“Each pinnacle is a little God and the summit, Jupiter,” Emilio remarked when he first saw the vertical 200-metre faces of Olympus’s peaks, Agios Antonios (the highest mountain in Greece, at 2815 metres), Mytikas and Skolio. His client, Anna Escher, must have been amused to see Greece bring out a rarely seen scholarly side of Emilio. When it rained he blamed the god Fluvius. “Thank Phoebe, the goddess of light,” he said on the summit of Olympus, “there is enough time to get down.”159
Their guide and bodyguard was long-haired, wild-eyed Christos Kakkalos from the nearby village of Litochoro. Kakkalos carried a rifle, which doubled as an ice axe. When wild dogs closed in on the approach to their campsite on the Plain of Muses, Kakkalos chased them away with a fist and a feral growl. On the hike in, when a mule bucked off its load and ran away, Kakkalos had piled its load on his already heavy pack.
The ancient Greeks had built a small shrine on the summit of Agios Antonios. In the modern period, the sport had been slow to catch up with western Europe. In 1921, Kakkalos had guided Swiss explorers Marcel Kurz and Fritz Kuhn on the first ascent of Stefani. The steeper walls of the mountain had not even been considered.
Emilio and Escher, however, made quick work of the first ascents of the northeast ridge and northwest face of Stefani and the northwest ridge of Mytikas while Kakkalos and Escher’s friend, Dr. Gizman, watched Emilio and Escher with a telescope. After the climb, Emilio showed Kakkalos how running belays worked, with a tent pole as an anchor point.
Most of Emilio’s account of his Greek trip, however, concerns not the technical climbing on Olympus but the approach to Smólikas (2637 metres), in the Pindus range, with Escher and Gizman. Smólikas, the second-highest mountain in Greece, was in the Ioannina area, close to the Albanian border, and no one knew how to get there from Athens. A travel agent told Emilio to take a one-day bus ride to Grevena, but there was no bus, and the taxi ride took them two days. In Grevena, they hired taxis for the long drive on bad roads to Kastoria.
In Kastoria, the best hotel in town was so infested with bedbugs that they slept in their sleeping bags with the drawstrings cinched around their faces. In the morning, they paid a local with a car to drive them, partly cross-country, 70 kilometres to Samarina, a hamlet that Emilio said “in the winter would be difficult to reach, as it then lay buried under high drifts of snow, far from the inhabited cities, the haunt of wolves, in a land that knows no skiing.”160
The innkeeper of Samarina knew a little about Italy from the Italian soldiers who had crossed the mountains from Albania in the Great War to pasture their horses. Along with the local gendarme, he entreated the climbers to hire armed escorts if they travelled further, in case of brigands. Emilio declined.
Climbing Smólikas was easier than getting to Samarina. “Some of my good friends will think,” Emilio wrote, “what a delusion for Comici, after having travelled so far to reach it, he finds a climb that is not even in the first degree of difficulty!… both me and my two companions were equally amused. Even if Smólikas did not let us feel the thrill of a virgin summit, it introduced us to a unique country, barren, sad, monotonous, burnt by the sun… and yet a memory remains in my heart. A nostalgia, even. We had met strange inhabitants, renowned for their warrior and brigand spirit; we had climbed a distant mountain, without any difficulty, but with a mountaineering purpose. We did not regret the trip as lost time. And we returned, intimately pleased, bringing with us the dear memory of so many new things seen and lived.”161
***
Although Emilio had enjoyed the vacation from the Italian climbing scene, as soon as he returned from Greece, he fretted over his project to make a newsreel movie about basic climbing techniques.
Emilio’s diary has many entries for trips to the cinema where he would have noticed that German climbers dominated the screens, as they had once dominated the Dolomites. In Struggle for the Matterhorn (1928), Tyrolean climber Luis Trenker had starred as the Italian guide Jean-Antoine Carrel. Leni Riefenstahl had played a climber in half a dozen films. German climber Franz Schmid, like Emilio, had made the first ascent of the one of the great north faces, but Schmid, unlike Emilio, reprised his great climb in a movie. Gipfelstürmer (released in English as The Mountain Conqueror), was a fictionalized retelling of the story of Schmid and his brother Toni’s 1931 first ascent of the Matterhorn Nordwand. Toni, however, had died in a climbing accident on the Grosses Wiesbachhorn and was replaced by an actor whose character, out of respect, was given the name Bertl.162
Emilio might have been disappointed to note that Italian mountain filmmakers preferred war stories to alpinism. By 1934, the only Italian feature film with a climbing theme, Il gigante delle Dolomiti (Giant of the Dolomites) was seven years old.163 It was set in the Dolomites, where the heroic Italian character, Maciste (Strongman), a fixture in films with a variety of settings but similar plots, takes the part of a mountain guide and exposes an ethnically German guide named Schultz and his client-accomplice as spies.164 The film also portrayed alpinism to the public as the proper activity of strong, simple, but morally upright Catholic guides, rather than urban sports enthusiasts, a model for the guiding profession that worked against Emilio’s vision and interests.
