Magic Mountains

In 2019, while visiting the third-highest mountain hut in Europe at 2,803m, I noticed a young woman taking a picture of Mont Blanc with her phone. Blond ponytail, orange bandana, she was clad in a pink shirt with a quote on the back that stuck with me: “To struggle up a mountain is poetry to me,” a phrase attributed to the late Italian bicycle champion Marco Pantani.

In those days, I was staying at the Boccalatte Hut— reachable either by helicopter or with a challenging trek—to produce a documentary on the global glaciers’ crisis. The hut is ensconced in the heart of a towering rock jutting out of one of the glaciers most compromised by global warming. Moun­tains change, they are not as unalterable as they might appear. They age, just like us. They melt, they crumble. They gradually roll into the night or in plain daylight for all to see and hear.

I was visiting an old friend and climbing partner, the mountain explorer Franco Perlotto who managed the hut after a lifetime as a pioneer of modern alpinism. He was in poor health, he confessed: “Up here, I feel fine. As soon as I descend to the plains, I can’t cope.” Although still sturdy and muscular, he eventually had to leave the hut, as his body could no longer stand the challenges of such rough conditions, as Franco’s heart, back, and bones deteriorated. One evening, while looking at the glacier, he shared his concerns about the melting ice mass. The glacier, like Franco, was creaking, groaning, collapsing.

In the summer of 2024, I returned to that same valley, lodging in a cabin in Mayenchet, a hamlet with a view of the Boccalatte and the Grandes Jorasses glaciers. I often looked at the hut from the wooden balcony, remembering the nights spent on that rock years before. The Planpincieux glacier had significantly shrunk. There was tension among glaciologists who warned that in the summer 500,000 cubic metres of ice could detach and crumble into the valley at any moment.

The trail leading to the Boccalatte was shut. I waited hope­lessly for it to reopen so I could hike up and compare current conditions with those of 2019. Since then, the world has been sidetracked by a global pandemic and two major wars which have been felt as a more immediate threat than climate change. Public opinion has been gripped by a global health crisis, the violation of borders, new killings, and constant bombings overcrowding emergency rooms.

Just as true improvements are irreversibly slow, deterioration is also difficult to perceive emotionally, since its narrative unfolds over decades, not in moments, while scrolling a timeline, or in days or weeks. The process of people becoming more polite, more respectful of the rule of law, or more harmonious, can be documented through generations, rarely in a lifetime. Similarly, the disappearances of forests, the depletion of natural resources, the slow drifting towards brutality can escape notice within one’s life. Deep changes, for better or for worse, can elude human perception because they happen on a cyclopean timescale.

That is why returning to the alpine banks of the Dora of Ferret creek, lulled by its bright turquoise waters, has been important to me, as I listened to the bubbling whispers of this stream nour­ished by glaciers, while attempting to decipher what it wanted to tell me. Was it alarms or reassurances? What message did the Dora’s whirls bring from the mountains about resplendent worlds now crumbling under growing temperatures, tropical tornadoes, piercing hailstorms and wild tempests?

I tried to discern what the murmur of these waters—essen­tial for life yet capable of killing—was hiding. But the mistake we often make with the mountain and with nature is precisely what I was doing right then—anthropomorphising, associat­ing my emotions with an inanimate object.

Loving the idea of mountains too much, just like the open seas, or nature in general, could lead to death in the arms of the elements, which, again, have no real arms. By thinking that it is a great mother, a great father, by romantically uniting with nature, one can fall into the trap set by our own error of judge­ment. Yet we cannot help it. We need it. As it may also be an imaginative mechanism that brings us back in synchronicity with the rules and surprises of nature.

When I moved far from the mountains under whose shadows I grew up, I missed them so much that I turned to watercolour painting to heal my nostal­gia. In those days, living in North Florida’s tropical weather, the theme I returned to most often in my mind was the profile of the Little Dolomite peaks above my home in the Agno Valley of Northern Italy. I outlined their profile with a pencil, dabbed the patches of snow with a brush, designed their shapes, replicated their colours dipping into the palette… all rather crudely, of course, not being even close to a decent painter.

Recreating those mountains in colour, as if conjuring up the face of a loved one, was my way of consolidating the idea of Homeland. Or rather, of Heimat, as the German word works better, here, since it proposes itself as the antonym of aliena­tion. German was the language spoken in those mountains for much longer than Italian. German was the idiom of my ancestors here, since borders have moved back and forth in these parts over the centuries.

