Alpinismo dietro le quinte

The mountain preserves stories of life, passion and sacrifice like few other environments in the world. Up there, among those austere vastnesses of ice and rock, events and deeds are preserved which express in no uncertain terms the purest essence of man and his value. They are episodes and deeds of courage, altruism, but also imprudence, which took place in peaks and valleys, and which we feel today more than ever the need to preserve the memory. To fulfill this need to remember what happened, the author of the volume, with immediate prose and historical rigor, traces profiles of mountaineers who, between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, practiced mountaineering in direct contact with the mountains and with a sensitivity capable of going beyond pure technique. Portraits emerge of men who, in the name of by fair means, used rope, ice ax and crampons as their only tools in their ascents, and who were driven by an incurable passion for the discovery and study of the mountain environment. The many stories collected - also evaluated on the basis of unpublished material - have the ability to make the reader experience the ecstasy and vertigo of the summit, but above all to demonstrate, once again, how the mountain is that severe and sometimes implacable terrain where man is forced to reveal his most authentic personality.