The first person to go through Emilio’s papers and his desk was his piano teacher, Rita Palmquist, who lived close by in Passo Sella. His letters and books, to which he had intended to return later that afternoon, remained in disorder. She distributed them among his friends, who, for now, were more preoccupied with their grief than with their friend’s personal effects. Emilio’s letters, diaries and other materials were divided among a handful of his friends spread throughout Italy, his family and the CAI.
The first steps towards a legacy were symbolic conquests of landmarks and institutions. Climbers renamed the Zsigmondy hut the Rifugio Comici. Zsigmondy was a hero of the guideless climbing movement in Vienna in the late 19th century, and although Emilio would not have admired him for that, at least he would have liked the idea of supplanting an Austrian. The rock school in Val Rosandra was renamed the Comici School. The Salame del Sassolungo that Comici had tried to claim in the name of Italo Balbo was renamed after Comici himself.
Giorgio Brunner made good on his promise to commemorate Emilio and formed a committee of five to collate and edit a book about him. Casara was not invited to join the editing team, but he was allowed to submit an essay on the north face of the Salame del Sassolungo. The five editors lived in different parts of Italy, and wartime disruptions to communications, postal service and travel made for slow work.
Manaresi blessed the project, although his blessing contained a guarantee of censorship. The CAI apparatus in Rome finally gave Emilio the gold medal for the relatively unimportant Salame climb. Emilio was dead. He could not remind them moodily about how they had held it back for the Civetta, the Cima Grande, the great solos. In death, Emilio was promoted from his earthly role as a troublesome and self-absorbed party member to a paradigm of fascist masculinity: strong, resolute, manly, never doubting his Duce. Dead, Emilio became “the acme of the virile qualities of the Latin race regenerated by fascism.”256 Manaresi wrote the preface, and, not surprisingly, the north face of the Cima Grande, over which Emilio had quarrelled with partners and his party superiors, was not included in the articles commissioned by the editors. In life, Emilio had tried to disrupt the way that educated, powerful men redacted his work and reputation. Post-mortem, the same men had free rein. In the end, Manaresi drew their materials together and published Alpinismo eroico (Heroic Alpinism) in 1942. For a year of shortages and famine, it was a remarkably thick book, and full of photo plates. It was a collation of Emilio’s writings and those of his friends.
Casara set to work separately on his own book, L’arte di arrampicare di Emilio Comici, mostly using anecdotes and his personal correspondence, although he was accused of redactions in favour of his myth of Emilio as “The Angel of the Dolomites.”257 The name was based on Emilio’s compassion towards other climbers and his grace on the rock. But the first climber to have been nicknamed after a supernatural being was Tita Piaz, the Devil of the Dolomites. Despite Piaz’s claim that he had a demonic appearance, he had earned the name by hard and dangerous climbing. A true anarchist, Piaz survived the prisons of Emperor Franz Joseph, King Victor Emmanuel, Mussolini and Hitler. Emilio and Piaz were both poor kids who became climbers, and both pushed the definition of what was acceptable on the rock. But when it came to politics, they were opposites.
Emilio was not the only fascist amongst the greats of Italian climbing between the wars. Cassin, Gervasutti, Chabod, Ratti, Carlesso and many others embraced fascism openly, albeit to varying degrees. Although few climbers shared Emilio’s idealism about the party, it offered him few rewards.258
Emilio might have changed his politics had he lived until July 1943, when the government decided to oust Mussolini. The ouster, after all, was engineered by jaded long-time PNF loyalists like Dino Grandi, Galeazzo Ciano and Pietro Badoglio. Even Angelo Manaresi and Emilio’s old commander Colonel Masini joined the anti-fascists out of a revulsion Emilio would have shared for the Nazi invasion of Italy in 1943.
By then, Masini’s Ninth Alpini regiment had fought in Greece and Russia, where most of the soldiers Emilio trained in elegant climbing on the palestra at Castello Jocteau had been killed or captured. The unit was disbanded in Udine in 1943. Soldà, Cassin and Ratti joined the resistance. Ettore Castiglioni became a partisan and helped anti-fascists flee to Switzerland. He died of exposure after escaping incarceration by Swiss border guards who had taken away his clothing and equipment.
If Emilio had lived until 1943 and retained his position as prefectural commissioner in Selva di Gardena, he would have lost his job when the Nazis occupied the Tyrol. The Germans fired all of the fascist podestà and their commissioners and made the Italian fascist party illegal. Emilio’s anti-German views and his enthusiasm for the ethnic cleansing of Tyrolean Germans would have made life under the Nazis difficult and dangerous.
Even after the Trieste section of the CAI hung signs forbidding Jews in its huts, Emilio had fretted over the predicament of his Jewish friends, not as if racism was a core program of his beloved party (which, after 1938, it was), but as if it was some kind of unintended oversight by a regime he saw as benevolent. What would Emilio have thought when the Nazis built concentration camps in both Trieste and Bolzano?