As a teenager living away from home, I missed my friends, family, and the valley, but most of all, I missed the emotions felt while climbing and hiking in those mountains. When I ascend­ed alone Mount Cornetto (Hornberg, or “horn mountain” in German), or climbed with friends on Mount Baffelan (Wölfeland, “land of wolves”), or trekked with my brother up to Carega Peak (Karegge, or “rocky peaks”), I imagined the history embedded in those ravines, crests, paths and tunnels dug into the rocks, again infusing meaning into an impersonal nature.

I imagined young Austrian soldiers on Mount Pasubio kill­ing 5,000 Italians in the senseless World War I. I thought I heard the echoes of both my mother’s and father’s uncles rock-climb­ing those walls in the 1930s with hammers, nails and ropes. I picture my grandfather Elicio, a partisan fighter, battling fascists and confiscating a Luger pistol from a Nazi officer in an ambush in the Dolomites during World War II. I evoked the days in which I walked these trails holding the hand of my first true love. This layered history made those places important not just for their natural charm, but for the stories connected to my own bloodline and memory.

To me, those peaks and slopes still evoke the deepest sense of homeland, of belonging, of connection. Yet I find that feeling everywhere. While trekking up the Huichol’ s sacred mountain of El Quemado in the Mexican desert, I saw images of my child­hood dreams. Up there in the Ecuadorian Andes, in the Rockies of Colorado, in the Sapa mountains of Vietnam, or on Mount Kenya, I felt at home. While on the slopes of Gulmarg, in Kash­mir, in Gangtok, in Kalimpong, Shimla or Mashobra, in the high valley of Zanskar, in Ladakh, or trekking in Dharamshala, in Himachal Pradesh, or strolling in the Meghalaya rain, I constant­ly found landscapes that brought me back to the Heimat, even if those peaks are often different from the Alps or Dolomites.

The same Alps of the Grandes Jorasses, hosting imposing glaciers nestled in granite rock, are unlike the steep limestone slabs, the jagged peaks of the long walls of the Dolomites of my youth. Yet, they all give me a sense of belonging to the same mountainous world. Perhaps precisely because they are just a vertical mirror—no matter what form those mountains take, I confront myself with that feeling, regardless of where the mountains evoking them are located on the globe.

The mountains nourishing the Dora di Ferret—the same glacier that claimed the lives of several climbers while I was staying in that valley—are rocks that inspire thoughts like these, that seduce and give a sense of the sacred, the supernatu­ral, the celestial—natural ladders leading to something beyond their peaks.

Yet again, all these things exist only in our imagination. Mountains are neutral, acting as a canvas on which we draw our stories. Mountains are the rocky pages upon which we inscribe our tales. We embrace them with our emotions, we cloak them with our intentions.

Since childhood, I have filled those pointed peaks with meaning—imagining witches flying, heroes rock climbing and dreaming of soaring among the canyons myself. To me, it has always been about the possibility of seeing something inexplicable, indescribable, a sensation of a force more powerful than us. Unlike a manmade skyscraper that crushes the spirit, the magnitude of the mountain makes me feel connected. It is a vertical bridge that brings me closer to the clouds. It is the way we commune with nature.

When I rock climbed, I had to probe the crags and crevices of the rock walls with my fingertips, searching for a pocket-hole, a crack, a sliver of space where I could hook my digits and place the tip of my feet in order to lift myself up the vertical trail, secured in harness tied to a rope.

These acrobatic poses would sometimes force my sweaty cheek to cling to the rock, chest pressed against the wall, legs frog-opened and glued to the surface. The nostrils grasped the olfactory mark, granite’s being different from limestone’s. When it rains you can smell the petrichor, which unsurprisingly geolo­gists named from petros, rock, and ichor, the blood of the gods.

It was almost sensual. A slow dance, a strong embrace, as I melted with the warm, dry limestone, searching for a way up. I remember thinking that the rock felt like a being, a pachyderm, a still motherly giantess who did not mind my respectful ascent upon her torso.

On the summit of Mount Cornetto, engulfed in hypnotic billows, even though I believe I am rational, I have often slipped into a mystical ecstasy, the sensation I was united to everything, something beyond the clouds, ethereal, sidereal even, a cosmic wholesomeness that I could not bring myself to call God… yet I felt I could blend into something usually associated with the Divine. This feeling made me sigh with joy, weeping with an unexplainable happiness which perhaps was nothing but my blood working hard to carry more oxygen to the brain, in the thin air at 2000m.

