In 1924, Emilio’s caving mentors, Culot and Prez, introduced Emilio and Benedetti to the Società Alpina delle Giulie (Julian Alpine Society) in Trieste. The society took its name from the Julian Alps, the closest mountain range to Trieste, and had eccentric and nationalistic associations. Its main project in the 1920s was to make first post-liberation ascents of peaks formerly in Austrian provinces and wave the Italian flag on the summits. Its members dabbled in freemasonry.18
The society was the centre of Trieste mountaineering. Its founders included Napoleone Cozzi and his partner, Alberto Zanutti, who still led climbing trips to the palestra at Val Rosandra. Julius Kugy, who had introduced Cozzi to alpinism, was the society’s, and indeed Trieste’s, most eminent mountaineer. Kugy’s fame had recently spread beyond Italy with the publication of his mountaineering memoir.19
Kugy and Emilio came from opposite ends of Trieste society. Kugy had been born to a rich merchant clan of ethnic Slavs and inherited an importing business. Although his fortune was depleted by the war, there was enough money left for Kugy to spend his life mostly as a philanthropist. He sponsored the Trieste choral society. He also paid to replace the Hermann Findenegg hut in the Madre dei Camosci group, which had been destroyed in the war. Although he had served on the Austrian side and had loved the cosmopolitan empire of Austria-Hungary, he acquiesced when the Club Alpino Italiano (Italian Alpine Club, or CAI) renamed it after an Italian infantry captain named Corsi, who died on Monte Grappa. After the Great War, Kugy spent much of his time in pursuit of the elusive Scabiosa trenta flower, of which he wrote in his memoir:
And thus you, the long sought and passionately desired miraculous flower of my heart, will rise some time from the dreams of my yearning, from the strength of my trust, from the mysterious gloom of your origin, of your blossoming and vanishing, and you will come and join me in the late evening of my life… Scabiosa Trenta! Never did my belief in you die, though you seemed to be beyond my reach. And though you were far away, I have never been unfaithful to you. I have been on the lookout for you all my life, anxiously listening to any news about you.20
Cozzi, the bomb maker, represented hard climbing and revolution, but Kugy had a Mitteleuropean bourgeois world view and went to the mountains not to climb hard but to appreciate nature. As Kugy’s friend Paul Kaltenegger tactfully put it, Kugy “preferred the [easier] Aiguille Verte to the [harder] Dru.”21
In 1880, Kugy took his classical alpinism to the Julian Alps and made the first ascent of Škrlatica (2740 metres), the third-highest peak in the Slovenian Julian Alps, and followed it up with dozens of other first ascents in the range. He named the mountain group that included the Ago di Villaco, Jôf di Montasio (2752 metres) and Jôf Fuart (2666 metres) the Madre dei Camosci (Mother of Chamois) and proceeded to explore and record it in some detail.
In the Western Alps, Kugy climbed with the Englishman Albert Mummery. They shared no languages, but Kugy nonetheless absorbed from Mummery the ethos of the golden age of alpinism, which frowned upon pitons. Many of the most famous adherents of the anti-piton school were bourgeois climbers from Vienna. The Vienna school’s greatest proponent, the brilliant soloist and intellectual Paul Preuss, eschewed pitons and rappelling. Preuss’s breathtaking solo first ascent route on the east face of the Campanile Basso in 1911 had been repeated for the first time only in 1925 by a party with a rope and pitons. Kugy was a climber in Preuss’s Viennese tradition of style before difficulty.
Kugy’s fame was such that it attracted modern climbers as well as traditionalists. Emilio and Benedetti imbibed climbing tradition from Kugy, but they learned to climb from modern experts like the studious Fausto Stefenelli and the experienced Alberto Zanutti. Stefenelli and Zanutti were followers of Hans Dülfer, the German who climbed the east face of the Fleischbank with pitons and rope tension after he had inspected the route on rappel, and his Italian counterpart, Tita Piaz. Piaz, a guide from the Fassa valley, used pitons on his revolutionary 1908 first ascent of the west face of the Totenkirchl in Austria. Italian guide Angelo Dibona adopted pitons as well and used them on his new route on the Croz dell’Altissimo.
Technical climbing in the Eastern Alps was curtailed in the Great War, when the front between Italy and Austria cut through the Dolomites. Famous mountains like the Rosengarten group and the Marmolada became the sites of bloody industrial warfare. The war on the Western Front claimed the lives of many young climbers, including Dülfer.