In the summer of 1944, Osiride Brovedani, whose mother was Jewish, was arrested after being accused of listening to Radio Londres, the allied Italian radio broadcast written by Antonia Pozzi’s literary friends. As the train headed north towards the camp, Brovedani looked out a crack in the boards of the locked cattle car full of Jewish Triestinos and saw the Montasio. “I will see you again, divine Montasio, companion of all my summer climbs” he wrote. “My eyes were veiled with tears when we passed through Valbruna; the Jôf Fuart stood out clearly with the summit illuminated by the sunset… I said goodbye to the Mangart.”259
Brovedani was interned in Bergen-Belsen, Dora and Buchenwald concentration camps, a fate shared by the brilliant 23-year-old Jewish rock climber and partisan Ezio Rocco, who was shot in one of the camps. Several young climbers from the XXX Ottobre who formed the “Bruti” (Brutes) of Val Rosandra worked in the resistance as they continued to climb. Would Emilio have remained unmoved when, after the German occupation of Trieste, his climbing partner Piero Slocovich became a partisan, along with a dozen poorly armed and organized members of the GARS? Teenage climber and partisan Glauco Sabadin (who used the code-name “Whymper”) died of typhoid fever fighting in Istria. Giulio Della Gala was betrayed to the Nazis by his climbing partner, tortured and hanged. Eighteen-year-old partisan Luciano Soldat, also betrayed by a climbing partner, stayed in Trieste instead of running into the hills so that his parents would not be punished. He was hanged by the Nazis. The talented climber Dario Ceglar was deported to Buchenwald, where he was killed. Emilio’s climbing partner Riccardo Deffar was also killed in the camps.260 Slocovich, like Brovedani, survived the camps.
Spiro Della Porta Xidias, a member of the Bruti, said that Emilio had become a kind of patron saint of struggling Triestino climbers, even those in the resistance. Emilio, said Xidias, “rose above all baseness… his smile is accentuated and gradually fades into a great light, a light that is total and restores strength and courage and dissipates the darkness in my soul.”261 Like a medieval saint’s, his power was rooted not in the facts of his life but in the hope those in need found in his image and memory.
Although the climbers of Val Rosandra might have forgiven him, if Emilio had survived the war without changing his political views, he would have been vulnerable to vigilante justice by the survivors of the fascist terror. In Selva di Gardena in May 1946, former partisans tortured and then burned to death five former fascists. Emilio’s patron Guido Buffarini Guidi, who had colluded in the murder of 335 civilians in the Ardeatine Massacre in Rome, was captured as he fled to join his Jewish mistress in Switzerland. He was tried in Milan by an “extraordinary court of justice,” tied to a schoolchild’s desk and shot.
Julius Kugy was arrested by the fascist police in 1941 on suspicions of Slavic sympathies but released shortly afterwards. He died in 1944, after having spent the last years of his life secretly aiding Slovene partisans, a final luminous act of Mitteleuropean nostalgia for the cosmopolitanism of Austria-Hungary.
Unlike many fascists, Emilio maintained friendships with Slavic climbers like Jova Lipovec. The climbing scene in Val Rosandra was a haven of tolerance between Italians and Slavs. These considerations would have counted for little when, in 1944, the Yugoslav People’s Army of Marshal Tito occupied Trieste. Over 40 days, Tito’s armies murdered hundreds of citizens they judged to be guilty of fascism and filled the mouth of the Bus de la Lum cave with their corpses.
On May 14, 1941, Emilio’s long-suffering mother, Regina, died. Less than a year later, on March 18, 1942, her husband, Antonio, passed away. Neither lived to see the end of the regime that had shaped their lives for almost two decades.
In the late 1940s, life in Italy to returned to a semblance of normalcy, and the survivors of war and fascism rebuilt their lives. Fabjan became an important figure in Italian Olympic athletics and an organizer of the 1960 Rome Olympics. Fausto Stefenelli became an academic and a respected environmentalist. After surviving three concentration camps, Osiride Brovedani returned to Trieste and his wife and fellow climber Fernanda. In the camps, he had lost his enthusiasm for providing Italians with their national staple. He shifted his focus to selling baby powder, which made him a billionaire.
Angelo Dimai died in a climbing accident in 1946. After that, his brother Giuseppe never climbed extreme rock again. Giuseppe held to the ancient guide’s wisdom of avoiding risks unnecessary to his profession. He died peacefully in Cortina in 1985 as the respected patriarch of his vocation.