Mussolini thought it was essential for the Italian film industry to catch up with other European nations and founded the Direzione Generale per la Cinematografia (General Directorate for Cinematography) to loan expertise and fund film projects of all sizes. Emilio, however, was skeptical about experts in Rome and believed that things worked out best when he kept them to himself and his friends. He decided to become his own scriptwriter, producer and director.
When he needed a film crew, Emilio turned to the army, an institution for which he had always nurtured a childlike trust. It was in the army, after all, and not film school, that Emilio’s idea for the film had been born.
In the early 1930s, a mountain warfare school had been founded at Castello Jocteau, near Aosta, on the Italian side of Mont-Blanc. Castello Jocteau became the headquarters of Emilio’s reserve regiment, the Ninth Alpini. The original concept of the school was that its candidates would be selected by doctors on the basis of their physical and racial suitability for high-altitude warfare. They would be armed with modern weapons, should such become available to the Italian army, and trained in both the latest mountain warfare skills and alpinism. A certain Colonel Luigi Masini knew that Emilio was a mountain guide and made him an instructor without a promotion from his present rank of corporal.
Prompted by Captain Giuseppe Inaudi, an enthusiastic climber, Colonel Masini urged Emilio to make detailed plans and a model for an artificial climbing wall to be quarried out of the granite hilltop in the park adjacent to Castello Jocteau. Emilio, with the assistance of the climber and musician Toni Ortelli, proposed a 60-metre-wide outcrop roughly the shape of the Montasio, Emilio’s favourite teaching crag in Val Rosandra. The wall would have cracks, chimneys, artificial climbing, routes of all grades, and a ledge to teach multi-pitch climbing belays. It was the first plan for a purpose-built artificial rock climbing wall intended to teach modern skills.
During the Great War, the army had developed extensive expertise blowing up rocks and excavating tunnels and fortifications, but this might have been the first instance when they used their skills to create a climbing area. Explosives and drills turned out to be inexact translators of Ortelli’s sketch based on Emilio’s ideas, but the engineers rendered something recognizably similar to Emilio’s plan and added a small amphitheatre in front so that troops could watch demonstrations.165 The instructors referred to the facility as the Rocciadromo.
The officers who had watched Emilio climbing from the comfort of the amphitheatre could imagine how his idea of making a film might be useful, popular, and even bring some attention to the regiment. After several delays and cancellations, an army cameraman finally arrived in Trieste and announced that he would be the sole crew member and that he did not climb, so he would be filming from the ground. The cameraman, Emilio and local Giorgio Pirovano headed out to Val Rosandra on two motorcycles with all of their climbing and camera equipment in rucksacks.
For the first scene, Emilio attacked an overhang on the Montasio outcrop. Less than five metres up, he dropped a piton, lost his balance as he grabbed for it and fell. The rope caught him, but the film project he had waited weeks to start was paused no sooner than it had begun. He needed the piton to complete the climb and was impatient to start filming again, so a desperate search of the unstable talus ensued.
Pirovano accidentally rolled a boulder downhill towards Emilio. There was no time to move out of harm’s way. The rock would have broken Emilio’s neck if it had not burst into pieces when it struck a boulder close to him with so much force a splinter lodged in Emilio’s leg. Emilio could tell he needed a doctor. Despite the pain, he hopped back on his motorcycle and drove straight to the hospital.
The star climber and director was out of commission, and the time waiting for the cameraman, who returned to his regiment, was wasted. Emilio convalesced in his parents’ house, where he washed the wound every day and dampened the pain with aspirin. Penicillin was not yet available for medical use, and recurrent infections kept the wound from closing.