Or perhaps the mountain does gift us with the rediscovery of dreams, stories, and magic—the deities of the Olympus, the gods of sacred peaks, symbols of a super-human power, a reac­tion that has accompanied humanity for millennia. To catch that gift, you must take the time to stop and listen to what the mountain, in your imagination, could be telling you.

This summer, I also ventured up one of the highest Catholic monasteries in the alps, the Hospice of the Great Saint Bernard, founded in 1045 at 2,437m right on the Swiss-Italian border. It has also a quaint refuge for the burly and cuddly mountain-res­cue Saint Bernard dogs. As Saint Bernard is the patron saint of mountaineers, I listened attentively to a sermon in French by the insightful oblate Anne-Marie Maillard, who later lamented to me how impatient and athletic “sky runners” rarely cared to investigate the sacred aspect of the hospice.

“When you’re hiking you can see the top of the mountain, so you know where you need to go. But you don’t know how to get there. That’s life. There are moments when you think you no longer have handholds. You must go beyond the uncertainty. Create your own path. Sometimes you see it in front of you, sometimes you look behind, and sometimes around your feet you see the immediate path. You choose where to look. Only you can push yourself to get to the top. The mountain teaches us to wait before reaching the summit—the mountain is the path.”

One of the two thousand monks who live on Mount Athos in Greece, Father Galaktion, describes the climb up to his monastery: “The human soul cleanses itself through the effort of climbing. The summit of Mount Athos holds a strong spiritual power from the many ascetics and saints who have made their experiences here, and who have transferred them to Athos over the course of one thousand years. Humans have always felt the urge to climb to the top of mountains. When you reach the top, you’re achieving a higher goal.”

The Lakota believe rock is Earth’s oldest living being, existing before the world’s creation, and that mountains made of rock will last forever, beyond the transient nature of human constructions.

Even if it were so, nature, the mountain, the sea… they are all neutral. They have nothing against us. Nothing in favour either, for that matter. They do not react to us, even if they are damaged by our actions. We are superfluous, small, infinitesimal. It would only take a mild shrug of the Earth to eliminate us forever. If we remembered this, we might regain our innate sense of nature’s sacredness, embodied by mountains and seas. We might reawaken the urgent respect we struggle so much to find.

Throughout history, works of literature, scientific studies and philosophical thought have attempted to decode nature’s messages. In 1336, Tuscanian poet Petrarch ascended with his brother the slopes of Mont Ventoux in France. Once on the sum­mit, he became aware of the vanity surrounding his previous 10 years and resolved to change course. Up there he felt “closer to God”. He opened randomly the Confessions of St. Augustine: “And men go and admire the height of mountains and the vast waves of the sea and the wide beds of rivers and the immensity of the oceans and the path of the stars, while neglecting themselves.” The mountains are mirrors bringing us back to constructive and deeply insightful self-contemplation.

When, in the mid-1700s, Voltaire ascended the Grutli in Swit­zerland (a peak later immortalised in Friedrich Schiller’s William Tell) he was also overcome by the experience. From the “cruel God” of his early treatises, he began to contemplate the idea of a Supreme Being, as the deist he was. He dropped to his knees: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”

In 1780, Goethe found himself in a gamekeeper’s lodge on the Kickelhahn mountains, in Germany, contemplating the quite hills and treetops, hearing hardly a breath. Even the birds were asleep, as Goethe warned himself: “Wait, wanderer, soon like these thou too shall rest.” The mountain teaches the observer how to prepare for the cycles of nature, the final rest. ‘Über allen Gipfeln’, or ‘Over the Hilltops’, became a heart-wrenching classi­cal German folksong thanks to Franz Schubert’s music.

Western literature has often contemplated summits as a different viewpoint, as in Thomas Mann’s 1924 The Magic Mountain, providing the main character, Hans Castorp, with a panoramic view of pre-war European discontents. Influenced by Freud and Nietzsche, Mann alludes to the irrational forces within the human psyche, reverberating in the rarefied air of a high-altitude sanatorium.

Our awe facing such grandeur has contributed to the moun­tain’s sacrality, a natural temple of the gods—from Mount Olympus of ancient Greek mythology to the Holy Kailash in the Himalayas; from the Kilimanjaro worshipped by the Chag­ga, Maasai and Kikuyu in Tanzania and Kenya, to the Tacoma, a spiritual beacon for the Puyallup, Nisqually, Yakama and Muckleshoot tribes in the Pacific Northwest of North America. But also, the Gebel Musa, or Mount Sinai, and Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, revered by Judaism, Islam and Christianity. The Calvary itself is an eternal symbol of suffering for Abrahamitic religions, a hill adorned with sacrificial crosses.

