make me dream.”
The music was redolent with his love for his grey city, that sad prisoner of Austria. His parents had taught him to long for reunification of all the Italian lands, the goal of those who called themselves irredentists. For Emilio, even as a boy, the tragedy of his city resonated with the sadness inside him he found so hard to escape. Like Trieste, Emilio had a certain distacco, or aloofness without indifference or cruelty, and lontananza, a sufficiency unto himself kept pure of any arrogance because it was fated, not chosen.
***
In the early summer of 1914, Russian-backed Serbians had assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Like most Triestinos, young Emilio blamed the event and the Great War that followed on the brutality of the Austrian government. Even Italy seemed to have lost its way and joined in an alliance with Austria and Germany. The war seemed far away and unlikely to benefit Trieste until, in May of 1915, a miracle happened: Italy forsook its alliance with Austria and Germany and declared war on Austria to reclaim ethnically Italian lands.
In Trieste, the Austrians acted swiftly to suppress Italian nationalism and thus inadvertently turned many young people into irredentists. The Austrians mined the harbour because they feared a British amphibious invasion, which they expected the Italian population of Trieste to support. The police shuttered the coffee shops said to breed irredentism, and, for good measure, closed the Italian boys’ clubs. Expressions of Italian sympathy were brutally crushed. Young Italians drafted into the Austrian army were sent to the Russian Front because most of them would desert if forced to fight the Italians. Emilio felt a rush of pride and excitement when he heard of the young heroes who risked death to cross the Austrian lines on the Carso to enlist with the Italian army.
For much of the conflict, the Austrians held the Italians back 30 kilometres west of Trieste, at Duino. The Italian aerial bombardment of Trieste, reinforced with aircraft and pilots from other allied countries, was limited in scale but sustained and indiscriminate. Irredentists risked death or arrest to stand in the streets and cheer on the Italian aircraft.
The imperial ship works were moved south to Pula in Croatia, where the Slavic workers inspired more trust from the Austrians. Austria-Hungary’s greatest saltwater port and railhead became almost unusable when the British blockaded the narrow mouth of the Adriatic between Brindisi and Otranto. Antonio sat for days at the kitchen table, playing the mandolin or the guitar. Money became literally scarce, as cash from the banks and maritime insurance companies had been sent north to Gorizia, further from the front. Rationing kept the population on the edge of starvation. Austrian mines in the harbour made fishing dangerous. Boredom and hunger bred anger. Unemployed Italian youths joined students from Emilio’s school to clash with the police in the Piazza Grande. Even as the Italian army suffered a series of defeats, irredentist author Scipio Slataper swore that Trieste’s youth “would be happy to die in [Trieste’s] blaze.”1
After the first Italian victories, German troops were sent to the Italian front in the Dolomites and introduced poison gas, air warfare and a new level of brutality to the war. Germany, once seen as an ambivalent nation by Trieste irredentists, now shared in Austria-Hungary’s infamy.
Too young to work or fight, Emilio spent many days entertaining himself. His lontananza, or natural aloofness, drew him away from the city to the solitude of the Carso. In the broken bone-white limestone wilderness split by gullies full of red sumac, he explored and daydreamed.
“My Carso is a landscape of limestone and junipers,” wrote Slataper. “A fierce cry, turned to stone. Grey boulders stained with rain and lichen, twisted, split, jagged. Dry junipers. Long hours of limestone and junipers. The grasses are all bristles. Bora. Sunshine. The earth is without peace, without continuity. It doesn’t even have any field to spread itself in. Every attempt it makes is all fissured and cloven. Cold caves, lying dark. The water-drop, carrying with it all the soil it has stolen, falls regularly, mysteriously, for a hundred years, and another hundred years.”2
One day in the hot, hungry first week of August 1917, Emilio walked along the dusty road between the Carso and the blue Adriatic, lost in his thoughts. At first, he thought that the figures to the west were a mirage, but then he heard distraught voices. Dozens trudged towards Trieste. Peasant women in kerchiefs cajoled goats or cows. Mothers carried small children. Some pulled donkeys laden with bundles or furniture. The only men were a few unarmed soldiers in dusty uniforms, with crutches or bandaged limbs.
