Gran Sasso in Movimento (The Gran Sasso on the move)

When, on the occasion of the Fourth Salone della Montagna (held in Rome on 22 December 2007), we met Dr Daniela Antonini, Head of the IMONT Secretariat, we were bowled over by her helpfulness and kindness. Far greater amazement was to come as we got to know the publications of the well-known Istituto Nazionale della Montagna (National Mountain Institute; today the Ente Italiano della Montagna ).

This time we want to look at a recent publication: “Il Gran Sasso in Movimento” (The Gran Sasso on the move), the results of the monitoring and of the preliminary studies on the landslide of 22 August 2006, a volume edited by Massimo Pecci and Gabriele Scarascia Mugnozza.

That Italian research was in the front line worldwide we already knew, but this book has something truly extraordinary about it. The landslide happened, as we said, on 22 August 2006; the book was published in September 2007. It took little more than a year to produce a complete and competent work on the geological situation of the Corno Grande.

Photographs, graphs, tables and all the results of a great piece of work carried out directly at the site of the by now very famous landslide.

The book even comes with a CD-ROM gathering a large amount of extraordinary content: films, images, appendices and documentation.

Another marvellous Quaderno della Montagna distributed by Bononia University Press.

From the back cover we read...:

Our country is no stranger to natural disasters of a geological nature, such as the landslide on the Paretone of the Corno Grande of the Gran Sasso d'Italia on 22 August 2006. Such events remind us, among other things, how what we are used to thinking of as the most stable and motionless thing - the mountain - is in reality alive as well, on the move. Driven by a new sensitivity towards the environment, mankind and the complex relationships that bind them, the Istituto Nazionale della Montagna and the Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga National Park, together with the Sapienza University of Rome and the "G. d'Annunzio" University of Chieti-Pescara, have integrated and coordinated various disciplines and skills, carrying out, immediately after the landslide, investigations and field surveys, but also historical and archival research on the explorations and the events that, over the centuries, have affected the highest summit of the Apennines. Today IMONT makes the results of this research available with this volume which, after outlining the overall setting of the land and the environment that forms the backdrop to the landslide, offers a summary of the historical, scientific and technical information on similar events in that area, and an overview of the contributions that mountaineering experience can make to monitoring work. The problems of gravitational instability in the area have been placed within the wider dynamics of high-altitude geomorphological processes, using the latest technologies for field surveys, in order to provide pointers and prospects useful for forecasting risks and, therefore, for prevention.

Massimo Pecci, geologist, researcher at the Istituto Nazionale della Montagna, teaches Glaciology at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre and is a Mountaineering Instructor of the Club Alpino Italiano.

Gabriele Scarascia Mugnozza, geologist, is a lecturer in Applied Geology at the Sapienza University of Rome.

The mountaineer Massimo Marcheggiani put his name to many first winter ascents on the Paretone of the Gran Sasso.