How Mountaineering Helped Shape Italy

Somewhere above my head, my sister-in-law Olya began muttering to herself. “It’s OK Shanti, don’t be scared” she repeated – a mantra to keep herself calm more than anything. Concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, it was all I could do to stop myself uttering a prayer of my own. Vertical descents like this are not uncommon among the jagged peaks of the Dolomiti di Brenta.

The westernmost of the nine mountain groups which make up the Dolomites UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Brenta range, in the province of Trentino, is famous for its dramatic pinnacles of red rock. These rise sharply from green alpine meadows, like the spires of a Gothic cathedral.

On top of this, the Brenta Dolomites are criss-crossed by wellsignposted trails, and dotted with rifugi (“mountain refuges”). These offer weary walkers a bed in a bunk room and – this being Italy – a tasty three-course dinner. This infrastructure, including the paths, ferrate, and most of the rifugi are maintained by the Society of Trentino Alpinists (SAT). Navigating around their network is so easy that many people, including our group, opt to trek here without a guide.

Like climbers everywhere, SAT’s founders were motivated by the spirit of exploration – the idea of becoming the first to reach certain peaks, or complete specific routes. But these men (and they were almost all men) were also driven by more than just a desire for personal glory. They believed they were serving a greater purpose – one that linked climbing mountains to the future of Italy itself.

Furthermore, although the people who lived here spoke Italian, the idea of mountaineering – climbing for fun – would have been a completely alien concept to most of them. Above 2,000m in the Dolomites, the trees disappear and the grass becomes sparse and unsuitable for grazing. For the shepherds eking out a hardscrabble existence on these slopes, the idea of deliberately venturing higher, into the dangerous world of snow, ice, and rock would have sounded like madness. Their lives were hard enough.

It was, perhaps surprisingly, Brits who bagged the first big peaks of the Brenta. Mountaineering had caught on among the English upper classes in the first half of the 19th century. Viewed not just as a sport, but as a test of will, the new discipline was championed by the romantic poets, and in a frenzied decade of activity between 1854 and 1865, English amateurs would go on to make first ascents of many of the most famous peaks in the Alps.

In 1871, two bewhiskered Victorian gentlemen, Douglas Freshfield and Francis Fox Tuckett, arrived to explore what Freshfield (in his 1875 book Italian Alps) called “the fantastic rock ridges and mighty towers of the Brenta”. They were accompanied by a French guide, Henri Devouassoud (responsible for the comparison between these peaks and parliament), and in August, the three summited the range’s highest point, Cima Brenta. As news of their exploits spread, upper class locals realised they were being squeezed out of their own backyard.

Like alpine clubs everywhere, SAT set out to build mountain refuges, mark out paths through the Brenta, and organise expeditions to their peaks. Unlike other alpine clubs, they did so with the explicit aim of making sure the culture of these mountains was Italian, not Austrian. They funded expeditions to the summits, paid for scientific publications, and sponsored the training of guides. But the flag they planted on peaks was the banned Italian tricolour, the books they published were in Italian, and the guides they trained spoke the local language, not German.

This might not sound controversial today, but in the politically charged climate of Austrian-ruled Trentino, it was seen as deeply subversive. In 1876, four years after it was founded, SAT was shut down by the authorities (only to re-emerge the following year, with its current, slightly tweaked name). As its campaigns continued, SAT came into direct competition with the Österreichischer Alpenverein (the Austrian Alpine Club) and their German counterparts, the Deutsche Alpenverein, or DAV, who were busily constructing refuges, and laying out trails of their own. Competition between the clubs was fierce. Rival expeditions would snake past each other at night in order to claim a particular face or route first. Mountain safety in the 1870s and 80s was basic, at best. Falls were common, and death was never far away.

Two days later, we spent our final night in an Austrian-built hut which sits 20 metres up the slope from SAT’s very first refuge, Rifugio Tosa, built in 1881. This literal one-upmanship might seem laughable in today’s Europe, but at the time, it was deadly serious. In their first meeting, SAT adopted the poem Excelsior! as their motto. Written by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, it tells the story of a doomed young mountaineer who ignores all advice to carry on climbing and plants his flag on top of a mountain, dying in the attempt.

While the competitive environment between German and Italian-speaking mountaineers spurred the exploration of the Brenta and other peaks in Trentino, it also contributed to the patriotic fervour which led to the tragedy of the First World War. Many of the earliest members of SAT joined up to fight on the Italian side – among them Cesare Battisti and Fabio Filzi, both hanged for treason by the Austrians in 1916. Another SAT member martyred for the cause was Damiano Chiesa, executed by firing squad a few days short of his 22nd birthday. Like Battisti and Filzi, he now has streets and piazzas named after him throughout Italy.

On the trail, we met people from all over Europe. From the Dutch couple scaling the misty via ferrata as we climbed down, to the Czech crew who’d summited several of the highest peaks, to the countless German and Austrian families who’d hopped across the border to experience the mountains Italian style. The idea that this range was once contested, or that these cultures clashed bitterly, was scarcely believable. If you looked hard enough, inside the side-by-side rifugi, you could find small plaques commemorating the modern friendship between the German DAV and the SAT. But otherwise, there was no sign of the fierce rivalry which drove the exploration of these mountains. The pioneers’ legacy remained, however – in trails open to all, via ferrate that secured everyone’s safety, and huts that welcomed hikers from around the world.

150 years on, the only thing left for us modern mountaineers to conquer was our vertigo.