On August 2, 1930, Emilio awoke beneath the warm blankets in the dormitory of the Mussolini hut and felt the cold air of the grey dawn on his face.92 His partners, Fabjan and Piero Slocovich, a university student from Trieste, still slept.
Emilio didn’t mind. He hated early mornings and had a lot to think about. They had come to climb the 500-metre-high west face of the Croda dei Toni, a broad pillar of rock on the complex Croda dei Toni group in the Sexten Dolomites.93 The Croda dei Toni was easily seen from the hut, but because of an absence of obvious cracks, few had tried to climb it. Slocovich and Fabjan had been so lukewarm when they had seen it for the first time the day before that they stayed at the hut while Emilio hiked up and reconnoitred the wall from the talus. Despite the lack of an obvious place to start, Emilio knew that walls revealed their most important secrets only after he tried to climb them.
“So, what do we do?” Fabjan asked him when he returned.
“We’ll try it tomorrow.”
When his partners finally got out of bed, Emilio convinced them to hike up the talus with him and at least try the wall. He set off tentatively up the wisp of a crack. Holds appeared, although there were no piton cracks. The impossible-looking wall yielded just enough small holds so that Emilio could pick a strenuous way upwards. As he gave the wall everything he had, he entered into a mental state he called the “wild voluptuousness of climbing.”94
The wall relented halfway up, where ledges criss-crossed the face. To save time, they roped up to move at the same time without belays, a common technique for experts on rock replete with ledges and holds. The climbers occasionally placed the rope behind a rock spike, but this provided little real protection in the case of a fall. Although the idea was to move briskly, each hold and move had to be considered carefully, because a fall was out of the question.
And yet, Slocovich fell. In the split second in which it was possible to avert the death of the whole party, Emilio, although unanchored, braced himself against the face, threw the rope over his shoulder and caught Slocovich in mid-flight. Emilio recalled that he simply surrendered to instinct and felt no emotion, even when he thought of how they might be pulled to their deaths.
They reached the final overhang an hour before sunset. Emilio was tired and emotionally worn out by the near-miss below, but as the strongest and fastest climber, he took the lead. After an hour of thin face climbing protected by two poor pitons, Emilio had tackled only 15 metres of the wall. The sun was close to the horizon but the summit was still some 20 metres away. Fabjan suggested that they bivouac on the belay ledge and try the wall again the next morning, but Emilio could not find a place for a piton to lower back down to his companions. He climbed on. Near the top, he had to lunge for a hold far above a poor piton. The move would have drawn gasps from onlookers, even in Val Rosandra. At the top of a new route in the Dolomites, with bad protection and darkness setting in, it was a remarkable manoeuvre.
Emilio reached the top as the sun disappeared below the horizon. Slocovich, who was still rattled by his fall lower down, fell again while he seconded. The fall was a luxury Emilio could not have afforded on lead, and despite his patience on the wall, Emilio expected his partners, even if they only seconded, to be efficient and predictable. The climbers remained equivocal about the reliability of the rope. Slocovich had fallen twice that day; once where it might have killed them all, and now, when there was no time to waste before darkness made climbing impossible. Emilio coached Slocovich the rest of the way, but he never climbed with him again.
They rappelled in the dark to a ledge in the Alta della Croda gully that separated the pillar they had climbed from the main peak of the Croda dei Toni. They crawled into Slocovich’s three-man Zdarsky-style bivy bag. Emilio stretched his limbs out on the rock. He imagined enjoying a hot cup of tea and thought that the only thing that could have made everything perfect was the company of a girl he merely described as “his brunette.”
On the wall, where bourgeois conventions of relations between the sexes had no sway, Emilio proved himself worthy of physical contact with a woman in an atavistic trial by stone, cold, gravity and altitude. The recollection of the woman was followed by a sense of well-being. Emilio fell asleep listening to his companions “speaking of many beautiful things… dreamed a little, and waited out the morning.”95
The West Face of the Croda dei Toni was graded VI, and it was the last major Dolomites route Emilio would climb in 1930. He spent most of his other weekends in Val Rosandra or the Julian Alps. On average, the rest of his new climbs in 1930 were easier than the Croda dei Toni climb and few were of interest outside of the small circle of Julian Alps specialists.
With Trieste rock school alumnus Mario Cesca, he made the first total traverse of the Cengia degli Dei, a unique four-and-a-half-kilometre circumnavigation of the walls of the Jôf Fuart group. He made a new route on the Bricelik and early-winter ascents of the Grinta di Plezzo and Cridola; it was the itinerary of a climber who felt like he had already done enough that season to prove Italy’s ascendancy in alpinism.
Emilio was still employed full-time at the Magazzini Generale. He loved Trieste, the Carso and the Julian Alps, but his love of climbing and the mountains forced him to reassess whether he truly belonged in his hometown.
Political changes Emilio supported in theory inconvenienced or disappointed the young climber in practice. Trieste’s militarized ship and aviation industries expanded as Mussolini flexed his muscles in the Mediterranean. Overtime on weekends curbed Emilio’s climbing.
Government support for climbing was copious but mostly ideological and propagandistic. The popular sports of cycling and football offered greater opportunities to sway the masses. The government invested in coaches for the Italian national football team, paid the players to train and built stadiums. Mussolini loved bicycle racing so much that his government held the races until it collapsed in 1943. In exchange for their vocal support of the regime, footballer Giuseppe Meazza and cyclists Alfredo Binda and Learco Guerra were given the freedom to train and compete without the burden of regular work. Many famous cyclists had personal audiences with Mussolini, an honour enjoyed by few mountaineers, and one that would, in 1930, have thrilled Emilio.