Those giant natural pyramids, those walls, and woods, and snowcapped towers have always been a magnet for the divine, an element making us think about something “other”, everywhere in the world, without any cultural divide. A place where the Divine speaks to humans. Rationalists may dismiss it as supersti­tion, yet this reverence recurs incessantly throughout history.

As Goethe reminds us, mountains can help us accept the idea of eternal rest. Mountains can also literally bring death upon us. But they also channel snow into water. Which is life. And they can make us feel more alive with their views and whispers.

In my hut in the Ferret valley, I watched high winds blow snow off the top of Mont Blanc’s peaks, as if the white powder wanted to kiss the sky, impregnating the clouds with vapour morphing into clouds. Water is our life, as 60 per cent of our body is made of it. This is why it is easy to personify the mountain as a supreme being that helps us understand who we really are.

Yet, it is we who measure ourselves against the mountain’s sea, two neutral axes on which our humanity is measured, like an existential pie chart, two intersecting mirrors on which we can judge our behaviours, in our relentless quest for meaning.

As the sun set behind Mont Blanc’s spires and I gazed at the glacier dusted by Planpincieux’s landslides, I realised this vertical axis reflects a monumental human failure to which we all contribute.

Mountains are neutral, yet often they become politicised. Many use them as natural borders—theatres of wars, smuggling, ambushes, shootings. But culturally, mountains do not divide the people living on their sides—they unite them everywhere, in the heart of Europe, of Asia, Africa, Australia, New Zealand and of the Americas alike, just like those holy mountains everywhere attract the worship of different tribes and peoples across borders.

Tibetans provide clear evidence of this, relating, in their forced exile, to the mountains on both sides of the Himalayas— in Lhasa as much as in Dharamshala, in Leh as much as in Zan­skar. The Swiss, French, Germans, Austrians, Slovenians and Italians seem to be split along linguistic lines, and they have at times bombed each other to smithereens in the Alps and Dolo­mites. And yet they share an evident point of reference which has similar influxes on them on all sides of the peaks.

This is why an Austrian author like Thomas Bernhard might be better appreciated, in translation, by readers in the Italian Alpine regions of Trentino Alto-Adige, Veneto, or Friu­li-Venezia Giulia than by a northern German, who may relate more to a geographically closer Dutch or Danish author. Swiss author Friedrich Durrenmatt speaks loudly to the heart of mountain and valley dwellers in Piedmont, Lombardy or Valle d’Aosta, on the Italian side of the border with Switzerland.

Geography matters, but not as you would think. It tran­scends the cultural impact of language, creating common experiences through shared light, weather, and activities like agriculture, hunting, foraging and trekking. And tourism. It can shape people in equivalent ways, across cultural divides.

Again, the mountain has a neutral impact on either side of its flanks, as it disseminates its equanimous influence. Mountain people across borders have often more in common with each other than with seaside people in their own nation. It is us humans who try to fertilise these rocks, stones, woods and slopes with our politics, building upon them the symbols of our transient power. Rituals. Castles. Forts.

A few years ago, I visited the Castle of the late Italian Queen Margherita in Valle d’Aosta, a testament to the Savoy family’s propaganda. Margherita, who gave her name to the homonymous pizza, in 1893 was hoisted on a sled carried on mountaineers’ shoulders to reach the Mount Rutor glacier. All to prove how adventurous that royal family could be.

In 1996, I covered an odd ceremony for BBC, which became part of Italian political history. I was following the leader of the secessionist Northern League, Umberto Bossi, in one of his feats of self-aggrandising propaganda.

He gathered hundreds of followers halfway up Monviso, a pyramid-like peak east of Turin. We all circled around the spring of the Po River, a sort of divinity in the eyes of the mystical Bossi. He ceremonially filled an ampoule with water, with the gestures of a mysterious Celtic druid, and held rallies along the river’s course all the way across Northern Italy to Venice, where I later witnessed him release the pure spring water in the lagoon with a solemn ceremony. He was extracting the symbolism of the mountain as creator of myths, as an emblem of a unifying life source meant to establish the foundation of an independent nation in Northern Italy called Padania. Well, it didn’t really work.

It was something perhaps inspired by Adolf Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, a mountain retreat meant to evoke ancient Aryan powers drawn from the Earth’s energy—a heart of stone in the chest of a Europe soon ravaged by hate.