After a few weeks, Emilio felt strong enough to do some easy climbs. The cameraman returned. Instead of documenting the latest hard rock techniques, for which Emilio’s leg remained in too much pain, they made a semi-comical piece contrasting Emilio’s efficient climbing with Pirovano’s, who hammed it up and pretended to be a terrible climber. Although they did not realize it at the time, it was the first short documentary climbing film.
***
Climbers like Riccardo Cassin in the Grignetta dressed in a sloppy mix of factory, alpine and gymnastics garb that reflected their view of the cliff as a place where normal social conventions could be ignored. Emilio and the GARS wore proper climbing trousers and a jacket or sweater vest. They dressed well to climb well, and Emilio’s climbing style, which had been compared to the flight of an angel, was much observed and emulated.166 Climbers from neighbouring routes gathered to watch Emilio climb. He showed off to the crowds by climbing problems with one hand and, on one occasion, feet-first, always while smiling and clowning, always perfectly dressed.
Young women were plentiful in the Val Rosandra scene, and Emilio’s personal style and reputation attracted their attention. Emilio preferred the women of his hometown, but he related best to the female members of the GARS.167 In the early 1930s, the strongest of them all was 18-year-old Brunetta Bernardini (nicknamed “Bruna”). Unlike Paula Wiesinger, Mary Varale and many other women who climbed grade VI, Bruna mostly lead climbed, and only rarely seconded. Her first ascent of the grade V pitch Bavarese del Fiume had caught the attention of the instructors at the climbing school. Although, due to sexism, her name was not listed in the school’s roster, she was nonetheless an instructor.168
Emilio joined up with Bruna to make the first ascent of a grade VI dihedral at the Crinale cliff. Bruna led the more strenuous second pitch. The next day, Emilio went to the cinema with her in Trieste. Usually, Emilio recorded the initials of his dates in his diary. Bruna is the first woman to warrant a surname alongside the dates of their encounters in the city.169
Bruna was more than ten years younger than Emilio, but aggressive on the rock, fit, immersed in the world of climbing and the only woman he had ever climbed with who could lead grade VI. Emilio’s relative maturity (which older women might have questioned, since he still lived with his mother), stature in climbing, good looks and his motorcycle overcame any misgivings Bruna might have had about his age. They began a romantic but, as yet, uncommitted relationship that seemed nonetheless full of promise.
A couple of months after their first ascent, Emilio went alone to the Pellarini hut in the Jôf Fuart group to await a partner. The December rain soaked him to the skin as he hiked through the dark firs. The mountains above were hidden by the clouds. The hut was abandoned and the air so damp that the fire would not light. He crawled under the wool blankets and lay awake for hours before he drifted into sleep.
A woman’s scream awoke him, but he was unsure whether he had just had a nightmare or actually heard something. He went out into the drizzle in his wet boots. The black forest was silent. Fog hid the mountain walls that were just a hundred metres away. He waited for a few minutes before he went back inside. He lit a candle, then heard two knocks at the door. He opened it, but once again, no one was there. He held his hand over the candle flame and pulled it away when he felt his palm burn. It wasn’t just a bad dream.
He looked outside again. The mist had cleared, and in the pre-dawn gloom he saw a woman climbing the rock wall above the hut. He grabbed his pack and soloed after her in his nailed boots. Her route became steeper and harder the higher she climbed. She climbed quickly and when she reached the top kept climbing into the sky until she became smaller and smaller, then disappeared.
With this, Emilio realized that he had chased after a mirage. He stopped to collect himself and decided to climb down to the talus. When he looked down, however, he saw the woman waiting for him. He climbed down carefully, more unsure than ever of whether he was in his right mind. When he reached the bottom, she was gone.170
The next day, in Trieste, Emilio learned that when he had been at the Pellarini hut, Bruna had slipped on the second pitch of their Diedro route. Her fall strained the manila rope beyond its breaking point. The rope snapped and she fell 40 metres to her death.
Emilio’s diary entry for December 8, 1932, reads: “Death of Brunetta on the dihedral. Sore throat.”171 It would be a couple of years before Emilio ever recorded any emotions in his diary that did not relate to climbing disappointments, but he did not comment on his sore throat to diminish the importance of Bruna’s death. His reticence was a symptom of a physical and psychological crisis. Emilio’s heart broke. He was treated for heart pain and congestion likely caused by inflammation due to stress exacerbated by depression. Bruna was the first woman Emilio had loved, but like his sister, Lucia, she had been stolen from him by death.