Although the government’s financial investment in mountaineering was almost negligible, it had no intention of leaving the climbing community to figure out its place in fascism. In September of 1931, CAI political leader Angelo Manaresi held a meeting in Bolzano and summoned 3,000 members to attend. Manaresi’s speech to Italian climbers was published both in the newspapers and the Rivista Mensile. He exhorted climbers to stop bickering about climbing controversies and work together to build a virile, anti-aristocratic, striving sport rather than a comfortable outdoor pursuit for the middle-class and well-to-do. “We seek the union,” said Manaresi, “on a single rope, of blackshirts, mountain guides and amateur climbers.”96 As a reward for their attendance, each CAI member was given a plastic figure of Mussolini, whom Manaresi called “the new Michelangelo in Rome.”97
In 1931, Manaresi exhorted Italian climbers to catch up with the German Alpine Club with its “240,000 members, 440 sections, 625 huts… a terrible army of German-speaking mountaineers.”98 The solution to this threat, according to Rudatis and many others, was for Italians to redouble their efforts to climb at the highest levels. He explained the spiritual and political importance of the task in a series of instalments called “The Sport of Climbing” in Fascist Sport magazine.99
The Germans, however, had already lapped the Italians. In 1929, the northwest face of the Civetta was repeated not by Italians but by the German party of Leo Rittler and Willi Reiner. Five more German ascents followed in 1930. That year, Attilio Tissi and Alvise Andrich from Belluno made the first Italian ascent and set a new speed record for the wall, climbing it in a day without a bivouac. Germans had left a note for them in the summit register with the insult: “This [the northwest face of the Civetta] is no food for Italians.”100 The insult echoed the cry of the Austrian troops in the Great War: “Italians, turn back!” and became a rallying call for slighted, ambitious Italian climbers. Tissi said after he read the note that he could have climbed the face without any pitons. Such was his reputation for boldness that no one doubted him.
Invigorated by the German slight, Italian climbing slowly overcame its sense of inferiority. Brothers Angelo and Giuseppe Dimai from Cortina d’Ampezzo in the eastern Dolomites, nephews of the great guide Angelo Dimai, climbed harder every season. Renzo Videsott from Trento was strong on the rock. Ettore Castiglioni and Celso Gilberti accrued a list of grade V and VI first ascents in the eastern Dolomites.
In Lombardy, on the other side of Italy, a crew of talented, hardworking young climbers from Milan honed their skills on the limestone rock walls and pinnacles of the Grignetta, as the Triestinos had done in Val Rosandra. Alvise Andrich and Attilio Tissi joined this group on occasion, but the leading figures were Riccardo Cassin and Mary Gennaro from Milan. Inevitably, this group would transition to the big walls of the Dolomites.
Emilio’s own nationalist ardour was strong. “We do not allow ourselves to be inferior to other climbers across the Alps,” he wrote, “otherwise we will continue to be surpassed by them on our most arduous walls.”101 The “them” Emilio referred to were Germans.
On July 27, 1932, the mighty Emil Solleder, the greatest German climber of the late 1920s, died when his rappel anchor failed while he was guiding on the Meije in the Dauphiné Alps in France. It is an index of Italian disregard for German climbing, at least at the official level, that the obituary of the man who had brought grade VI to the Dolomites and made first ascents of the northwest face of the Civetta, the north face of the Furchetta and the east face of the Sass Maor warranted nothing more than a few lines in the Rivista Mensile. Looming in silent mockery over this petty, conspicuous disregard was the northwest face of the Civetta, an enduring monument to Solleder’s German skill and bravery. For decades before the Eigerwand, the Walker Spur and even Everest were seen as the ultimate mountaineering challenges, the northwest face of the Civetta was feared and desired by alpinists, and no Italians had conquered it by their own route.
A week after Solleder’s death, Emilio and his oldest climbing friend, Giulio Benedetti, went to the Coldai hut to repeat Solleder’s climb. Emilio, ever conscious of the presence of the fallen, must have thought about Solleder as he looked at the wall, which soared to a summit that tore the clouds.
Emilio had visited the Coldai hut beneath the northwest face for the first time with Gino Razza in 1927. Razza had pointed out a potential new route to the left of the Solleder-Lettenbauer from the hut. In 1928, he had returned and half-heartedly attempted the Solleder-Lettenbauer, but retreated from low on the wall. “It was an experience,” he wrote, “to which my will was unequal.”102
The Dito di Dio, the Sorella di Mezzo, Riofreddo and dozens of other climbs had made Emilio one of the strongest big wall first ascensionists in Italy. “Although [Benedetti and I] were afraid to repeat the Solleder Route,” he wrote, “we wanted to create an even more terrifying one.”103 There is some doubt, however, that Emilio had planned a harder route on the Civetta at all. From the Coldai hut, Razza’s line looked more direct than the German climb, but from directly beneath the wall, it looked more diagonal. Emilio’s plan to join the Solleder-Lettenbauer two thirds of the way up the wall was a deliberate attempt to ameliorate the severity of his climb with a traverse.
All of these deliberations, compromises and guesses at the best route led Emilio to the discovery of the aesthetic ideal of the direttissima, which came to be inseparable from his principles. Traditional route finding involved traversing back and forth on the rock to discover and link together cracks or the best series of handholds. Generations of climbers had prided themselves in avoiding dangerous or excessively difficult parts of the mountain to “find the route” or “unlock the problem” on a given objective. The direttissima climber let gravity decide on the line from the bottom of a climb and accepted traverses only as necessary compromises. Pitons, aid climbing and high-standard free climbing had given access to rock that climbers before the Great War considered impossible. The new tools, however, both increased the chances of success and potentially diminished the sense of adventure. By denying modern climbers the option of wandering the mountain for easy rock, the direttissima reconfigured the ethic of adventure for 20th-century climbers and elevated route finding from a skill to an ideal.
Like many revolutionaries, Emilio claimed his idea had a historical precedent. He revealed the unlikely source of his idea in a conversation with Benedetti that he later recounted in Rivista Mensile:
“You know, dear Giulio,” he said, “that the ideal climbing route, the elegant route, follows ‘the falling water drop.’”
“Where did you steal this beautiful sentence?” Benedetti asked.
“It’s not mine, a famous English mountaineer said it.”
“I traced a hypothetical line of a water drop,” Emilio wrote, “that came down, down, down [the northwest face of the Civetta] and splashed on the talus. But here Giulio and I disagreed. I said that the water drop had fallen a little to the left, Giulio, more to the right, and he may have been right… But the beautiful line came to us at last, when we agreed where the drop had fallen.”104
There are a few references to direct lines in British alpine literature prior to 1929, but none use the metaphor of the water drop.105 In any case, Emilio knew that the quest to follow direct lines on rock walls started in Germany in the 1900s with Hans Dülfer, Otto Herzog and Hans Fiechtl. He was always reluctant, however, to credit Germans for anything.
Emilio could have invoked the plumb line, a strict and mechanical definition of verticality, but a water drop did not follow a plumb line. Water carved the winding caves of the Carso and the sinuous valley of Val Rosandra. Snowmelt streaked the faces of the Dolomites before it fell from the rock and was carried far away by the wind. Emilio and Benedetti argued about where a water drop from the summit of the Civetta would land, given the slope of the talus and the influence of the wind. They both agreed that the vertical line was just a starting point, an ideal, and that not everyone would appreciate their line.