After the war, the borders reverted to their pre-war informality. The physical remains of the war on the alpine borders, however, remained and became a popular attraction. Even the cultured Venetian guidebook writer and editor of the CAI journal Antonio Berti delighted in the Marmolada, the highest peak in the Dolomites, not only because of its alpine beauty but also because there one could see “tattered remains of clothing, shell casings and shrapnel, battered wooden beams, rusted bayonets, stockless rifles, petards, bomb shells, crushed canteens, harpoons, loaders, cartridges.”22 Berti’s fascination with this post-war wreckage is all the more intriguing as he, himself, was a veteran of the Alpine Front.
The Touring Club Italiano, an offshoot of the CAI, compared battle-worn Dolomite peaks to “the face of a mutilated brother,” asserting that “the ravaged face of the mountain is even more beautiful.”23 Amidst all of this detritus and nostalgia for destruction, the pre-war objection that pitons, even used in quantity, would destroy the spirit of climbing and the fabric of the mountains themselves seemed banal.
In the mid-1920s, when Emilio made his first climbing trips in the Julian Alps and Val Rosandra with the Julian Alpine Society, the mood in Italian climbing was right for the great age of the piton to begin.
***
Rosandra River cut a steep-sided valley, 40 to 90 metres deep, into the pith of the Carso as it flowed the last 15 kilometres to the Adriatic at the Bay of Muggia. The air in the valley smelled of limestone, the gnarled pines that hung from ledges, and by season, sumac, wild carnations, gentians. The valley was quiet except for the gurgle of the river, the cries of birds that echoed from the cliffs, and the wind in the dry grass.
Val Rosandra had roughly sheltered men and animals since the Stone Age, but attempts to civilize it had left only a broken Roman aqueduct, a couple of tiny mill hamlets reached by a narrow-gauge railway and a hermit’s chapel. Trieste had grown towards the western rim, but the valley itself remained a small patch of unspoiled and ancient southern Europe.
Since Napoleone Cozzi first visited Val Rosandra, climbers had taken the liberty to name the valley’s rocks and cliffs that were mostly too small to warrant the attention of map-makers. Montasio, like many such names, was meant as a joke. It was only 30 metres high and nothing much next to its namesake, Jôf di Montasio, at 2752 metres the second-highest peak in the Julian Alps. Individual climbs had also been given names that were sometimes merely descriptive, like Diedro (Dihedral), or fanciful, like Nottambuli (Night Owls) and Pazzo Volante (Crazy Flight).
Climbing in Val Rosandra was backward compared not only to the Alps but to comparable local climbing areas like Fontainebleau, near Paris; Peilstein, close to Vienna; and Buchenhain, near Munich. In 1926, German climber Willo Welzenbach created his grade system, which could be applied to any climb, anywhere. Its simplicity added to its popularity. Roman numerals I through VI described ascending levels of difficulty. The basic standards for each grade, regardless of the region, were:
At Val Rosandra, there were no climbs of grade VI (the hardest grade), and only a few of grade V. Trieste climbers nonetheless took seriously the pursuit of difficulty on the 50-metre walls of Val Rosandra. Many climbed only in Val Rosandra and had no aspirations to travel to the Alps. Some invented their own climbing gear and techniques. A few carried grappling hooks, others free soloed. Local cavers practised their ropework there. One local wore a shaving-brush plume on his Tyrolean hat.25
A full rock climbing kit comprised half a dozen carabiners, ten pitons, 30 metres of ten-millimetre manila rope, a few rope slings, a hammer for the leader and a lighter hammer for the second. Pitons were mostly manufactured by blacksmiths, and the popular ring pitons were just spikes with rings manufactured for hauling tree trunks. Everything else, with the exception of the carabiners, was stocked by hardware merchants. For footwear, most climbers in the Alps still wore rope-soled scarpette, although a few had begun to experiment with crepe-rubber-soled roofer’s slippers. The urban craggers of Val Rosandra preferred footwear from city gyms and playing fields, the American-style, canvas-topped, rubber-soled basketball shoes. Whatever the footwear of choice, the whole climber’s kit cost a fraction of the price of a bicycle.
Zanutti taught Emilio and Benedetti, who already knew how to rappel from caving, how to use pitons, carabiners and running belays. Stefenelli showed them how to swing across blank rock on the rope, or stand in a sling attached to a piton. Along with technique, they learned the legends of their new sport: how Dülfer had mastered the piton, the difference between free and aid climbing, the great solos of the Austrian Paul Preuss and the singular status of the Italian Dolomites in world climbing.