He found a woman carrying two infants and followed by three children. Stress and exhaustion lined her face. The children’s tears made lines on their cheeks.
“What’s happened?” Emilio asked. “Who are all of these people?”
“General Cadorna took Duino, but first he shelled it. We are lucky to be alive. There were many, many dead.”3
She told Emilio that she had no family in Trieste and intended to seek the charity of the church or the authorities.
Emilio concealed his joy at the thought of the Italian army closing in on Trieste, but he feared for the woman and her children. Trieste already sheltered 10,000 refugees from the northern Carso. Food and shelter were hard to come by. But what if his own mother had been in such a plight? He did the only thing he could, and brought them home.
“Mama,” Emilio said, “these are refugees, they have nowhere to go and they’re hungry, we must take them in.”
Antonio and Regina already had five mouths to feed. Food, fuel and medicine were strictly rationed. And yet, in the old Mediterranean way, the stranger was seen as a second self, never to be cursed or rejected. The woman and her children stayed with the Comicis until the end of the war, in the autumn of 1918. There was no time limit on the ancient pact of hospitality. Emilio was proud of himself. Life could be sad, but there was hope for Italy, and there were moments, even for a boy in the Carso, to be a hero.
***
Emilio left school at 15 and became a junior clerk at the Port Authority’s Magazzini Generali, the warehouses of the Punto Franco Vecchio.
Every day he strode purposefully to his job, dressed in grey trousers and an open shirt. He always ate lunch in the same restaurant. He was a serious young man. When he went out with his friends to bars in Castello di San Giusto on the weekends, he drank only orange juice and went home to his mother at ten p.m.4
Despite his social reticence, Emilio craved excitement and contact with other young people. In 1916, he joined the Trieste Gymnastics Society. In addition to gymnastics, the society offered track and field activities, calisthenics and strength and endurance workouts like rope climbs and horizontal ladder traverses. At 15, Emilio still had plump cheeks and dark, almost girlish eyes. After a year at the society, Emilio grew into the physique of his father, not tall, but muscular, handsome, with high cheekbones.
The Trieste Gymnastics Society club set out to harden both its members’ bodies and their political views. Before the Great War, the irredentist politics of the society were usually tolerated by the police to prevent ethnic unrest. The police stood back, however, when in 1915, Austrian sympathizers burned down the society’s building to end the publication of La Piccola, an irredentist newspaper published on the premises. Young Emilio knew the society’s reputation and embraced its commitment to sport and Italian nationalism.
Out of the earshot of police and informers, between bristly boat rope climbs and calisthenic routines, Emilio learned of Italian victories at the front and the legends of Trieste’s irredentists, many of whom now fought on the Italian side. Inevitably, the name of Napoleone Cozzi, a founder of the society and Trieste’s greatest irredentist and climber, came up.
Cozzi’s climbing partner Antonio Carniel described Cozzi as “small, enthusiastic, volcanic and agile as a squirrel.”5 He was best known to the public as the artist who had painted the murals in the Caffè San Marco, where he and other irredentists had plotted against the Austrian government. Cozzi, however, did not limit his political action to chats over coffee.
In 1904, the Austrian secret police searched the headquarters of the Trieste Gymnastics Society and found several Orsini bombs, home-made grenade-like devices popular with anarchists. Cozzi was taken into custody on charges of high treason and imprisoned in Vienna to await trial. The Italian government intervened on his behalf, and, on the unlikely premise that the bombs had not been intended for an attack, Cozzi was acquitted.6
Cozzi was a more successful revolutionary as a climber. He surprised alpinists in the Eastern Alps with his aggressive skills honed on the Carso at Val Rosandra on the eastern outskirts of Trieste, where he created the first palestra, or practice climbing area, in Italy.7 With Trieste climbers Alberto Zanutti, Giuseppe Marcovig, Antonio Carniel and Tullio Cepich, he formed the group of climbers who became known as the Flying Squad.
The squad made numerous first ascents in the Cridola and Carnic Alps and tried to equal or outdo Austrian climbers like the great soloist Paul Preuss or the guideless climbing pioneers Eugen Lammer and Emil Zsigmondy. In 1910, Cozzi and Zanutti climbed a prominent rock spire in the Civetta group in the eastern Dolomites and named it Torre Trieste to proclaim their city’s arrival on the stage of alpinism.
