I must have been more or less between 8 and 10 years when a small still with the boy shorts, in the magazine rack, wooden living room of my house, I found a magazine in black and white and color that had perhaps (forse!) just the cover, whose title was "TIME".
I remember the pages with the corners a bit 'curled, the "ears" he called my dad, and I remember very vaguely, I saw a name written on a service within that review: W. Bonatti.
I was a kid, I knew nothing of mountains, except what little I saw in the summer when, with my parents, I walked the paths of the Dolomites, gray and sharp-edged ridges, but that neither felt the beautiful sunset pink that would cause so many emotions years later, in my heart.
When about twenty years later walked down stairs, some climbs that I was to approach the name of Bonatti had become a myth, but the past, now in the history of mountaineering, and almost unattainable, which I had read anything, even young ignorant, tense as I was climbing myself, without investigating the reason of many ways that covers ...
Then, a year ago, right in the twenty-first century, now that man in mature age, a gionro I was in line to wait my turn to pay a bank account in a post office, as well as those where that the operations of mail today, you also do the shopping ... (Modern conquest progress!) and gaze fell on a white volume of which struck me the title, but the author: W. Bonatti. It was offered at the discounted price, but what matters is that it was written by Bonatti that now that forty years ago, wrote in the magazine with the "ears" at the corners of your pages. And then a flash in the living room of my parents, the chair and the magazine and those photos ... and I leafed through the book, inside of me decided that I would have bought it, whatever the cost.
As with the books that I feel are worth, I have not read in one go, but I sipped, as I always like a nice bottle of port. And I have not regretted it.
does not tell the climbing, this time, but that Bonatti's career has taken a turn put the boots to the nail, when, in 1964, to quote his own words: "meanness and misunderstandings more profuse in the world of mountains, had come to make me finally get out of that environment, "beginning the following year left for the profession of Epoch. (In 1965 I was 9 years and so my memories were not totally wrong ...)
In this book the mountaineer-turned-explorer, collects some of his writings produced between 1964 note, and 1976, in which travel stories always undertaken with the spirit of sports with intent not discover, or to taste heroic enterprise, but to go to understand, descending in places and among the people of those places that looked, what was in the same places, living thing and held the living areas was gradually crossing, most often on foot and alone , almost always without risk of weapons while guess some tiger or some bear.
We go from cold Siberia to Africa desert, from Antarctica to Easter Island, crossing deserts and endless places, leaving the reader to sognre, as when, guys, you read books of adventure, except that here talk about real adventures and experienced.
What emerges, in my opinion, is a man that respects the place where everything goes to pass, that seeks to understand rather than attack it and tame it, what is striking is the feeling of admiration and wonder at natural phenomena, to even imagine the things most of us, but above all by the genuine curiosity to learn, as Man, Serber then things in her heart and whose pictures or words, now will bring, if not fleeting glimpses that will affect whether or not the imagination e.. the heart of the reader, with the heart.
lucky man and I guess you could say is the truth, although willing to trade security and certainty of a living "normal" with the uncertainty of a work that could also bring him to end his days, a sudden .
When closing the book (in 2009), Walter Bonatti has almost 80 years and what strikes me is the kind of thoughts and sincere respect and intrinsic and not merely formal, that I feel in him, to the environment in we live in, to the whole earth, the discovery of how the man himself is the cause of his illness, which is slowly eroding the land on which they live and from which it draws life. Do not complain, not the usual howls of a dog beaten and old that many elderly people do, but merely a light exposing facts, reality, before the eyes of someone who wants to see, who reads and wants to understand.
closing its pages, a soft smile remains in my heart the memory of a sentence that is given to him during the journey to find the headwaters of the Amazon, when an Indian, whose simple life of poverty and took place between those mountains of the Cordillera Chila where Bonatti with a friend, was to explore, accommodates tired and hungry, in his poor hut and offers them a simple soup that has food for himself and his family, sharing with them, which occurred there all'iimprovviso: "I greet you and ask you to serve as a brother, sure to have your help in need! "
This spirit, simple, sincere, straightforward and without frills, I still really like a treasure in a corner of the heart, as taught by an Indian unknown to me as a man of twenty-first century, immersed in globalization.
of this seemingly trivial and silly "teaching" to me for anything valuable and trivial, I say thanks to this man from another era!
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