Emilio and other Italian climbers in the 1920s considered pitons and other hardware necessary. Piton use, in their minds, segued with the historical development of climbing and pointed to the future. The piton did not eliminate adventure. Climbers on overhanging walls of limestone, equipped with manila ropes from the local hardware store and carabiners and pitons from a blacksmith, risked just as much, or more, than they did soloing on lower-angled rock with many holds.
Piton usage became complex partly because the selection of available pitons was largely unimaginative. There were some different thicknesses and lengths of blades, but none were specialized for aid climbing, and many still fit only in the specific type of crack they were designed for. Emilio realized that the best and most versatile piton was made for vertical cracks, because the eyelet for the carabiner was at a right angle to the blade, so it could be used in corners or offset cracks without blocking the carabiner.
Emilio improvised on what Zanutti and Stefenelli had taught him and what he had learned in caves. He extended the use of the piton into even more dangerous situations with the deliberate use of pins strong enough to hold body weight but too weak to support a fall. He fell, dropped pitons, ripped them out of the rock when he weighted them and often backed off, but he persevered.
With his new rock climbing techniques, caving experience, a quirky, low-commitment environment and as yet unfocussed ambitions, Emilio was free to experiment with new techniques. Most climbers had deployed a simple loop of rope to use aid from a piton. That worked well when aid climbing was an occasional emergency technique, but Emilio wanted something more versatile. He tied three loops in a sling to form rungs and make a miniature version of the wire ladders he had used in caves. These slings became known to Anglophone climbers as étriers, the French word for stirrups, but Italian climbers called them staffe, or ladders, hearkening back to their derivation from caving gear. Emilio always climbed with two staffe, one for each foot.
He discovered that two ropes were preferable for aid climbing because the leader could hang from one line and clip the free rope to the piton above and haul himself up. Most climbers tied the rope around their chest, but Emilio found that the waist tie-in gave him better leverage and a few more centimetres’ reach. Climbing with two ropes at the same time had been a technique used to increase safety and to enable the leader to decrease rope drag.
Emilio used pitons in a radical new way. He hung from one rope clipped to a piton, clipped the slack rope into a piton overhead and had his belayer put tension on that rope and pulled himself up on it. The lower rope would catch him if the upper piton tore out. Traditionally, the majority of pitons were placed for the utmost security and left behind as permanent fixtures for subsequent parties. A few might be placed on long climbs by an individual party, and of these, most would be left behind for subsequent parties. Fixed pitons on climbs were slowly increasing in number, although few climbs sported more than a few on each pitch. In situ, pitons rusted and weakened over a few seasons, since they were made of soft steel or iron. Climbers could not rely only on fixed protection.
Mountain guides at the time were born with a claim to the mountains that was almost aristocratic in its authority, although it carried none of the material advantages of class. Urban workers had to conquer the peaks with the piton rather than a pedigree. Emilio made an extensive, almost absurdist study of the outer limits of piton use. The deliberate use of pitons that would only support body weight rather than the greater load of a falling climber was unknown. Emilio taught himself how to place pitons which would hold no more than his body weight in tiny pockets and cracks. He would intersperse strings of these dubious pitons with more solid “base” pitons to catch him if he ripped out the weaker ones. This required an extensive arsenal of pitons, carabiners and slings, and Emilio towed a thin line to haul up more pitons from the belayer if required. The extra line also allowed him to haul up the second climber’s pack to make it easier for the second to climb. On aid sections the second did not prusik or use the still un-invented mechanical ascenders, but went strenuously piton to piton, like the leader.
Cavers relied on the rope to rappel and climb, but most climbers held that the leader should not fall. Emilio embraced the active use of the rope. He practised leader falls to discover the perfect stance to lessen the impact. His hard free climbing and aid climbing on poor pitons made occasional unexpected falls inevitable. After he had climbed the hardest established routes in Val Rosandra, Emilio set out to make his own routes on vertical bulges and steep walls that had never been considered climbable.
For all of this piton work, Emilio saw free climbing as the basis of rock climbing and applied himself to the systematic improvement of its basic techniques and movements. In the Eastern Alps, where the rock was often unreliable, climbers were exhorted to weight each hold equally in case one broke. Emilio, however, studied the movements in free climbing and developed a semi-dynamic style of movement much emulated by his peers.
The CAI used its new political powers to assume the Julian Alpine Society into the club. Within the new Julian Alps Section of the CAI, Emilio and his friends founded the Gruppo Alpinisti Rocciatori Sciatori (Rock Climbing and Skiing Group), or GARS, for ambitious climbers. The GARS became synonymous with the energetic group of mostly young people who changed the scene in Val Rosandra and saw themselves as an integral, if small, part of the Italian national climbing scene.