In 1902, Cozzi solved one of the great rock climbing problems of the Eastern Alps when he led a vertical crack on the unclimbed Campanile di Val Montanaia. Zanutti, however, quailed at the thought of a struggle with even harder cracks and walls higher on the pillar, so they retreated. Before Cozzi could attempt the climb a second time, he indulged in a night of drinking with Austrians Victor Wolf von Glanvell and Karl Günther von Saar and shared details of his route. Glanvell and Saar promptly used the information to snatch the first ascent, an act that provided Cozzi with more proof of Austrian treachery.
When Italy joined the allies in 1915, Cozzi was one of the first Triestinos to enlist in the Italian army and risk exile from his hometown if Italy lost the war. He served with the alpini, or mountain infantry, on the Alpine Front, where the lines stretched over high passes, across glaciers and rock walls. Both sides blew up mountaintops, forged trails with explosives, bombarded peaks and strafed them with machine guns and filled valleys with poison gas. The mountains themselves inflicted heavy casualties. On a single day in 1916, later known as White Friday, 2,000 soldiers from both sides combined were killed in avalanches. Although the war ended with an Italian victory, 600,000 Italians had lost their lives and a million more had been wounded.
The nation made the alpini into heroes for their defense of the Alps against the Austrian and German hordes. Cozzi, however, never got to enjoy these honours. In 1916, he died in exile of complications from syphilis. Nonetheless, in death, as in life, his legendary status among irredentists in Trieste continued to grow.
At Cozzi’s Trieste Gymnastics Society, teenage Emilio could not help but learn that to become a hero for the motherland, and Trieste, was not a duty but an adventure.
***
News of Austria-Hungary’s surrender reached Trieste on October 30, 1918. The Italians of Trieste, despite years of malnutrition, celebrated with bonfires, danced and drank in the streets. The “Marcia Reale d’Ordinanza,” the anthem of the Kingdom of Italy, banned by the Austrians, was sung: “The Italian Alps will be free / angelic speech will reign, the hated barbarian / will never set foot here / as long as our fervent patriotic love lasts / as long as our civilization reigns.” Pictures of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy and flags hidden away for years were draped from windows. Church bells rang. Despite years of military incompetence and the staggering waste of Italian lives, irredentists claimed the war as proof of Italian prowess.
The Slavic and Austrian citizens were less festive. Amidst the anarchy of the open city, there was no one to stop the mobs who looted their homes and businesses.
On November 4, before Trieste had even been ceded to Italy by treaty, a ship full of Bersaglieri troops arrived from Venice. Emilio was ecstatic. The expedition had been inspired by the intervention of Dr. Paolo Jacchia, a Jewish doctor and irredentist.8 Despite the cold weather and a strong Bora wind, the crowd cheered.
The 500-year-long Austrian occupation of Trieste came to an end to the sound of the Bersaglieri brass band as they marched double-time through the streets. In the eyes of Emilio, the city’s faith that it would one day overthrow the oppressors had contributed to the victory.
There was a notion older than the church that the wronged eventually take their revenge against the oppressor, not in love and understanding, but in a vendetta, the Italian word for vengeance. Overnight, Italian became the official language of the whole region. German, Slavic and Austrian institutions were vandalized and suppressed. Many Slavs and German-speakers Italianized their names to avoid persecution.
The world outside of Italy, however, remained wary. The post-war restoration of sea trade was slow. Worse still, Trieste had been the chief saltwater port of Austria-Hungary. Now Trieste competed with all of Italy’s ports, including the modern port of Venice, 150 kilometres to the west. The warehouses of the old port filled slowly with imported goods. Few new ships were laid at Antonio Comici’s shipyards. Emilio filled the idle hours in the warehouse with door jamb pull-ups and deadlifting the silent adding machines. His physical strength grew, but like many nationalists, he was impatient for the longed-for liberation to bear fruit.