Sestogradisti were temporary, and losing rope partners was hard for Emilio. Losing a climbing partner who was also a romantic interest shattered Emilio. Whether Emilio composed the story of Bruna’s ghost retroactively to come to terms with her death, or believed that he had a supernatural experience at the Pellarini hut, her death on a climb he had created affected him in at least one way. From now on, Emilio only dated women for whom climbing was a pastime rather than an obsession. Even fighting with women about his lack of serious employment and how he preferred climbing to all else was easier than climbing with the ghost of a lover.
Sometime in 1934, either at Val Rosandra or at one of the GARS after-climbing meals with drinks at the Hotel Moccò, Emilio met Alice Marsi. Alice was a working-class Triestina. In his diary, he referred to her either as “A.” or “A.M.,” although sometimes he used the nickname la bionda, the blonde. She had strong facial features, high cheekbones, fashionably permanent-waved hair and wore trendy blouses, even when she climbed. Alice became a common sight on the pillion seat of Emilio’s motorcycle or beside him in the Hotel Moccò, where Emilio held court over the GARS in his own, self-contained manner.
Emilio and Bruna had mostly kept their relationship to themselves. Alice was the first woman whom friends described as Emilio’s serious girlfriend. Emilio nonetheless only lingered in Trieste long enough for his leg to be barely useable. In late August, as soon as he was able, he parted from Alice to resume guiding in Misurina.
Emilio’s friend Fausto Stefenelli was not surprised. He considered Alice very beautiful and assumed that this was the attraction for Emilio. But Alice wasn’t simply a Triestina of the season. Alice attracted Emilio for the same reasons she frustrated him. She was a mature woman who challenged him to be an adult.
One of many expressions of the fascist party’s fascination with male immaturity was its aesthetic praise for the lifestyle of the wanderer: “It was my wander-life,” wrote Mussolini, “now full of difficulties, toil, hardship and restlessness, that developed something in me. It was the milestone which marked my maturity.”172 The fascist measure of maturity was not the ability to build a home and a stable life but the desire to live intensely and seek out extreme experiences. It was a credo that fit the lifestyle of many semi-employed mountaineers.
Alice, however, wanted stability. And as a working-class woman who wanted to establish her own home, she needed a reliable boyfriend, worker and partner. Emilio lacked the funds and the natural inclination to settle down but thought he could overcome her resistance to his lifestyle with a dogged attempt to prove that he was, in fact, gainfully employed as a climbing guide. But when he returned to Misurina in August of 1934, clients, as always, were hard to come by. He unsuccessfully tried to get friends who sometimes doubled as clients to come to Misurina.
“I do not hide that I was a bit annoyed and even, on certain days from Aug 20–26 angry with you,” he wrote Casara, “and other people who did not come [to Misurina]. I was hurt by their absence during so many wasted days of good weather, used for nothing… you and Emmy [Hartwich-Brioschi] do nothing but chat and chat…”173
After a few days, Emilio took a break from this half-hearted attempt to find work and climbed a new grade VI on the east face of Punta Frida with Fabjan, Vittorio Cottafavi and Gianfranco Pompei.
Casara admitted, after cancelling many plans, that he was, at present, too busy with his law practice for climbing. Anna Escher had returned to her husband and children in Alexandria. Emmy’s latest husband, Otto Brioschi, was tall and athletic, but not much of a climber.
That summer, Emmy and Otto had forsaken the Alps to celebrate Shavuot in Palestine. Political unrest at home in Vienna undoubtedly played a part in Emmy and Otto’s decision to take an extended vacation. In February 1934, the Austrian government had brought in a new constitution along the lines of Mussolini’s fascist constitution. Fighting broke out in the streets, but the government crushed any opposition. The violent anti-Semitism common throughout Germany had become part of daily life in Vienna.
Emilio, however, continued to believe that Mussolini would not introduce anti-Semitic laws in Italy. He also ignored the rising anti-Semitism in the CAI, where some sections banned Jews from their huts. Emmy must have told him that her friend, and Preuss’s former climbing partner, Count Ugo di Ottolenghi di Vallepiana was banned from the alpine club because he was a Jew. Like so many less radical fascists between the world wars, until anti-Semitism affected his immediate circle, Emilio treated news of the party’s acts of violence and repression as anomalies or rumours.
