Edited by:
Massimo Martini
Date: 20/10/2005
Perhaps few people outside the small circle of mountain enthusiasts know that one of the protagonists of the first Italian ascent of the Matterhorn was Abbot Amé Gorret. Even fewer, probably, remember the talented mountaineer Achille Ratti, who later went down in history as Pope Pius XI.
Perhaps few people outside the small circle of mountain enthusiasts know that one of the protagonists of the first Italian ascent of the Matterhorn was Abbot Amé Gorret. Even fewer, probably, remember the talented mountaineer Achille Ratti, who went down in history as Pope Pius XI.
Alongside their names, history passes on those of several other churchmen who crossed paths with the evolution of mountaineering, sometimes as simple enthusiasts, in other cases as protagonists in the international elite of climbers.
To these extraordinary figures is dedicated the evening that the Cai di Merate, with the patronage of the municipal administration, will propose on Friday 21 October at 9 p.m. at the Sala civica in Viale Lombardia. The meeting takes its cue from the book by Andrea Zannini (historian, writer and mountaineer) entitled 'Tonache e piccozze', recently published by Cda&Vivalda editions.
It will be the author himself, in the company of Serafino Ripamonti, journalist and mountain enthusiast, who will recount some of these fascinating events, focusing in particular on the period between the first ascent of Mont Blanc (1786) and the conquest of the Matterhorn (1865).
Priests and religious figures such as Georges Carrel, Don Giovanni Gnifetti - the first ascent of the peak of the same name on Monte Rosa - or the aforementioned Amé Gorret played an important role in this 'infancy' of mountaineering. They were men of the mountains who had a higher education and created that synthesis between romantic sensibility and rational curiosity that contributed to laying the sporting and psychological foundations of early mountaineering.
The meeting will be introduced by a film contribution made by the Cai Merate, which will also focus on characters geographically closer to us and who have become part of the myth of local mountaineers, such as Don Giuseppe Buzzetti from Chiavenna, a solitary explorer of the Masino-Bregaglia mountains, who mysteriously disappeared among the peaks on 14 July 1934.