In 1920, the Trieste National Hall, a centre of Slavic life in the city, was burned by blackshirts, a new group of extreme nationalists who followed war veteran and political firebrand Benito Mussolini, whom they called Il Duce, or the leader. The blackshirts’ numbers grew as liberal governments in Rome failed in 1920 and 1921. Their uniformed presence in the street added a sense of the discipline and glamour that young nationalists like Emilio craved enough to ignore the street violence that killed 1,500 Italians and injured 40,000 more, brought down municipal governments and led to the burning of dozens of liberal and socialist newspaper offices.
In 1922, Emilio’s 14-year-old sister, Lucia, was diagnosed with a brain tumour. There was nothing to be done except to relieve her pain with morphine. Emilio spent every spare moment at her bedside, ashamed that he could not protect her and yet reverent of her heroic capacity to suffer. On the day before she died, she gave him her bracelet, a four-strand, gold-dipped steel chain. It became a symbol of Emilio’s vendetta against death. He would bide his time, but one day, he would avenge his sister by defeating death in his own way. Emilio never believed in accidents, even when the transgressor was a force of nature. He would later wear the bracelet when he climbed. Partners said that all they could hear as he led the hardest pitches in the Alps was the occasional ghostly tinkle of Lucia’s bracelet.
Emilio avoided church, but he was moved by the music at his sister’s funeral mass. “De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine” (out of the depths, I call to thee, O Lord), words he knew from the school chapel, had a new poignancy.9 His sister became the first name in a necrology that was to grow quickly once he became a climber.
In 1921, Emilio saw a flyer for the XXX Ottobre (30 October) Society, named after the day Trieste became part of Italy. The society called on brave local youths of both sexes to meet in the nearby neighbourhood of Pitteri for gymnastics, marches and dances. On weekends they would venture into the Carso to camp and explore caves. Emilio was the 26th card-carrying member of the society, but he had little time to join in their activities before he had to perform his compulsory military service.
In late October of 1922, while Emilio was in the army, Mussolini’s fascists orchestrated the failure of the elected national government in Rome, and King Victor Emmanuel III approved of a government led by the Partito Nazionale Fascista, or PNF. Fascism became the law of Italy. The choice faced by the majority of Italians was stark. “On the one side,” said fascist Mario Carli, “the cowardly, the soft, the hysterical, the effeminate, the cry-babies, the mommy’s boys; on the other the strong, the aware, the idealists, the mystics of danger, those who triumph over fear and those who are courageous by nature, the hot-blooded heroes and the heroes of the will.”10
Mussolini proclaimed that reunification of Italian territory was only the first step towards a fascist future. Italy must expand and found a new Roman empire in the Mediterranean and Africa. In the fascist economy, workers, management and capital would all work together for the betterment of the nation. The economy would be nationalized. To young people like Emilio, fascism offered the progress and hope that had not been realized by the liberation. Mussolini and his second-in-command, alpino and aviator Italo Balbo, became Emilio’s heroes. When Emilio was released from military service, he became a party member and joined the squadristi, or blackshirts, and the XXX Ottobre Society became the centre of his social life.11
The Trieste Gymnastics Society’s cloak-and-dagger irredentism seemed feeble and surreptitious next to the rigours of the XXX Ottobre. Romantic nationalists in suits and top hats led the Gymnastics Society. The Roman characters “S. XXX. 0” emblazoned on Emilio’s new club’s uniforms had a stylish, up-to-date fascistic aesthetic. Military-style trumpeters called members to order. Marching was compulsory. Lean, idealistic, in search of adventure and fond of uniforms, Emilio fit right in.
The XXX Ottobre encouraged the healthy relations between sexes that were the precursors of the reproductive duty to create more citizens. In the dancehall, Emilio easily learned the steps of the waltz. His outward grace hid from teenage girls his lack of self-confidence. The girls who were attracted to his smile and handsome looks did not know that they could not match the sacrificial heroism of the women he idolized: his mother, his sister, the refugee he took in on the Duino road. Emilio preferred women who were more reticent towards him, as if their aloofness reflected their intuition that there were hidden obstacles to gaining his love.
Mussolini embodied the state’s aspirations and destiny as a man of action and adventure. The XXX Ottobre Society took Mussolini’s lead and emphasized the moral benefits of caving and hiking.