Escher survived the war and continued to visit the Alps every summer into her 90s, by which time she had acquired a little Volkswagen Beetle for her travels. The extraordinary Emmy Hartwich-Brioschi survived the Holocaust and ended up in Nice when the war ended. Alice Marsi left the stage of alpine history after her photo was taken at Emilio’s graveside.
Casara authored several films and books on mountain subjects, most notably on Paul Preuss. Domenico Rudatis, the arch-elitist intellectual and esoteric philosopher of the sixth grade, decided, after the war, to put his energy into refining the television set, the technical innovation most often blamed for post-war populism, consumerism and cultural mediocrity. He moved to New York in 1952 and filed a patent for a new form of colour television set in 1958.262 Although he never climbed again, he continued to write about his favourite subject, the sesto grado.
Cassin went on to become one of the greatest climbers of his generation, with expeditionary firsts in Alaska, the Himalayas and Peru to his credit, in addition to many important alpine routes. He lived to be 100 and died in his bed.
***
In the 1950s, the breathless Italian press moved on to covering new achievements, like the Italian first ascent of K2 in 1954 by Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli. The photographers also had a new, charismatic, photogenic alpinist in Walter Bonatti, whose unprecedented solos, like the southwest pillar of the Dru, were followed up with expeditionary triumphs like the first ascent, with Carlo Mauri, of Gasherbrum IV (7295 metres) on a 1969 expedition led by Cassin.
Emilio Comici became the most prominent name in most general accounts of Italian climbing between the world wars. Only the specialist literature on Italian climbing dwelled in any detail on the wild free climbs of Hans Vinatzer, Attilio Tissi’s ability to climb at the hardest levels without protection and the hard climbs of Alvise Andrich, Celso Gilberti, Luigi Micheluzzi, Gino Soldà and a host of others. Cassin, Esposito and Tizzoni’s ascent of the Walker Spur became the only exception to this relative silence.
The longevity of Emilio’s reputation among climbers is partly attributable to the popularity of two of his greatest routes. The north face of the Cima Grande and the Spigolo Giallo became popular classic itineraries. Beginning in the 1950s, however, Emilio’s reputation was partly kept alive by those who saw him as one of the most culpable heirs in a succession of individuals who relied on technology to diminish and then defeat nature. In this narrative, in the first decade of the 20th century, Hans Dülfer introduced tension traverses, planned aid manoeuvres, pre-inspection on rappel and the liberal use of pitons, and on one occasion even carried, but did not use, a drill to make a hole for a piton. Emilio Comici took up the torch in the 1920s and attacked hitherto impossible problems like the north face of the Cima Grande with pitons, fixed ropes and the technique of climbing from piton to piton.
Beginning in the late 1950s, examples of what critics considered ruthless big wall climbs appeared at least every few years. Lothar Brandler, Dieter Hasse, Jörg Lehne and Siegfried Löw’s June 1958 direttissima on the north face of the Cima Grande was the first climb on the wall to rely on bolts and was seen as the logical next step for those who, for better or worse, followed Emilio’s example. In 1959, Italian climber Cesare Maestri claimed the first ascent of the ice-encrusted granite tower of Cerro Torre in Patagonia, but his partner, Toni Egger, died on the descent, and many doubted Maestri’s account. Maestri returned in 1970 and used a gas-powered compressor to drill over 400 bolt holes in the mountain’s southeast face to the reach the summit. It was the most brutal settlement of a climbing vendetta in history.
The backlash against Maestri, his means and ethics was immediate. Reinhold Messner, a young Tyrolean climber and friend of Rudatis, condemned the use of bolts as “l’assassinio dell’impossibile,” which British magazine editor Ken Wilson translated as “the murder of the impossible.”263
Some climbers looked for precedents to Maestri’s deed and found Emilio culpable. British big wall climber Doug Scott described Emilio as a talented climber but also a preening narcissist who loved having his photograph taken shirtless or in what he calls “velveteen jumpers,” and who unscrupulously deployed technology to overcome climbs.264
Emilio, however, never used bolts, and if he had used them, he would not have been the first. Laurent Grivel in the Alps and David Brower in the United States, neither of whom are associated with breaking climbing traditions, had beaten Emilio to that honour, such as it was.
The climbs that continued Emilio’s ideas were not Maestri’s Cerro Torre epic but the northwest face of Half Dome in 1957, and the Nose of El Capitan in 1958. When California rock climbers took on the big granite walls of Yosemite with large stores of ropes and pitons, aid climbing and high-level free climbing, they mostly claimed for their inspiration the naturalist John Muir, who did not climb, and the eccentric Swiss-American rock climber John Salathé, who never climbed in Europe. The great American climber Royal Robbins listed Emilio Comici as a model, but only after Walter Bonatti.265 The Comici-Dimai on the Cima Grande, the Cassin-Ratti on the Cima Ovest and a few other Italian climbs of the 1930s and ’40s, however, were the only existing templates, anywhere in the world, for the climbs of the golden age of Yosemite big wall climbing. Emilio and his colleagues never truly got the acknowledgement that was their due for inspiring it.