“Someone will object,” Emilio said, “‘But you took almost three hours to do 150 metres and placed six pitons.’ Here is how I make my case: look down. The line falls straight, therefore it is beautiful and elegant.”106
The aesthetic of the direct line predated both fascism and the futurist aesthetics that pervaded European design between the wars, but the term direttissima was borrowed by climbers from the name of the direct Rome–Formia–Naples railway line that opened in 1927. A straight line expressed strength and velocity. The cover illustrators of the Rivista Mensile rendered the mountains as world of verticality, unbroken lines and geometric perfection akin to a cityscape of skyscrapers (Emilio measured the Civetta by skyscrapers; five skyscrapers, by his estimate).
The direttissima concept was a coeval and ideological cousin of the Germanic fascination with the Nordwände, or the great shadowed and ice-lined unclimbed north faces of the Alps. On a Nordwand, the worthiness of the race of the climbers was proven in a Gesamtwerk of rock and ice where death was as likely as it was on a battlefield. By comparison, Emilio said that direct routes on big walls in the Eastern Alps, which were mostly rock climbs, would not succumb to suffering or heroism alone but to the “most complex means imaginable.” German writers described the Nordwände as titanic, colossal, forbidding, and even monstrous. Emilio, on the other hand, followed the water drop, and would not climb what he did not consider beautiful. Emilio was no stoic and wept at the news of tragedies in the mountains. Although a patriot and a soldier, Emilio never indulged in the comparisons between war and alpinism popular with German and British climbers.107
***
The most dangerous and technically demanding sections on the Comici-Benedetti route on the northwest face of the Civetta combined hard free and aid climbing on bad pitons in poor rock. Emilio described one pitch two-thirds of the way up the wall in detail.
After having secured a piton in the bottom of the roof, [Benedetti] moves [up] and checks for loose rock at the lip of the roof with hammer blows. He stands up, but not to the point of losing balance, trying to place another piton as high as possible. After many hardships, he succeeds and clips a carabiner into it, and to this, he clips in one of the two ropes. Then he rises up to have that carabiner close to his belt, and is completely suspended from the piton. He then looks for another crack, he finds it; another piton is placed. He takes the second rope, which is free, and clips it in. The friend below helps him by pulling the rope. And here he hangs from the second piton, with his body almost horizontal, parallel to the roof of the cave. Up and out he goes, placing another piton, he fastens the free rope and binds a stirrup-like cord into it for his foot. This way the body takes up a vertical position.108
Benedetti risked a 20-metre fall directly onto the belay, far enough to snap the doubled manila hawser. Even if the rope held, there was no guarantee that Emilio’s belay piton would have been strong enough to withstand such a load. At this point, they were more than 300 metres from the ground and did not have enough pitons to rappel. Rescue from above was blocked by 300 metres of overhanging rock. There was no way out but up.
This was the big wall. Emilio and Benedetti had radically broken from the doctrine of never climbing up where you could not climb down. Their commitment to the wall, each other and Benedetti’s chain of bad pitons was total. The philosophical ideal of the sestogradiste was total immersion into the experience of the wall. The psychological strain it inflicted on the climbers liberated new and unexplored energies. Emilio described a kind of synthesis between mind and body on the Civetta that he compared to the relationship between a driver and a sports car. The harder he pushed his body, the more it revealed its hidden capacities.
Emilio was generally protective of his friends and had a special concern for Triestino partners. He was relieved to take the lead on the next pitch and didn’t relinquish it to Benedetti until they had climbed several more pitches of steep free climbing protected with poor pitons.
They were some 20 pitches off the talus when they reached the place they had intended to traverse right to the easier final section of the Solleder-Lettenbauer. When Emilio looked more carefully to his right, however, he saw that they had made a serious mistake. The horizontal weakness they had seen from the base was an illusion. Escape to the Solleder-Lettenbauer was blocked by more than a hundred metres of blank, vertical rock.
They had no choice but to find a path through the overhangs they had originally planned to avoid. It was slow work, made more onerous by the thought that somewhere on the inhospitable wall they would have to find a bivouac site. Bivouacs en route were still mostly extemporaneous affairs to be avoided. Electric headlamps later lengthened the climbing day by many hours, but in the 1930s, climbers had to start at first light and stop climbing when darkness came. Sleeping bags, bivy bags, stoves and food were so heavy that they were rarely carried on hard climbs. On the cold, dark, high-altitude northwest wall of the Civetta, the temperatures fell below zero centigrade every night. Most climbers who spent a night out on the mountain anticipated hunger, cold and sleeplessness rather than rest.
After a few pitches they found a cave in the face formed by overhangs. They pulled their hoods over their heads, tucked their hands in their armpits and settled down for a long night.
The dawn revealed what few weaknesses there were in the serried overhangs of grey, smooth rock. In the night, their caster sugar, their only food, had poured out of its bag onto the wet rope and formed a hard crust that kinked it and made it almost unknottable. As Benedetti played out the frosted rope, Emilio climbed up to the roofs to reconnoitre the route and was so discouraged he retreated to the cave to warm up his hands and calm his nerves.
On Emilio’s second attempt, Benedetti eked out the rope as he laboured overhead with outrageous pendulums anchored to pitons that he described as “giving us little [security] beyond being in the rock.” It was a masterful piece of rock climbing. Riccardo Cassin described his attempt on the pitch during the second ascent in 1935:
A long traverse led me to the spot where Comici’s notes said “pitons with etriers.” The overhang ahead was formidable. After great effort, I managed to clip in to a piton and hook in an etrier, then pull over the bulge using a vertical hold. To get myself over the entire overhang I had to leave an etrier, climb Dülfer style [i.e.with rope tension] and, with my left hand, reach a small hold; hanging on with my right hand, I tested the hold: it seemed sound. Arching my arms and legs, I flung myself out and up, but suddenly the bloody hold collapsed. Because of my push-off I went into a spin, and because of the sudden somersault, my right hand could not hold me.109
Cassin’s partner, Mario dell’Oro (nicknamed Boga), bandaged his heavily bleeding wound and they climbed on. Retreat was almost impossible from that point on the wall. It was one of the closest calls with death in Cassin’s long and epic career.