Mountains can bring out the best in us, but they also reveal our worst side.

Walking up a mountain is medicine to me. I mean, it is literally a medicine. When I descend from a hike on a mountain, I feel refreshed.

During the steep, strenuous climb to the almost 2,000m height of Mount Cornetto, the body asks the mind: “Why did you drag me up these endless, stone-hot tracks?” The mind replies calmly: “Just wait and see.”

Once on the peak with a view of the plains all the way to the sea to the south and the snowcapped Dolomites to the north, a feeling of elation and euphoria grows inside me, while the high-altitude wind brings a rejuvenating infusion of a new chapter in life. Just like Petrarch said. The person who ascended is not the same marching down. Going up, the mind is filled with qualms about the challenges awaiting back in the city. Once on the summit, the body releases those lovely endorphins and adrenaline, two of the six “hormones of happiness”.

This is what the writing on the back of that young lady’s pink T-shirt meant. “To struggle up a mountain is poetry to me”. The poetry is brought out by the overwhelming beauty, but also by the hormones produced by the effort to get up there.

This is what the mountain does: you sweat, puff, pant, and curse the torturer who dragged you up there, in this case, my own self. Once it is conquered, you feel like royalty—lungs expanding, nostrils opening. Yet something is always missing.

This reminds me of the poem, ‘To Look into Serene Skies’ by Giacomo Noventa, where he abandons his vegetable garden to search for clear skies beyond the dark clouds in these dolomitic mountain peaks. But on the summit, he wonders if he will be able to see his garden, down there, hidden by dark clouds. The longing restlessness of it all…

As you march down, smiling at the next indifferent bush, you might encounter mountain bikers, or worse, those sky runners wearing bright sportswear who brandish ski poles like knights ready to joust. To avoid being skewered, you quickly step aside. They are training for an extreme challenge. They wake at midnight to march up and down the mountains for 20 hours, covering 80km and a 5.5km elevation change. They hurriedly view the mountain as a training ground, a personal test, often losing sight of the surrounding value, overlooking the layered history, legends, and natural beauty—the very things that make nature’s embrace an extra tonic for the mind.

Amid mountain bikers, sky runners, and worries about the disappearing glaciers, we often forget that up here, we find not answers nor questions, but can discover simply peace, inspira­tion, upliftment. There, that’s the right word. Lifting up.

Mountains appear to rise in front of our eyes, while perhaps they are actually crumbling, as they have been rising for tens of millennia. They must be tired by now (again, I am forgetting their neutrality). Yet, it is precisely this perception of ours, contemplating gargantuan slabs of rocks, that still lures us up here. And inspires us, as if we were lifted up by the rocks rising to the sky.

Pivot of the stars, connection between divine, human, and hell; mountain as gym, therapy, temple; the mountain that gives both death and life… Docks to the heavens, fingers pointing up, rock highways leading us to the forever elsewhere, inspiring us to say words such as these.

Once we start climbing, the mountain leads us through the initiatory rite of its mysterious forests, gripped by chiaroscu­ros—light and shadow, illuminating rays, disquieting smells, threatening creaks. Emerging beyond the woods, we reach high meadows, marching among glacier-fed streams as we climb higher, towards the purity of rock and the solitude of a summit where we hope to find ourselves.

By choosing the right timing, avoiding mass tourism, you may still discover a solitary peak where you can feel like a fool­ish romantic and face something like fear, courage, cowardice, a sense of measure, limitlessness, solitude, terror, God, gods, angels, demons, dreams, reality—whatever lies within you.

The mountain, like all nature, is neutral, it simply exists. It does not wait for us, yet we cannot escape the thought that there is something of it in us, and something of us in it.

In 2000, I asked Sir Edmund Hillary, the first person to as­cend Everest and return alive, along with Tenzing Norgay, if he had ever sought help from divine providence to make it back alive. “I’m not very good at praying,” he replied, “but I believe that if I got myself into trouble, I have to get myself out of it. The important thing is to get out on my own two feet.”

We are the ones in danger; we must save ourselves. The mountain doesn’t care, and it doesn’t need saving. It has always survived, regenerating for millions of years.

So we need to keep climbing. In order to have a better vision, because, as mountain explorer Walter Bonatti, who in 1954 was part of the first expedition to summit K2 along with my great uncle Gino Soldà, once told me: “He who climbs highest, sees farther. He who sees farther, dreams longest.”

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