Giani Stuparich described the Sunday-morning eight a.m. bus from Trieste to Bagnoli, the closest stop to Val Rosandra: “A company dressed in corduroy trousers and short canvas jackets… everyone, men and women, had tanned faces and the same casual air of risk and joy. The same lively way of communicating with each other. Age was irrelevant despite differences. Young girls of seventeen were in brilliant agreement with men of fifty… a summer dream made of sheer stone and sky… in the eyes of some of the young girls, an exaltation barely contained.”26
In Trieste, the Slavic and Italian communities were wary of one another, partly as a result of the racial violence and unrest in the city in the early 1920s. In Val Rosandra, Italian and Slavic climbers ignored the past and shared ropes and friendships. Emilio, who never had the anti-Slavic tendencies of many Italian nationalists in Trieste, enjoyed the company of his Slavic friends and learned their songs in après-climbing drinking sessions.27
In this atmosphere redolent with idealism, adventure and fellowship, Emilio’s technique and training had dimensions of spirituality and aesthetics as well as athleticism. Climbing partnerships were more than friendships. They were bonds that transcended mundane concerns and enmities through which ropemates could transmit intangible moral resources.
“Not only do [belayers] constantly follow the leader with their eyes,” said Emilio, “but almost step-by-step, live with his spirit, cooperate in his advance, silently transmit all of their willpower to the leader. They desire his success, suffer with him when he climbs the crux. Only with this spiritual foundation, this communion of spirits, can a rope proceed safely.”28
The intensity of the bond between climbers did not preclude moments of youthful languor. When it was too hot, or climbing did not appeal to them, Emilio and his friends lounged by the river, suntanned and drank wine, while Emilio played the guitar and sang.
Emilio developed an almost childlike trust in partners who were Triestino and had learned to climb as he had, in Val Rosandra. Giulio Benedetti, Fausto Stefenelli, Claudio Prato, Albano Barisi, Giordano Bruno Fabjan, Cesare Tarabocchia, Mario Premuda and Ovidio Opiglia and dozens of other Val Rosandra climbers shared more than climbing with Emilio. They spoke with the same accent, had starved together during the Great War and grown up blasted by the Bora and eating bacalao. For the rest of his life, with a few exceptions, Emilio preferred partners from Trieste, even if he hardly knew them, and occasionally even turned down climbing opportunities when there were no Triestinos available.
They all shared a longing to climb that was greater than their free time, location or income allowed. They had to transform themselves into climbers not by climbing in the famous ranges but by weekends and a few evening hours on the cliffs of Val Rosandra, practising hammering pitons into disused masonry during lunch break at work, bouldering on buildings and training in the gym. To become a climber without mountains is to develop a kind of mental toughness that, in Emilio’s case, imbued him with the idea that he was almost invincible.
Many of Emilio’s early forays into the mountains were based on the notion that drive would overcome the most basic practical concerns. As soon as he became serious about climbing, he began to explore the Julian Alps on foot, sometimes with the other young members of the GARS and sometimes alone. These impromptu, underequipped forays taught Emilio how to survive in the mountains with little equipment, food, maps and plans but sometimes led to missed trains and shifts at work.
Once, while he searched for water, Emilio unwittingly trespassed into Yugoslavia, where he was arrested by the border patrol. A Yugoslavian judge sentenced him to a month of hard labour. Emilio, a fastidious eater who looked after his clothes and personal grooming, would have made a very unhappy prisoner. Luckily, the Yugoslavians released him after a visit to the jail by the Italian consul, and he made it back to Trieste in time to attend a dance.29
On his first climbs in the Julian Alps, Emilio was often accompanied by Benedetti and Giordano Bruno Fabjan. Unlike most of the GARS members, Fabjan came from a middle-class family. He was a superb climber and an experienced caver as well as a national golf champion. Fabjan’s calm, analytical approach to climbing complemented Emilio’s more obsessive and emotional devotion to the rock.
As the Julian Alps became Emilio and his friends’ main object of desire, Val Rosandra’s walls were reduced to a weeknight and poor-weather training ground. This new passion for the mountains, however, proved expensive. Even the fares of Mussolini’s improved, low-cost “People’s Train” service added up to a major weekly expense on a working man’s budget, and unexpected bivouacs made for even more missed trains and Monday shifts at work.
Train travel maintained old Europe’s order of time and status with its expensive tickets, printed schedules and segregated classes of carriages. The Great War, however, had produced a more versatile, proletarian option soon to become popular with climbers: the mass-produced motorcycle.