After Emilio and Benedetti negotiated these trying pitches unscathed, they were relieved to find good cracks above. A steep chimney, another roof, a pendulum, and then they were at the belay for the last pitch of the Solleder-Lettenbauer.
The transition from the deadly, intricate world of the wall to the sunshine on the summit ridge was as sudden as it was invigorating. In the sunshine, safety and elation of victory, the frozen bivouac and dangerous climbing had all seemed in aid of the aesthetics of their route. They were amused, however, when they looked over the edge and saw that, in Emilio’s words, “the water drop landed in the wrong place. We had imagined the water drop falling from the top of the wall, not the true summit, which was invisible from the bottom.”110
The new route on the Civetta was graded VI by Emilio and Benedetti. Given the pair’s experience in the Dolomites and Emilio’s reputation, the claim was undisputed. Newspapers called it a heroic victory of national importance. Writers who knew little about climbing speculated that Comici and Benedetti’s route was harder and more direct than the Solleder-Lettenbauer. Casara boasted to the CAI that Emilio’s line was superior to Solleder’s. The notion enraged Emilio.
“Don’t say our route on the Civetta is more or less direct than Solleder’s route,” Emilio said. “This would enter into controversy I absolutely wish to avoid.”111
This was the first time that Emilio’s drive to do new routes led him into controversies, and the publicity frustrated him. He asked Casara, somewhat petulantly, not “to involuntarily drag [me] into alpine affairs which do not interest me, when I have no strength to fight against it and I don’t feel like it.”112
Emilio, however, could not simultaneously avoid controversies and also author spectacular new routes.113 To Emilio’s frustration, the press framed their praise of his routes in ways he thought either irrelevant or incorrect. For example, Solleder had used 15 pitons and free climbed his whole line. Comici and Benedetti had used three times that many pitons, with many for aid, and two pendulums. The Italian climbing press considered Emilio and Benedetti’s route to be harder, more modern and sophisticated simply because they used more pitons.
Later writers saw a marked difference between the Civetta and Emilio’s more aid-intensive ascents. British mountaineer Doug Scott wrote that the Civetta was a template for a less piton-dependent approach that Emilio forsook later for predominantly aid-climbing ascents.114 Emilio, however, did not believe that he had used a specific style on the Civetta that differed from his other ascents.
After the ascent, Dino Buzzati pointed out to Emilio numerous unclimbed lines on the Civetta and the neighbouring peaks. Emilio, however, never returned to the Civetta. He gained less satisfaction from new routes on faces that had already been climbed. In the new grade VI idiom, a face could be home to several routes as climbers vied for harder or more direct climbs, but Emilio preferred to be the first on a wall and rarely added a new route, let alone one that partly followed an established line. It was one sure way to avoid the chances of obvious but misinformed comparisons between his climbs and those of others, but it also contributed to his reputation as the conqueror of the unclimbed, which brought with it its own challenges, rewards and scrutiny.
***
On January 6, 1931, after final warnings about the possible disadvantages by Kugy and Fabjan, Emilio left Trieste and followed his dream to become a mountain guide to the Dolomites.115 What his family thought of the decision is unrecorded, but it must have been an emotional time for his mother, who had come to rely on Emilio emotionally and financially. He promised to continue to visit often and to regularly send money for the expenses at number six Via Bazzoni.
Winter was a good time for an aspiring mountain tourism professional to move to the mountains, since skiing was growing quickly in the Dolomites. Many resorts added their first rope tows in the late 1920s. Most local climbing guides became proficient at the sport to make money teaching Christiania turns and snowplows in the wintertime.
Emilio was a passable if not advanced skier. In 1929, he had his introduction to the sport, not in a resort, where he might have developed good technique, but on ski mountaineering tours, where endurance and safety were more important than elegance. Ski mountaineering in the 1930s involved wet and frozen clothing, avalanche danger, trail breaking in heavy wooden skis prone to breakage, cold leather boots, heavy rucksacks and few downhill thrills. For Emilio’s first run at a resort, he threw himself down a steep, rocky hill and spent more time on his backside than his skis. Experienced skiers doubted that he would ever become an instructor.
The demand was high, however, and Emilio easily secured a position as a hotel ski instructor, although he was soon fired, presumably because of his lack of skill. The staff at the Hotel Sass Maor in San Martino di Castrozza were more understanding and gave him a second chance. By the time the snow melted, Emilio could make elegant Christiania and snowplow turns.
When the climbing season arrived and Emilio had to work as a mountain guide for the first time, earning a paycheque became more difficult. Government propaganda, which insinuated itself into climbing publications, encouraged urbanites to move to the mountains because life there was healthy, straightforward and inexpensive. Physical labour in the alpine regions had hardened the bodies and spirits of the alpini, who, in the national myth, had saved the nation. Honest labour in the mountains was a spiritual tonic powerful enough to improve the politics of communists.116 The potential salutary effects of an alpine residency on an already upstanding party member and climbing star like Emilio could be expected to be practically limitless.
Most of this propaganda had been written by urbanite fascists, who knew little about the multilingual, complex, insular, Catholic and decidedly non-fascist native alpine communities. The new Italian fascist would take on the mountains on their own terms. Fascist camps and communities were planned to bring urbanites into nature and re-educate the genetically strong but ideologically weak alpine dwellers in the new Italian reality.
Emilio planned to become a mountain guide, a traditional rural career, developed and maintained by mountain natives whom the regime found suspicious. Before 1931, his experience of guiding was restricted to taking less skilled friends up easy alpine routes and teaching rock climbing in the controlled environment of Val Rosandra. He was the star of a cohesive body of Triestino climbers. Among them were many female climbers whose first names fill Emilio’s diaries, and not only on climbing days.117 By the early 1930s, Trieste was home to more women who could lead grade VI than almost anywhere in Europe. Bruna Bernardini, Fernanda Brovedani, Amalia Zuani Bornettini, Edvige Muschi and Germana Ucosich were a few of the women who shared Emilio’s passion for rock.118 Some, like Fernanda Brovedani, who was married to Emilio’s friend Osiride Brovedani, were unavailable, but many, like Emilio, were single. The climbers of Trieste of either sex delighted to accompany Emilio on any project he chose on holidays and weekends, regardless of all-night drives, hikes, wet bivouacs and terrifying climbing.
