Alpinisti Sottaceto (Pickled Mountaineers) - Manuel Lugli

We bought it, yes, “Alpinisti Sottaceto” (Pickled Mountaineers) is a book that holds within it all the power of a packet of fruit sweets.

The sweets are short mini-biographies of mountaineers, some better known to the general public than others. When you get your hands on it you don't know which sweet to start with, because, well, you know all the flavours are good.

You start from any name at all, just like that, picked at random, thinking you'll be facing the usual potted biography, and instead you find yourself facing the portrait, at last, of a human being. This is what Manuel Lugli has managed to do: a mountaineer, an observer of people, a wanderer of the soul.

A different book, lightning-quick, a special treat from the house of "Versante Sud".

From the back cover

Manuel is the travelling companion you'd want beside you.
He soaks up the mountaineers' bad moods, loads them on his back and then scatters them who knows where. You never see him sulking, not even in the most tangled Nepalese muddle…

Manuel loves the open spaces and has put a whole globe of roads under his feet.
He falls in love with geography like a boy.
He has another speciality: he is curious about people, about persons; he asks questions, then keeps quiet and listens…

Manuel has decided to empty out his pack of experience. Since he's no chatterbox he has found a length just a little longer than a postcard

Here there is the friction of acquaintance
Seeing yourself glimpsed, brought into focus by Manuel, gives a frank account of each of us, a net weight.

Erri de Luca
(passages taken from the introduction)

Manuel Lugli is sunny, helpful, kind, and it's not hard to feel at ease with him. He is a vagabond in the high world of the mountains and in the flat expanses of the deserts. A wandering mountaineer, by vocation and inspiration, who struck me at once with his way of telling little or nothing of his travels but a great deal about his encounters, as if those men and women he crossed paths with were the centre and the ultimate meaning of his journey.

Vinicio Stefanello