In 1921, the first Normale machine rolled out of the Moto Guzzi factory in Lecco and put motorized travel within the reach of the Italian worker willing to risk a dangerous, proletarian, modernist reputation and, possibly, death on the roads.
For the illegal climbing guide and political agitator Tita Piaz of Pera di Fassa, the so-called Devil of the Dolomites, the motorcycle became both a means of transportation and a calling card. Piaz recorded that on an all-night trip from his hometown of Pera di Fassa to the Totenkirchl in the Kaisergebirge to make the first ascent of the west face in 1908, he had run over a dog and two chickens and collided with a turnip cart. Alpine aesthete Guido Rey sneered that the machine branded Piaz as a “modern,” a reputation that Piaz and many motorcycle enthusiasts would gladly embrace.30 Climber and writer Domenico Rudatis rode hard and was taken out of climbing by an accident on his motorcycle in the mid-1930s. Motorcycles were one of the many passions that propagandists attributed to Emilio’s hero, Mussolini, publishing photos of the frowning dictator astride late-model machines.
Emilio’s first bike cost him 5,000 lire (about US$2,500 today), an enormous sum for a man who often made less than 1,000 lire a month.31 The investment would be recouped in train and bus fares and shifts at the docks that would have been lost without the freedom to drive home from the mountains through the night.
There was, however, some doubt as to whether or not Emilio’s motorcycle would last long enough to make good on his investment. It was an army surplus machine made by the Birmingham Small Arms Company in Britain. BSA machines had a poor reputation in Italy, and motorcycle enthusiasts transformed its initials into a joke in Italian, that went something along the lines of: “we should know how to get there ourselves [without the motorcycle].”32 A long history of motorcycle accidents, falls and repairs to his first machine and its successors ensued, all of which Emilio suffered gladly in exchange for the freedom to travel to the mountains whenever he liked.
During these costly repairs and injuries, Emilio began to wonder whether he might be better off living right in the mountains instead of commuting every weekend. He was, by nature, impatient. With only weekends to climb mountains, his progress as an alpinist who could undertake long routes was slower than he wished. He confided in Kugy that he wanted to quit his job at the Magazzini Generali and move to the Dolomites to be a mountain guide. In the mountains, he thought, he would work only a few days a week and spend the rest of his time climbing new routes with friends from Trieste.
Kugy discouraged him. Kugy knew the guide’s trade from the patron’s point of view and had even trained two Slovenian woodsmen, Matije Kravanje and Osvaldo Pesamosca (the latter also reputed to be a highwayman), to act as his guides in the Julian Alps. He explained to Emilio that guiding was seasonal work and guides were mountain people who took farm work, road building and mining jobs when there were no clients. He also told Emilio that, unlike most city workers, guides had no pension. Even the famous Angelo Dibona, who had guided royalty and conquered some of the hardest unclimbed faces in the Alps, had to take a menial job filling in sitzmarks on a local ski hill after failing health forced his retirement in his late 60s.33
Kugy also warned Emilio against hard and dangerous climbing. He had watched Emilio emerge as the leader of a group of young climbers in basketball shoes who were handy with pitons but lacked Kugy’s romantic reverence for the hills. If Emilio moved to the mountains, they would follow, bringing their new approaches. Unlike so many places in the Alps, the Julian Alps had remained a preserve where what the golden age alpinists would have considered mere gymnastics had not been pursued as an end in itself. Kugy sincerely believed that walls such as the north face of the Riofreddo, one of the biggest unclimbed faces in the Julian Alps, were impossible, and therefore any who tried them both spoiled the reverential atmosphere and risked their lives for nothing.34
Emilio, however, was an ambitious young man who could not help but wonder if Kugy had judged him as something less than the cosa vera, the real thing, when it came to both guiding and exploratory climbing. For the present, Emilio took Kugy’s advice and gave up on the guiding idea. Soon, however, he would defy Kugy’s attempt to stand, fortified by alpine tradition, between Emilio and the unclimbed walls of the Julian Alps.
The tension was inevitable. Kugy’s nostalgia for the days before pitons and carabiners, when the mountains had been part of Austria-Hungary, was irreconcilable with the dreams of Emilio, who had grown up poor and hopeful of that empire’s demise. For Emilio, the alpine tradition was not a possession of the old guard, or a caveat and a warning, but a wild invitation to new experiences. If anything, Kugy’s warning fanned Emilio’s desire for the unclimbed faces of the Alps, and few had ever desired unclimbed walls as ardently as Emilio.