The climbing school was so successful that Manaresi visited Emilio and went on an excursion to Val Rosandra. In April of 1932, Emilio was received, at the Castello di Miramare in Trieste, by Prince Amedeo, the new Duke of Aosta, the highest-ranking Italian official who ever recognized his climbing achievements. These were the honours Emilio had always wanted, but he sensed that the scene in Trieste had plateaued. While he taught locals how to climb 15-metre-high crags, the mountain guides in the Dolomites hosted film starlets, royalty and political celebrities of the first rank. Crucially, they were free to take their days off not to train in Val Rosandra but, Emilio believed, to explore new alpine routes.
Emilio left the Trieste scene for the world ruled by hoary patriarchs with their pipes and moustaches and tough young men in farmer’s clothes he had met plodding ahead of their clients. For now, he did not realize that their lives were as far from a day cragging at Val Rosandra followed by an evening in the smart bars of Trieste as alpine goat farming was from working in the Magazzini Generali.
For centuries, intrepid peasants had guided outsiders through the Dolomites for extra income. As mountaineering developed into a sport, guiding became a trade, and therefore, in the old-fashioned mindset of the peasants, a vocation. Occasionally, a guide might cultivate a rich client who would indulge his family with a modicum of upward social mobility. Guiding, however, remained a lower-class pursuit. When the Austrian government sanctioned guiding in 1865, they imagined it as a dangerous service position suited to uneducated men from poor alpine regions.
The client, not the guide, was the “Herr,” or “sir.” The bourgeois climber Paul Preuss had declined to become a mountain guide, despite his skills and need for employment, because the trade was below his social status. Even the fascist government endorsed a geographical determinism that served the idea that alpine guides came from alpine regions with its claim that mountain-bred Italians were a stronger, heartier, if less intelligent breed than other Italians.119
Cortina, Emilio’s first home in the mountains, lined both sides of a deep alpine valley. The rock walls of the Tofane, Pomagagnon, Cristallo and dozens of other legendary Dolomite peaks looked down on the town. The valley was divided by Catholic parishes that ministered to a population still mostly employed in ancient forms of alpine farming that kept them exhausted and, in bad years, on the verge of malnutrition. Guiding was a vocation closely related to alpine herding and dating, in one form or another, from the 15th century.
The modern guiding business in Cortina began in 1863, when Austrian Paul Grohmann hired Francesco Lacedelli to guide him on the Tofana di Mezzo. In the last half of the 19th century, new hotels that catered to visitors of all budgets opened their doors. As news of the beauty of the area spread, tourists, sportsmen, intellectuals, chamois hunters, artists, cranks and writers poured into towns like Cortina, Selva di Cadore and Bolzano. Ambitious, hungry young men from the surrounding parishes offered the visitors their services as guides.
Guiding in Cortina, however, was less lucrative than in the Western Alpine towns of Grindelwald, Zermatt, Courmayeur and Chamonix, which tourists associated with famous peaks like the Eiger, the Matterhorn and Mont-Blanc. Although Cortina’s Antelao, Pelmo, Pomagagnon and Cristallo were spectacular peaks, climbing them conferred few bragging rights in the salons of London and Leipzig. To further dampen the enthusiasm of potential visitors, climbing in the Dolomites only attracted climbers unfazed by its exotic reputation as the haunt of daredevil rock gymnasts.120
Family dynasties of mountain guides protected the limited client resource. The Dimais, Menardis, Constantinis and Ghedinas were large Catholic families. Guide Luigi Rizzi had 12 children; Angelo Dibona had 6. By the 1930s, these families dominated guiding in Cortina. They accrued generations of climbing experience, the benefits of which were handed down in lore. Skills were held to be bred in the bone. Although a few of these men, like Agostino Verzi and Angelo Dibona, became well-known climbers in their own right, to the Cortinesi, no amount of practice at crags like Val Rosandra could replace growing up in the shadows of the Dolomites.
Most guides were ethnic Italians. Cortina had been under Austrian rule until the end of the Great War, but it remained predominantly Italian. The Austrians had ruled Cortina without mercy. In the Great War, 650 men from the valley had been drafted and sent to the Russian Front. Few returned. Cortina changed hands twice during the Great War, and its citizens were forced, on pain of execution, to defend the town against the Italian army.
Despite the evidence to the contrary, fascists suspected that the Cortinesi had collaborated with the Austrians. Thus, Angelo Dibona, one of the best Italian climbers in the first two decades of the 1900s, along with many of the other locals, was routinely excluded from honours and recognition by the fascist government.
Unlike Triestino Italians, the Cortinesi had greeted fascist rule from Rome with indifference. The Cortinesi spoke Ampezzano, an Italian dialect, and the ancient language of Ladin. Their loyalties were to parishes, valleys and their market town, not to a distant nation-state. A guide, like a woodsman, farmer, miller or priest, hewed close to family, land, the rhythms of the alpine seasons and the church. They saw superstition as a lesser vice than modernity. Although Emilio believed in the influence of the dead on his climbs, the manifestations of their presence were mostly psychological. Among the Cortinesi, distinctly unmodern superstitions abounded, from the jewel-studded skeleton of St. Liberalis permanently on view in the basilica, to the fragment of a dead client’s bone Luigi Rizzi carried as penance for not insisting that the unfortunate man accept a rope on a steep step.121
The guides of the Eastern Alps were, however, in their own way, long-sighted. They competed with each other for business but also depended upon each other in times of scarcity, emergency or tragedy. Ancient and complex rituals, traditions of apprenticeship and intermarriage linked guides across mountain ranges, family lines and generations.
The mountain people had survived their harsh environment for centuries through a combination of controlled competition and cooperation. Guides, likewise, depended on a deliberately forged web of relationships. Jean-Joseph Carrel, of the famous guiding family of Cheneil, mentored Joseph Pellissier of Breil di Valtournenche, as well as his own son, Luigi. Luigi, in turn, mentored Pellissier’s son. Oliviero Gasperi was the godfather of Dolomites guide Camillo Giussani. After they had climbed with Emilio, several of his clients reverted to traditional guides like Pellissier and Gasperi. In the eyes of clients, there was much more to la cosa vera, the real thing, than being good at climbing.
Climbing credentials alone were insufficient credentials to penetrate alpine guiding cadres. Emilio, however, was an outsider and a fascist who lacked the Catholic convictions and sentimentalism about rural life that might have gained him some acceptance. It annoyed and frustrated him that guides were often uninterested in hard, amateur climbs. Emilio had hoped to do many new routes when he moved to the mountains, but his potential partners viewed his eagerness with suspicion. Most guides attended to religious, domestic, familial or agricultural chores on their days off, rather than chasing after new routes.