Some of the most famous caves in European speleology were within 20 kilometres of Trieste. The XXX Ottobre cavers, however, were equipped with handheld lanterns and had to restrict their explorations to caves accessible without ladders or ropes. Emilio soon found out that real cavers recorded the depth of their exploration below the surface. This information, which had originally been collected for geological purposes, had transformed cave exploration into a sport. Cavers competed to go deeper and further and mapped their explorations, although accuracy was elusive with the available instruments.12
Emilio and the more intrepid, and, as yet, unequipped cavers of the society dabbled in the exploration of deeper, more technical caves. In the Grotta dei Pini, Emilio and his friends reached a depth of 270 metres, after which Emilio decided technical equipment of some kind was required, not principally for safety but for deeper and longer expeditions. “We will sacrifice a few of our own lira,” he wrote in the XXX Ottobre newsletter, “to buy the necessary tools.” These included ropes, army surplus wire stepladders once used for the war in the Alps, carabiners, pitons, hammers and carbide lamps screwed onto army helmets. Armed with this gear, and expressions of determination, the cavers of the XXX Ottobre looked much like a squad of alpini ready for a raid on an alpine redoubt.13
Now they could explore the caves accessed by long vertical drops, such as the Abisso di Semi, Abisso d’Lune and the Abisso Selva di Pirro. Emilio reported on many of their expeditions in the society newsletter, and soon, accomplished adult cavers like Severino Culot and Cesare Prez joined these trips.
General Italo Gariboldi, commander of the Italian troops in the newly established province of Trieste and an ambitious fascist, saw the XXX Ottobre as a school for young heroes. He ordered his troops to drive the XXX Ottobre and their gear to the caverns. Unfortunately, the antiquated army trucks often broke down before they arrived at their destination, and the cavers had to get out and push them.14
The XXX Ottobre Society founded a chapter devoted to serious caving, which, like all fascist institutions, soon had a rule book to be followed in detail. Emilio had wandered into the society after his military service to alleviate the boredom of his job at the Magazzini Generali. Now he dreamed of setting world depth records for the glory of Italy.
In 1924, Emilio joined a team set to achieve a new depth record in Bus de la Lum cave. In 1902, a world depth record had been set in the Bus de la Lum by Luigi Marson, who had estimated the depth at 450 metres. Emilio’s party would bring a plaque to commemorate Marson’s achievement at his low-point and try to venture deeper into the cavern.
They descended for 24 hours without rest. The down-climbs, traverses of horizontal shafts, dampness and narrow squeezes exhausted their bodies and nerves, but the lure of a new record beckoned them deeper. At the place where Marson had claimed his record, their instruments, which were more modern than Marson’s, read a mere 225 metres, half of his supposed record.15 The team was neither equipped nor mentally prepared to repeat the effort they had already made and go on even deeper. They left the now-inaccurate plaque in the cave and started the long, weary exit. A legend about Emilio claims that after this painful first lesson in the elusiveness of glory, he made his way straight from the mouth of the Bus de la Lum to the summit of Cimon del Cavallo in the Carnic Pre-Alps. There, he forsook the caves and pledged himself forever to the world of mountains and climbing.
It’s a good story that played to climbers’ aversion to caves. The Cimon del Cavallo was a legendary and symbolic landmark, visible from the Adriatic. It was also the first peak climbed in the region, by Giovanni Girolamo Zannichelli and Domenico Pietro Stefanelli in 1726 – not to reach the summit, but to pick wildflowers. Unfortunately, Cimon del Cavallo was more than 45 kilometres from the Bus de la Lum, too far to hike after 30 hours in a cave.
Emilio explored many caves after the Bus de la Lum. In 1925, he had his greatest and most tragic caving adventure. A sudden rainstorm that flooded the lower reaches of the Raspo cave trapped a team of cavers deep in the cavern. Emilio volunteered for the rescue team.
After two days of attempts, the rescuers finally reached the edge of a hundred-metre waterfall, above the place they believed the victims had been trapped. The yellow light of the rescuers’ carbide lamps showed the lines around their eyes darkened by dirt and fatigue, and their hollow, stubbly cheeks. The leader was Severino Culot, a master of the world beneath the Carso. The battered trumpet he wore around his neck to communicate with cavers higher up made him look a little like he was leading a raid. Emilio had been trained as a radio-telegrapher in the Army, but communications in the cave were still medieval.