***
A month after his funeral, a wooden statue of Emilio was placed beneath the wall at Vallunga, almost out of sight, close to where Emilio fell. It depicted a tall climber with a grim visage: the masculine Roman hero that Manaresi wanted the public to see.
A quiet little side street in Trieste, north of the Farneto Park, was named Via Emilio Comici. It is bounded on one side by a limestone wall and a green border of pine trees and on the other by apartments with stuccoed walls and strong shutters to block the Bora wind.
In Val Rosandra, Emilio was memorialized by a pillar of stones on the crest of the Cippo Comici, a shield of Carso rock. From the monument, you can look down the river valley, past the outcrops where Emilio first climbed, to the eastern edge of Trieste, and the sea. Below, the water that bore down into the Carso to carve the limestone cliffs sparkles among the stones.
Sailors had once come to these cliffs to build shrines overlooking the Adriatic so that Maris Stella, Our Lady of the Sea Star, would watch over them as they sailed. It became, in Emilio’s day, a place for climbers whose gaze was not down to the wine-dark sea that had beckoned the wayward of other generations, but upwards, where, in the white rocks and the blue sky, they saw the Civetta, the Cima Grande, the Sorapiss and the Marmolada.
Although only climbers ever surveyed the valley from this place, Emilio’s nickname supplies the imagination with an angel roosting on the cliff edge.
Scripture says that mortals are, by their nature, “a little lower than the angels…”266 The sad, driven kid from the docks who climbed so well and looked out for his friends was lower in the imagined celestial hierarchy than the archangels in the glittering, Byzantine apse of St. Giusto’s Cathedral in Trieste, or the angels of mercy rescuing alpinists and lost, ill-clad shepherdesses on the lurid covers of La Domenica del Corriere. His mourners could not deny him his angelic status simply because of his politics. After all, most of them had shared those beliefs while Emilio lived. Perhaps they should have known better.
It seems more appropriate to find new meaning in the angelic title than to simply ignore it. An angel, after all, could fall, warn or unleash plagues as well as bless. Emilio’s life was a warning as well as a reassurance. Self-absorbed, skilled, obsessive, attuned to the supernatural, a visionary in his field of climbing, a fascist, there was no greater proponent of the search for difficulty as it was defined first by tradition and secondly by the new techniques and a grade system in which the highest beauty was the hardest climb. “I embrace you,” Emilio wrote to his friends, “in the sixth grade.”
Climbers respected Paul Preuss and the purists but did not follow them. Leonardo Emilio Comici led generations of climbers to the biggest rock walls in the world. Did he lead us into, or out, of a paradise of innocence? We still have to learn that, whether we are inclined to reject technology when we climb or to accept it, all disputes with the mountain need not be settled; to leave some of our beliefs and reasons, prices we are willing to pay, and strategies of last resort on the ground. “When we reach the sixth grade,” Tita Piaz warned us, “we will find that we have not entered the kingdom of heaven.”267
Dino Buzzati, the great literary navigator and philosopher of Italian alpinism in the mid-20th century, reflected that mountains defy our urge to impose permanent order upon them, whether through language, politics or technology. “What colour are the Dolomites?” he wrote. “Are they white? Yellow? Grey? Mother of Pearl? Ash-coloured? Reflections of silver? The pallor of the dead? The complexion of roses? Are they stones or are they clouds? Are they real, or is it a dream?”268
During Emilio’s adult life, the Dolomites were none of these evocative hues; they were black, the colour of fascist ardour and sacrifice. His climbs and his spirit were shaped by Italian fascism and the choices he made to accommodate himself to it, but they cannot be reduced to expressions of his politics. Emilio drove big wall climbing and free soloing to new levels and expanded the sense of what was possible on rock walls far beyond what climbers assumed were the limits of human endeavour when he started climbing in 1925. Emilio was just a sullen, poor, uneducated kid from the docklands of Trieste, but in the words of the refined poet Antonia Pozzi, his very blood dreamed of the rock. Few observed him as deeply and dispassionately as Pozzi did in her poem “For Emilio Comici”:
The boats dazzle on the burning glass.
Where did you leave your clothes,
the faces
of the girls, the oars?
Tonight, at the bivouac
white clouds
will break mutely on the stone:
so far from the thud of the waves
on the dock of Trieste.
No Moon
will thaw gardens, nor shine on
women laughing at a streetlight,
or warm your hair,
but you will only see
your rope
encased in ice
and your hard heart
among the pale spires.269
Pozzi understood that Emilio was a man apart, if not an angel. That very distance at the heart of his being, which made life so hard for him, gave him the ability to contribute so much to alpinism.