Outsiders who had become guides had shown more interest in the local Cortina scene than Emilio. Raffaele “Biri” Carlesso came from Costa di Rovigo, as far from the Dolomites as Trieste. Like Emilio, he was a fine climber. Biri earned his nickname by climbing so quickly that he reminded his partners of the Chiribiri racing car. He was, however, a practising Catholic trained in the ancient wool trade and could converse with Cortina’s wool farmers. Like the guides, he valued modesty and rarely published his new routes. He kept no climbing diary.
An episode at the Longeres hut that involved Carlesso illustrates Emilio’s insensitivity to guiding’s codes of competition and community as well as his naivety about the power of gossip. A former client of Carlesso’s complained to Emilio that Carlesso had taken a long time to guide his party up the Cima Piccola. Emilio responded that Carlesso should have hired more guides to help him. To question or insult Carlesso’s guiding skills in front of a client was a serious breach of guiding etiquette that might not have occurred if Emilio had been a local steeped in guiding tradition.
Carlesso was furious when he heard the story. Instead of apologizing, Emilio claimed that he had meant no insult. He said that he always spoke well of people, “even when they don’t deserve it,” and that he thought so well of Carlesso as a guide that he had recommended him to his own clients.122 Emilio’s relationship with Carlesso, however, never fully recovered.
Emilio represented a new kind of threat to the local guides, unmitigated by faith or modesty. He was a fascist and a believer in progress, and he lacked respect for traditions, least of all in climbing. Emilio had taught climbing in Val Rosandra not as an arcane trade but as a recreational skill set, like tennis. The guides feared that he would steal potential clients from the city who knew him through the newspapers. Emilio was, of course, as famous as ever in the mind of the climbing readership of the Rivista Mensile, in which he continued to write. His best clients were amateur climbers who were ambitious and rich enough to chase their alpine dreams with celebrity guides. The Cortinesi guides did not realize that this was a small market, but in any case, there was no sign at this point that Emilio would share whatever good fortune came his way.
The guides privately decided not to include Emilio’s budding guiding business in their circle. Rumours and innuendoes flourished on both sides of the stand-off. In Emilio’s first winter in Cortina, his equipment hut caught fire and he lost much of his skiing and rock climbing equipment. The suspicion of arson said as much about how bad relations were between Emilio and the local guides as it did about the actual cause of the fire.
Despite his differences with the Cortinesi guides, Emilio was wounded when they rejected him. In Trieste, the traditions of hospitality required that strangers be honoured and assisted. In the mountains, he expected the same, and did not understand that the guides saw him as a threat. Vittorio Varale compared Emilio to the character Ivanhoe in Walter Scott’s eponymous novel about a medieval nobleman who is dispossessed of what should have been his. Emilio continued to feel like his success as a guide was thwarted by the Cortinesi, success which should have been his by right as a superb climber.123
Paradoxically, Emilio’s sense of hospitality left him vulnerable to the needs of his competitors when they were in financial trouble. One night at a dance in the Savoie Hotel in Misurina, a friend called Emilio off the dance floor. The police, who were more willing to help out a party loyalist like Emilio than the Cortinesi guides, had apprehended two guides from Sexten who had solicited clients in Emilio’s territory. Emilio, however, told the police to release them. Despite his own lack of clients, he had given them permission to guide in his area because they were good men and there was little work in Sexten.
The national reputation that the local guides thought would make Emilio an unbeatable competitor turned out to be a liability. Potential clients respected his reputation as a hard climber but worried about whether they could keep up if they hired him. Would he take them on an overly difficult climb? What if they failed or climbed poorly when roped up with the great Emilio Comici? Would they need to learn new skills when they were used to the guide tying them to the rope and pointing out holds? It annoyed Emilio that more amateurs approached him for an autograph or photo than to hire him as their guide.124
Many of Emilio’s clients blurred the line between friend and client. Well-off friends like Emmy Hartwich-Brioschi and Severino Casara could afford to pay Emilio, but when Emilio had invited them himself, as he often did, it seemed rude to him to ask them for payment. In photographs of Emilio from this period, he sits shirtless in the sun, entertaining clients with his guitar. The Cortinesi guides rarely allowed their photograph to be taken with clients, and when they did, more often than not, they were standing upright and uphill from the client with an expression that suggested that they were not given to lighter moments under any circumstances. Local guides were not burdened by the awkwardness of charging their friends, or even people from their own villages or regions, for their services. Geographic, cultural and class differences helped to formalize transactions between guides and clients.
Casara had reason to identify himself not as Emilio’s client but as his friend and climbing partner. In 1931, the academy of the CAI was ordered by Manaresi to rule on whether Casara had soloed the first ascent of the north face of the Campanile di Val Montanaia.125 Their ruling, the so-called Lodi di Bolzano, acquitted Casara due to a lack of evidence to the contrary, a decision generally interpreted as a finding of guilt. Casara resigned from the academy of the CAI a month later. His best remaining shred of credibility was his association with Emilio.
Emilio’s embarrassment about the commercial nature of the guide-client relationship kept him from asking even his richest client, Europe’s top mountaineering aristocrat, King Leopold of Belgium, for his pay. When clients looked for Emilio the day after their climb in order to pay him, he was often nowhere to be found. Emilio’s one exception to socializing only with city friends or urbanites who had moved to the mountains almost cost him Leopold’s patronage.
The youth leaders of the XXX Ottobre had changed Emilio’s life, and he felt obligated to show his gratitude by teaching curious but penniless youngsters how to climb. When Emilio was guiding Leopold III, he learned that a boy whom he had promised to take climbing had taken a rope and headed for the Guglia Edmondo De Amicis, a pinnacle usually accessed by a Tyrolean traverse. Emilio chased after the boy, stopped him before he made it to the pinnacle, climbed a pitch with him and rushed back to his royal client. Leopold must have been surprised by the length of his guide’s absence, and likely unconvinced by Emilio’s excuse that he had forgotten his camera and gone to retrieve it.126
***
In 1932, Emilio lost his patience with the hostile Cortinesi guides and moved 15 kilometres northeast, to Lake Misurina. The massive rock walls of the Sorapiss, reflected in the shallow lake, enticed mountaineers from throughout Italy. The view was also a fine advertisement for Emilio’s skills: his routes on the Dito di Dio and the Sorella di Mezzo were visible on any clear day. Other famous objectives, like Monte Cristallo and the Tre Cime di Lavaredo, were close at hand. The Cima del Cadin was a fine peak for short rock climbs, and hiking opportunities were unlimited. In winter, skiers came to fledgling resorts like Col de Varda. Most importantly, in Misurina there were no mountain guides.