On a rare visit to Misurina, Otto took a photograph of Casara, Emilio and Emmy together by a jetty afloat in the silver lake. Emilio wears climbing clothes and his guide’s badge; his smile looks a little strained. Casara also wears climbing clothes, but unlike Emilio, manages to look like a golfer. Emmy is in a fashionable cap, her face made up and her dress too close-fitting for climbing. She leans on a cane.174 Emmy, a deeply intelligent woman who spent her life brooding on the significance of the death of her famous lover, found in Emilio a man as unlikely to deny himself to the mountains as Preuss. On the altar of the mountains, men of any creed might be accepted for sacrifice, but Emilio’s mastery of the pitons that Preuss had rejected made his sacrifice seem, for now, less likely to be fatal.
***
Although Emilio blamed his lack of new routes in 1935 on the rainy weather, his output would have been limited under any conditions by his leg wound. In the year since the injury, the infection had spread to much of his calf.
In 1935, he continued to try to show Alice that climbing was a real career by taking as many guiding jobs as he could get in Misurina and combining his visits to her in Trieste with instructing in Val Rosandra. Unfortunately, his frequent commutes from the mountains to the city exposed his calf to the heat from his motorcycle’s red-hot exhaust pipe. Instead of the heavy leather boots preferred by most motorcyclists, alpinists wore only their knickers and long climbing socks. By midsummer, Emilio had added a serious burn to his wounded calf.
When Emilio’s wound became so painful that he had to favour his other leg when he climbed, he dubbed it “The Evil.” Guiding clients were impressed by his stoicism, but doctors warned him that any vigorous exercise would reopen the wound and renew the infection.
The warning came at an inopportune time for Emilio. The race to be the first to climb the overhanging 500-metre-high north face of the Cima Ovest, the last unclimbed north face of the Tre Cime, had begun. The face was steeper and more devoid of obvious cracks than the north face of the Cima Grande, but that face had opened up the eyes of climbers to the possibilities of using modern extreme piton technique on apparently blank faces. Before 1934, a few local guides had discussed the line, but unlike the Cima Grande, the wall was so overhanging that retreat was complicated enough to keep off any half-hearted parties, and no one had even tried it. In 1934, Angelo Dimai, Antonio Verzi and Selva di Gardena guide Toni Demetz tried the face, as did Carlesso, but neither attempt had gotten more than a couple of pitches up. A successful ascent would have been a master stroke by any party.
Despite his injured leg, Emilio was incapable of staying out of the contest. His first ascents on the Cima Piccola and Cima Grande gave him an almost proprietorial sense of his right to the last north face of the group, despite his usual habit of renouncing contested projects. He had procrastinated before attempting the wall in the belief that the obvious difficulties would keep off most competitors. An aggressive, younger generation of climbers was about to show him that he had miscalculated.
On August 12, Hans Hintermeier and Josef “Sepp” Meindl cycled 300 kilometres from Munich to the Dolomites, loaded down with all of their camping and climbing equipment. With no money to stay in huts, they set up their tent against the base of the Cima Ovest.
In their first week on the wall, the Germans managed to climb only a few pitches before they retreated, leaving two fixed ropes on the most overhanging pitches. Another attempt ended with a frightening bivouac hanging in slings during an electrical storm. They rappelled to their tent in the morning to recover and wait for better weather.
News of German youngsters on the last great problem of the Tre Cime travelled quickly through the network of guides, amateurs and hut custodians to Misurina. Emilio could not nurse his leg and play the part of Alice’s responsible working man for another moment, as German interlopers tried to snatch the last great prize in the Tre Cime away from Italian climbers and, of course, Emilio himself. He convinced his Spigolo Giallo comrades of 1933, Mary Varale and Renato Zanutti, to make an attempt with him.
Varale told Cassin and her Grignetta comrades about the German attempt on the Cima Ovest before she left to join Emilio in Misurina. A few days later, she and Emilio and Zanutti threw themselves at the wall with as much vigour as they could muster, given that they had rushed into action behind an injured leader. After a few pitches, the trio reached a point where the route struck leftwards on 150 metres of rock that consistently exceeded the vertical. From here, each pitch pushed Emilio to the limit of his ability. When aid climbing, the second did not climb the rope with the as-yet-uninvented mechanical ascenders or even the prusik slings that were reserved for emergencies. The second climbed on the same pitons as the leader and hammered out most of the pitons. Often, on traverses, second climbers took even greater risks than the leader, and on the Cima Ovest, there were several.
