Giorni di Ghiaccio (Days of ice) - Marco Confortola

It was lost between a macrobiotic cookbook and an American crime thriller. I struggled to recognise it and for some time I didn't even notice it. Then one day Marco's gaze...

Marco Confortola's book was going round the shelves, still chilled to the bone. Probably carrying inside it,  hidden among its pages, an icy silence, perhaps a shiver of death. It was lost between a macrobiotic cookbook and an American crime thriller. I struggled to recognise it and for some time I didn't even notice it. Then one day the gaze of Marco, of Confortola the man, called out to me, and it was at that moment that I thought of rescuing it from the anonymity of a post office bookshelf...

Marco starts off inevitably talking about himself, but without beating about the bush. As he says, he doesn't go to the mountains for some strange philosophical or inner reason. He was born in the mountains and this is his home. He simply likes going to the mountains, he can't do without it.

"... soon, however, my passion for the mountains got the upper hand and in no time I realised it would be my life. I did nothing to resist. On the contrary, I started to take it seriously. There is no reason, as I said, why it happened to me. I'm not one of those who waste words on the mountains. I didn't go there and I don't go there to find myself or to run away from who knows what..."

That's the premise, and you have to listen to him, Confortola, he knows a thing or two. Yes, because even though the mountaineering he practises is certainly an extreme activity, his way of seeing the world turns out to be entirely balanced, serene. As when he says that " ... you have to listen to it, the mountain, because it has a lot to teach. For example it teaches that the limit exists, the impossible exists; that if you try, there are certain things you just can't do. There are situations in which the choice to carry on, to insist, is a suicidal choice and can only lead to one conclusion... "

And yet he has to admit, fatalistically, that "... giving up, accepting defeat is the hardest thing for a mountaineer, perhaps even harder than the climb itself. Nobody would ever want to surrender, least of all me, with a head as hard as granite..."

And he is a man of good sense when he states, in a politically correct way, that "... climbing without oxygen is a fair way of relating to the mountain. I'm not saying that those who use oxygen are wrong or less good, no, I'm just saying it's a different way of understanding the challenge..."

A journey with a man, a journey inside a mountain man. A good book that reads easily, quickly, even in a rather light-hearted way, especially for us mountain folk, who, when we pick up a book of mountain literature, are always ready to be told about amazing, unrepeatable experiences. Here the writer-reader relationship shortens, a friendship is woven, gladly, narrator-listener, plain and without particular frills, from one mountain man to another.

Of course we hope that this icy story, this tragic ending, won't keep Confortola away from the Mountains for too long. That would certainly be denying his own nature.