The lake’s first modern visitors were respiratory disease patients who summered in the sanatoriums, hoping to be cured by the clean air 1754 metres above sea level. By 1930, the area had become popular with alpine tourists. Smaller hotels offered inexpensive lodgings, and the woods around the village provided unlimited potential for campers, but the centrepieces of Lake Misurina were the big, glamorous hotels.
Misurina was off the railway line and main highway, and clients had to travel there from Cortina by car. Emilio’s main contacts there were tourists from the city, and a handful of artists, doctors, musicians and lawyers who had moved to the mountains.
Emilio was more comfortable in the ballroom of the Hotel Savoie in Misurina on a Saturday evening than in the humble Cortina bars where his guiding rivals drank beer. Handsome and elegant in his tuxedo, he whirled across the floors with the well-to-do ladies of Venice and Milan, whose jewelry sparkled in the light of the chandeliers. Through the art-nouveau window frames, he could catch glimpses, mid-waltz, of the moonlit rock walls and glaciers of the Sorapiss.
On Sunday mornings when there were no clients, the weather was bad or the season had ended, Emilio’s competitors heard mass in Cortina at the church of Madonna della Difesa (Our Lady of Protection). The church was built in the 15th century to commemorate the Ampezzanos’ miraculous defence of Cortina from marauding outsiders, an incident of which the townspeople remained proud 400 years later. While the guiding clans prayed for more clients and the defence of their trade, their families and their lives when they climbed, Emilio took a lounge chair on a hotel patio, drank coffee and read the newspaper – two of the few luxuries he could afford.
Emilio survived partly off money his mother sent him, a gift that embarrassed him but came with the blessing of the most important counsellors in his life. On his own climbing trips, he stayed in the cheapest rooms in huts, and when he could afford to eat in their dining rooms, he ordered plain pasta and slipped in pieces of sausage or cheese from his pockets.
Without climbing, the mountains could not hold Emilio. He did not solo, nor did he enjoy hiking, even to climbs, let alone for its own sake. When there was neither work nor climbing partners, Emilio hopped on his motorcycle and went home to his parents’ house in Trieste.
He extended his visits to Trieste for weeks if there were no clients in Misurina. And yet, despite his love of Trieste and the comfort of his parents’ home on Via Bazzoni, the city disposed him to depression and lethargy.
In Trieste, he wrote reports on his climbs, fretted about climbing projects and his reputation in the press or met with friends. Often enough, he did not even bring climbing equipment with him, but he would sometimes take work at the rock school in Val Rosandra or, less often, launch out on climbing trips to the Julian Alps.
Emilio was not the only mountaineer whose heart was tied to both the mountains and his seaport home. Kugy, who was well into his 70s, was no longer an active climber, but he was still an active citizen of Trieste. Although Kugy’s political embarrassment as a Slavic former Austrian imperialist forced him to the fringes of the new Italy, he remained Trieste’s most eminent living mountaineer.
Despite his differences with Kugy over climbing style, Emilio paid him a visit to ask for help with finding guiding clients. Kugy would not have been surprised that his prediction that Emilio would struggle to make ends meet as a mountain guide had come true. Nonetheless, he was no longer in touch with many climbers in need of a guide, and most of his own partners were either too old to climb or dead. He did, however, arrange a meeting between Emilio and his cousin Anna Escher, a Triestina, a climbing fanatic and a woman of means.
Escher was a member of the wealthy Glanzmann clan, but she usually dressed in plain sports clothes and avoided any appearance of wealth. She was suntanned, fit, attractive and had a big smile and a mane of naturally curly blonde hair that she occasionally cropped down to a couple of inches. Unlike the diminutive Emmy Hartwich-Brioschi, she was taller than Emilio.
Anna had grown up a couple of blocks from Emilio in the palatial Villa Bazzoni at the corner of Via Bazzoni and Via dei Navali. The Glanzmanns were a dynasty of self-made merchants from Savoy who had moved to Trieste in the early 19th century. No Glanzmanns worked as labourers in the docks or shipyards. Their children, like Anna, grew up in their world of coffered libraries, tutors and private gardens.
Anna was six years older than Emilio. She had been preceded by three sisters who died infancy, and on the recommendation of a friend, her mother named her after St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary and the patron saint of women in labour. It was an auspicious choice: four healthy siblings followed Anna into the world.
Anna’s mother was a patron of the poets, writers and musicians who frequented Via Bazzoni. Anna, however, was indifferent to high culture. Her favourite time of year was the summer vacation in the Swiss Alps, where she had been introduced to climbing by her cousin Julius.127
Anna found her future husband in Switzerland. Waldo Charles von Escher was a merchant from Zurich, but his business was based in Alexandria. Escher was, by training, an engineer, but in the early 30s, he became a consul of the Norwegian government in Alexandria.
Life in Anna and Waldo’s house on Rue Ross in the beachfront expat enclave of Saba Pasha was comfortable, but Anna felt restless and isolated. The Eschers belonged to the Royal Automobile Club of Egypt along with stars of desert exploration like Hungarian László Almásy and British major Ralph Bagnold. Anna made a few motor trips to the desert, but she missed the cold and rocky world from which she was exiled. She kept in touch with alpinism through publications like the Rivista Mensile, where she read all about Emilio’s climbs. The passenger ships of the Lloyd Triestino line took five days to reach Trieste, so trips home were infrequent. After her sons Cyril and Paul were born, however, Anna made protracted summer pilgrimages to the Alps via her family home in Trieste. Usually, Waldo stayed in Alexandria during Anna’s vacations, but when her boys were older, she occasionally brought them to the mountains with her.
In the Alps, Anna patronized the best guides and soon learned that there was a whole world of climbing in which her cousin Julius, with his alpenstock and botany kit, had little interest. She was a natural rock climber who was a quick study with the pitons and carabiners her cousin eschewed. In 1925, with guide Angelo Dibona, she made the first ascent of a route that climbed much of the steep north face of Jôf di Montasio in the Julian Alps.
