Terre alte, il libro della montagna (High Lands, the book of the mountain) - Carlo Grande

A book has come out, small in format. It sits well in the hand. It has a title that smacks of sweat and poetry, though! At least, you need a little mountain sensibility to catch it.

Because a mountain doesn't have to be high. It doesn't even have to be a high land in the physical sense. But it is one, in a deeply spiritual way. Terre alte (High Lands) was written by Carlo Grande, who remains the unforgotten storyteller of La via dei lupi, a feral ride of animals painted as sacred creatures.

In the third chapter, to which the author has given the mini - title Salire (Climbing), I felt something that the heart understands only when you climb a mountain. It's a feeling that those who take on the mountain alone perceive very well. But the good weather comes before dawn, says Grande. In this he is profoundly right. Ask any mountaineer which is the moment when he thinks about what the mountain stands for. It's that very brief instant when the eyes wake up, opening, and the first thing they mean to look at, with an automatic memory, is the weather. Straight after comes the moment of fear for the mountaineer's heart. Perhaps it isn't fear, strictly speaking: it's a very brief time in which the awareness of the sacrifice you are about to face hangs a little in the balance in your mind. It usually happens more often in winter, when getting up is stiffer because of the intense cold. But then you always set off. Because the climb is concentration, but it's also an enormous moment of mental freedom. Sometimes you even prefer to go alone. Because walking habits differ, and sometimes paces and even characters - in the mountains - don't get along very well. But you are never alone. You always go up with a physical rucksack on your back and a spiritual cross made of memories, loves and thoughts that are never the same. Along the way, in the simple act of walking, we talk with ourselves, we distil rudimentary thoughts, simple and deep, as before falling asleep, or as in the moment of waking. In those moments of absolute freedom silence seems almost compulsory.

Anyone who goes to the mountains knows that the dimension of speech hardly exists. Perhaps it's only a question of mountain sensibility, as we were saying at the start, but talking and walking are two irreconcilable things. You talk when you stop for a while, during the breaks, or when you're down in the valley and the mountain has become small again behind you. Carlo Grande has made numerous ascents of medium standing. The Capanna Margherita can be considered a difficult climb, at least because of the conditions of climatic and barometric adaptation that inevitably worm their way into your head and your stomach when you reach 4559 metres. Not everyone manages it, and not everyone is granted the wonderful gift of getting there.

The mountain is silence, for Grande. And today it's also change. If you think that about 10,000 visitors a year reach the Capanna, and that when you're there you have no choice but to put on the same smelly sandals that a thousand others before you have worn, for a moment the heart takes fright. Yet the fact remains that up there, the same heart that is disgusted by the stink of so many other feet opens out into a great bend of wonder when it sees the Lys glacier. I believe Grande has managed to truly get inside the mountain. Or rather inside that idea of height towards which we are drawn to climb when we go to the mountains. I believe that in this book, the size of a well-smoothed boulder, there is the most intelligent and most speleological description of what going through the mountains really is. He's right when he says that there aren't only lofty or overly important mountains. We can't all be Masters, Messner or Simone Moro, mountaineers who have been given an unrepeatable gift that they know how to keep warm in their breast with a sacrifice that asks too much of you, though. At least for us people of the plains, or of the sea, or who like the mountains but without that sense of life or death that clings to mountaineers with a capital M. That's why every climb has its own single spiritual dimension. The example of bouldering is emblematic. There are no boulders that are too high. There are boulders studied, rather, to give the climb the guise of an almost ascetic spiritual reasoning. But that's also why we like going to the mountains. To have a moment in which to take a total bath of spirituality inside ourselves. It is, without doubt, a moment of muscular, physical but above all mental growth. It occurs to me that nature sometimes frightens and terrifies us. Grande says that nature can become indifferent ( I really love this adjective, able to steal, in a way that carves like a chisel, what nature is) and ready to overcome every form of technology. It takes an instant to fall, to fall prey to the most vile cold, to lose someone down a precipice. Always in silence.

The mountain raises silent children. But there isn't a day when you wouldn't want to go there. To have mental freedom, to savour the water that gushes out at two thousand metres, and to have places where your mobile phone gets no signal. If you're planning to walk this summer, buy yourself this book. It fits comfortably in a small pocket of your rucksack and it's company that talks. It can feed your mental silence like un bon repas. That's what Gary Hemming would have said.