Varale wasn’t as versed in aid climbing as Emilio and Zanutti and began to struggle with fatigue. Emilio realized that climbing with the Dimais had been tense and competitive but more efficient than climbing with amateurs. Rain and mist enveloped the face before they reached the 17-metre overhang that appeared from below to be the crux of the whole route. If Emilio and Zanutti had been alone, they might have continued. The overhanging aid climbing offered some shelter from precipitation. If they went higher, however, retreat would have become increasingly challenging. They turned back, and Emilio never roped up with Varale again.
Desperate to make another attempt, Emilio forsook his dignity and telephoned the Dimais in Cortina to ask them to overcome past resentments and help him stop the Germans from snatching the north wall of the Cima Ovest. The Cortinesi, however, had considered the Cima Ovest already and decided it was not worth the effort. Whether Germans or an outsider like Emilio climbed it, it simply wasn’t their affair. They stuck to their own climbs and guiding appointments.
After the Dimais turned him down, Emilio asked Renato Zanutti, who had returned to Trieste, to make another attempt with him. Zanutti knew that a tough and ambitious German party was on the wall already and that Emilio was injured and not climbing well. He also knew that the climb was the hardest long rock climb yet attempted, anywhere in the world. He agreed, nonetheless, to drop everything and rush back to Misurina, although this time he brought with him a third climber, Marcello Del Pianto. Although Emilio remained the director of the Val Rosandra rock school, he only taught courses occasionally and no longer knew the abilities or even the names of the young climbers in Val Rosandra. Del Pianto was inexperienced on long routes and a poor choice for such a serious climb, but it turned out not to matter. The three made their attempt in weather so atrocious that the Germans stayed in their tent. The pain in Emilio’s leg was too much for him, and they retreated after climbing just 12 metres past his previous high-point.
Determined and patient rivals, bad weather, injury and the need to make money took Emilio out of the running for the last great challenge of the Tre Cime. He followed the rest of the summer’s events on the Cima Ovest with increasing bitterness, not against the other climbers but at his own loss.
In the third week of August, the weather broke long enough for the Germans to try again, but they only pushed the route a few more metres before another cycle of rappelling and waiting.
The patience of Hintermeier and Meindl was soon to be challenged by the impetuosity of Riccardo Cassin and Vittorio Ratti from the Grignetta, whom Emilio had taught his advanced aid techniques. They had heard that Germans were camping out below the north face of the Cima Ovest with the intention of stealing the route from Italian climbers.175 With Mino Rossi, who would help carry their gear to the mountain, Cassin and Ratti took the train to Cortina and arrived at the Lavaredo hut on August 27. On the morning of August 28, the mountains were hidden by clouds and rain. They made their way to the face unseen through the fog, deliberately avoided the Croda hut and whispered on the final stretch to the wall, so as not to alert the Germans. Emilio’s attempts had come to an end and the weather remained poor, so the Germans expected no more competitors and had taken the day to rest in their tent.
As Cassin and Ratti neared the top of the first pitch, the mist thinned enough to reveal the Germans peering out of their tent, trying to figure out where the noises outside were coming from. They decided that no one could be climbing on such a wet day and went back inside their tent. Cassin and Ratti rappelled the first pitch, left a rope in place, stowed their equipment and returned to the Lavaredo hut for the night. The next morning, the weather was just as bad, but Cassin and Ratti climbed four pitches, thanks partly to the pitons left behind by Emilio and the Germans, before their competitors figured out that they had been outmanoeuvred. The Germans attempted to pass them by a new variation, but they realized it was futile and rappelled.
Cassin later claimed that “the difficulties up to Comici’s high-point were nothing compared to those above.”176 The 40-metre pitch after Emilio’s high-point took Cassin seven hours and three falls to complete. The cracks were so poor that it took Cassin four hours to figure out how to place a piton on the hardest section of the pitch.
After two more bivouacs in the rain, Cassin and Ratti made the summit. Rossi befriended the Germans, and all three climbed the Innerkofler Route to congratulate the winners of the race for the north face of the Cima Ovest. Emilio stayed home in Misurina, undoubtedly disappointed by his loss. Back in Lecco, Cassin, Ratti and Rossi were greeted with fascist honours and a military parade, in which they participated with enthusiasm if not much ideological conviction. The honours Emilio craved once more went to others, who in this case were more indifferent to such attention than Emilio himself.