Anna got along well with the traditional guides, but when she met Emilio, she found a paesano who needed her emotional and financial patronage as much as the sad poets of the Palazzo Bazzoni relied on her mother’s help. Also, Emilio was a handsome young man whose melancholy face in the newspapers contrasted with his enthusiasm for climbing, balletic technique and victories over the hardest climbs in the Alps. Emilio was an unconventional guide who was willing to make friends with his clients. Anna’s isolation was geographic and literal, Emilio’s was internal and spiritual, but they turned out to be complementary.
From the start, Anna’s relationship with Emilio was proprietorial. When Anna was ready to climb or ski, whether it was in the Middle East, Spain or anywhere in the Alps, Emilio simply understood that he would show up, even if he had to cancel other plans. Without complaint, he catered to the needs of whomever else she brought along from her impressive circle of climbing friends and relatives. The arrangement worked well for patron and guide alike.
Anna and Emilio made their first trip together in spring of 1933. Their destination was the rock pinnacles and walls of the Grignetta, near Lecco, above the shores of Lake Como on the opposite side of northern Italy from Trieste. The climbs of the Grignetta were up to 150 metres high – much smaller than the Dolomites, but three times as long as most routes in Val Rosandra.
Emilio had been invited to the area by Mary Varale, who now climbed with a talented and ambitious crew of working-class climbers from the Milan area. Trieste had a population of about 200,000, but the population of Milan, the second-biggest city in Italy, was more than a million. The Grignetta was close enough to Milan that in some places, the city lights were visible at night.
Climbing standards in the Grignetta, however, lagged behind Val Rosandra. When Emilio was not guiding Anna, he demonstrated his advanced piton and aid techniques to a group of strong but unknown young climbers that included Riccardo Cassin, Giulio and Nino Bartesaghi, Mario Spreafico, Vittorio Ratti, Gigino Amati, Antonio Piloni, and Mario “Boga” dell’Oro.
Cassin, Mary Varale and a half dozen others in patched factory workwear and gymnastics gear watched as Emilio Comici tied the rope around the waist of his clean and fashionable climbing shirt. He looked just like he did in the newspapers. Above him rose the smooth, 80-metre-high, ledgeless unclimbed north wall of the Corno del Nibbio, one of the last unclimbed problems of the Grignetta. The only possible line was an overhanging thin crack.
Twenty-four-year-old Cassin was a blacksmith and a boxer and looked it, with his bull head, thin hair and crooked nose. Stripped down to his undershirt in the hot sun, he squinted and made mental notes about how Emilio organized his pitons and carabiners.
Emilio stepped off the ground and climbed some free moves with the elegance of a spider before he pounded in his first piton with the hammer in one hand. With double rope tension, Emilio gracefully proceeded up a problem that Cassin and his friends had not even known how to attempt.
On the same trip, Emilio climbed with Varale for the first time. She was a short, powerful climber with the prominent facial features of an opera diva. Her skill and determination were as well known as her self-confidence. Varale was proud of being a strong woman climber and wore a scarlet climbing jacket so that she would be visible high on a rock wall. Cassin described her as “an exceptional companion, alert, ready and utterly trustworthy.”128 Cassin also recalled that she kissed her male climbing partners after a climb.
With Emilio, Varale and Grignetta locals Spreafico and dell’Oro, Cassin led the first ascent of the west face of the Zuccone di Campelli, one of the biggest faces in the Grignetta. Emilio, however, only felt that he could claim a first ascent when he led the crux pitches. Before he left the Grignetta, he tried to make the first ascent of the so-called Lictor Route on the Torre Costanza. The climb drew its name from the statue of a fascist lictor, a stylized bundle of sticks lashed to an axe, that zealous fascists had erected on the tower’s summit. Varale belayed and shared her knowledge of the proposed route. Augusto Corti came third. On the crux thin crack, Emilio tore out a piton and fell five metres. It was not a long fall, but he injured his arm badly enough so that he had to abandon the attempt.
After a few days in Misurina, it was obvious that Emilio’s injury needed longer to heal before he resumed serious climbing. He withdrew to Trieste, his mother and the family home to rest and nurse his arm.
“I will stay about ten days in Trieste,” he wrote Casara, “and I hope to cure myself while doing nothing. But it will be difficult…”129
In Trieste, Emilio was struck by the ailment he simply described as “something worse,” likely the depression that hounded him throughout his life.130 The physiological sources of depression had not yet been discovered, and the disease was still stigmatized as a sign of unmanly mental weakness. Sometimes Emilio could block out the feelings of depression, if not the condition itself, with a demanding first ascent. When he could not climb, the symptoms of social withdrawal and sadness became worse. He vacillated between blaming the climbing weather, the press and the guiding business for his malaise. If anything, his occasional attempts to distract himself by writing for climbing journals or going out with young women from the GARS increased his frustration.
A month after he left Misurina, Emilio remained in Trieste. A combination of rest, the spring sunshine and news in the alpine papers, however, stirred his desire to return to the Dolomites. The crew in the Grignetta had already put what they had learned from Emilio last season to good use. Cassin had completed a new route on the north face of the Corno del Nibbio that was harder than Emilio’s and then climbed the route on the Torre Costanza that had taken Emilio out of commission and added another, even harder climb beside it.131
Emilio admired other Italian climbers’ skills, whether they were from Milan or Trieste, and had no projects on the relatively short climbs of the Grignetta. He was, however, aware that the revolution in Italian climbing in which he had played a pivotal role had begun to catch on elsewhere. In addition to his Trieste group and the Milanese, there was the guide Bruno Detassis, expert amateur Ettore Castiglioni, Gino Soldà, Raffaele Carlesso, Gian Battista “Hans” Vinatzer and a dozen other Italian climbers who would inevitably turn their attention to the remaining great challenges of the Dolomites. The thought vexed Emilio, because as the glory of Emilio’s greatest climbs wore off, he came to believe that there were a finite number of truly great Dolomite routes left unclimbed, and he intended to continue to add to his legacy.
In Trieste, in the spring of 1933, he made plans to take on a climbing goal that was bigger than the Civetta, something that would renew his enthusiasm. As Emilio well knew, there was one wall in particular in the Italian mountains that towered above all the others in prestige, height and difficulty: the north face of the Cima Grande, the tallest face of the gigantic stone pillars of the Tre Cime di Lavaredo.