The third rescuer was Giulio Benedetti, a dark-eyed and gaunt youth from Pitteri who Emilio had met on the rescue. His hair was parted into two upturned horns that licked the brim of his battered helmet and gave him a satanic appearance.
They were deafened by the flood waters filled with dirt and stones that thundered over the edge of their passage. Culot pointed upwards to signal the end of the attempt. Even if one of them made it down through the waterfall, the dangerous climb back up would take almost superhuman strength. Emilio looked at Benedetti, whose lips were drawn back to expose his white teeth in a grim smile. They both pointed downwards, and risked expulsion from the XXX Ottobre Society for insubordination. Culot thought for a second and then unexpectedly nodded his assent.
Emilio took a bag of food and climbed down into the waterfall, belayed by Benedetti. The trapped men had left a wire ladder, but the rungs were little wider than a hand, the flow of the water tangled it and the bottom half had been torn off by debris. His only link with safety, Benedetti’s taut belay rope, might be broken by a falling rock at any moment, but Emilio moved onto the cold slick rock to climb downwards. Frigid water poured over his shoulders and down his neck, but he reminded himself that the men below must be even more terrified than he was.
After 30 metres, Emilio reached down with his foot and couldn’t find a hold. He slipped the haversack of food off his shoulders and threw it down the cavern. His heart beat faster when he heard a faint voice below. In this contest with death, he had been a victor, but there was nothing else his team could do alone. At the very least, they would need a longer rope. “It’s Comici, from the XXX Ottobre!” he shouted. “We’ll be back with more help!”16
Culot was too exhausted to join the second rescue team, so veteran caver Cesare Prez took the lead. Benedetti and Emilio had bonded in the cave, but to Emilio’s disappointment, Benedetti had to return to work in Trieste. Emilio, however, was prepared to forsake his job to go right back into the cave.
Benedetti, Culot and even the victims were emotionally and existentially closer to Emilio now than the men he worked with in Trieste. In the caves, Emilio discovered a bond that could only be forged in strife and danger with men who respected his own lontananza, unlike the hearty but superficial bonhomie men shared in bars and offices. This realization resonated with Mussolini’s image of himself as a leader who emerged from the masses in the fire of war. Duilio Durissini, Emilio’s fellow XXX Ottobre caver, wrote that “the harsh, unnerving, tiring hours spent in the abyss strengthened [Emilio’s] mind and body. The patient search and the cautious proceeding in the darkness, developed in him the measured calm and absolute mastery of himself that served him later… in the blazing solitude of the starry universe… these [caving days] must have prepared him for the Alps.”17
Emilio’s reunion with the victims was bittersweet. Only two had survived. Two brothers had been separated from the rest of their party and drowned in a chamber that filled with water before they could escape. The Raspo rescue had been one of the most technical rescues in caving history.
On the day that the silver medal for civic valour was awarded to Culot and Prez (but not Emilio) for their part in the rescue, Emilio wrote “DELUSIONE!” (disappointment) in his diary. Emilio wanted to receive recognition. He wanted the world’s honours. He wanted respect. The atmosphere of the XXX Ottobre and fascism, with its emphasis on awards and titles, played on this desire. To Emilio, the lack of recognition was an insult, not an oversight – and an insult not from men but from fate. And the old way was that no insult, big or small, whether it was from an enemy, a friend or death itself, could be left unanswered.
Emilio tried even harder and more notorious caves. In 1927, two years after he had started climbing, he did his last and most gruelling caving trip, the Medjame cavern in Croatia. Its 30 underground bodies of water, long hard chimney traverses and narrow passages were threatened by rain and rockfall from crevices that led to the surface. There were other caves to explore, and Emilio might well have continued caving if he had not discovered climbing. Emilio craved an all-consuming devotion to a single person or activity, and if he had felt that way about caving, he never would have tried climbing. Once he had begun to climb, the caves simply could not compete with his new love: climbing the cliffs of the Carso and the mountains of the Julian Alps.