***
In mid-September 1935, Emilio was guiding Anna and her son Cyril on Triglav in Yugoslavia when he heard rockfall directly overhead. He looked up to see a boulder flying towards Cyril and threw himself between the boy and the rock before it smashed into his ribs and his hip. If it had hit the boy straight-on, Emilio recalled, “he would have been crushed like a peanut.”177
Emilio finished the climb with the Eschers, but Anna feared that he had suffered internal damage and insisted that he check in to the hospital in Ljubljana. Although the only damage from the rock was a minor bowel and kidney displacement that would correct itself with time, the doctor told Emilio that his infected leg required an immediate operation or he might eventually lose it altogether.
Emilio agreed to the operation. Afterwards, he took the doctor’s advice and rested his leg until he had to report to the army mountain school in Castello Jocteau for his longest period of active duty since his compulsory service in 1925.
By 1935, the plan to modernize the alpini had faltered on the old-fashioned traditions and regionalism of the Italian army. Mussolini later bragged about the warplanes and tanks he sent to the Spanish Nationalists, but for the Italian army at home, weapons and equipment were old and even boots were in short supply.
Conscripted urban proletarians and alpine peasants made up the ranks of the Ninth Alpini. The officer class was not a classless hierarchy based on fascist values of merit and strength alone, but a club for poorly trained, conservative, Catholic, Piedmontese aristocrats. The officers’ impression of Emilio illustrates the sophisticated but unmartial atmosphere among the regimental elite. Captain Giuseppe Inaudi reported that Emilio’s “didactic sense, culture and sensitivity made him welcome among the officers.”178 Presumably, Emilio’s lowly upbringing and lack of education were obstacles to his promotion by the same officers who found him so sensitive. He remained as he had begun ten years before, a reserve corporal.
The regiment treated Emilio more like a visiting sports star than a recruit. Colonel Masini, for whom Emilio had designed the palestra, indulged his need to take days off from his military training to climb. Despite Emilio’s humble rank, a young Lieutenant Gracco had Emilio removed from his normal duties as a junior non-commissioned officer in a foot platoon and made him a climbing and mountain travel instructor.
At first, Emilio planned to address the deficiencies in the army’s alpine skills. He gave the troops courses in rock climbing and other skills, much like those the Triestino civilians had enjoyed at Val Rosandra. Army photographers captured Emilio, bare-chested and grinning, posing with a climbing rope while the other soldiers (all fully dressed) stood at ease. When photographed in uniform, or with a rifle, Emilio was joking with his comrades or taking a siesta on a march. In these images, life in the alpini looked more like a mountain holiday than boot camp. Whether or not this was a cynical propaganda scheme to attract recruits, the officers, at least, genuinely enjoyed the training in alpinism afforded by their regiment.
Emilio’s commanders decided that Emilio’s skills were too good to waste on the recruits, and Emilio’s role shifted to that of a mountain guide paid in corporal’s wages for officers who booked him for “courses” that were little more than guided climbing holidays.
***
In mid-October of 1935, Emilio was invited to join the retinue of fascists from Trieste and attend the October 27 anniversary of the March on Rome. His officers had no choice but to generously issue him the required furlough with fulsome expressions of enthusiasm. In any case, it was too cold for Emilio to take them climbing, and ski season had not yet begun.
The anniversary festivities included a parade in which Emilio marched with other Italian athletes. The parade ended in the Piazza Venezia, beside the massive Altare della Patria and tomb of the unknown soldier. Every year, Mussolini himself gave a speech to the crowd from a balcony overlooking the square. “The whole crowd seems to vibrate with one soul to express with one outburst of passion its faith, its devotion, its admiration for Mussolini,” reported the newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia. When Mussolini appeared, the crowd expressed “its truest and most ardent sentiments of enthusiasm of the most incomparable force… Mussolini began his speech with the proclamation ‘I am your leader!’”179
Among the throng’s thousands of young men in blackshirt, breeches and boots was Emilio, who, since he had been a boy, had wandered off to lonely places and avoided crowds. A predictable response to seeing his leader would have been a redoubling of the fascist rhetoric in his writing and climbing dedications, enthusiastic accounts of the event and renewed expressions of political fervour in his correspondence. Instead, after seeing Il Duce in person and hearing him speak, Emilio never mentioned the event in his letters and never dedicated another climb to Mussolini again.