Rotti e Stracciati - Aria di Roma sulle cime

We want, however, to start from our own feelings to give our further (perhaps superfluous) contribution and comment on this book.

For those who dream of mountaineering while living and working in Rome, “Rotti e Stracciati” has a particularly strong value. In Rome, where the nearest mountains are the Gran Sasso and the Velino, mountaineering is not really a tradition that is, so to speak... popular. I would say rather completely “unpopular”. When you tell people in Rome that you go to the mountains, to toil away or to do some mountaineering, many look at you strangely, most don't even know what it means, everyone thinks you are mad and irresponsible.

Probably this sense of being an outsider, felt by the good Pierluigi Bini, remained so for quite some time and is still so today for those who want to practise mountaineering while living in Rome. Probably for those who live and are born among the mountains, climbing need not necessarily become a passion. And this is the extraordinary thing: Pierluigi experiences a real thunderbolt, a sudden falling in love that will lead him to accomplish heroic, daredevil feats with the lightness and the strong passion that only the young can live.

Rather than disenchantment, we can speak of a continual renewal of the enchantment of the mountains. Pierluigi Bini's path is very similar to the path of growth of many great mountaineers. Probably a mountaineering less trumpeted to the four winds, certainly a mountaineering lived at the price of enormous sacrifices.

Pierluigi lives his youth giving up school (willingly), going hungry for most of his expeditions, supported and accompanied by his great friend Vito Plumari, after whom Bini himself chose to name the opening of a new route, the so-called “Via del Vecchiaccio”, by now a classic of the Corno Piccolo.

The book did not strike us as written in a particularly captivating style; in some places the lack of a structure with a climax makes the pathos completely absent. Hard, but not impossible, to keep reading. As a first book by Alberto Sciamplicotti, we can say that it is a satisfying book, full of details and certainly quite consistent in its information.

Contents of the book

Introduction, by Massimo Marcheggiani

• March 1996
• From the “Freccia Nera” to the Escai course
• El Caiman
• Terror travels on the main road
• From the Morra to the Gran Sasso
• Thunder and lightning
• “The mountain is more romantic than the sea”
• A question of responsibility
• The roadman's house
• Exams never end
• Batman, Nembo Kid and the frugola
• A holiday at a dead loss
• The three nomads of climbing
• The dark ridge of the Corno Grande
• The “Vecchiaccio”
• Grazing on sandwiches at the Rifugio Tissi
• The alms of the Pradel
• The long summer of '78
• Mephisto's corner
• Climbing

From the back cover

In the seventies, the Apennines saw the meeting of mountaineers of different generations and backgrounds, in a ferment of exchanges of new ideas that revolutionised the climbing of those times.

Rotti e stracciati is the story of mountaineers with plenty of passion and not a penny to their name.

An unrepeatable period and a gallery of extraordinary characters, seen again through the eyes of Pierluigi Bini.

Discover the Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga National Park, the setting for many of the climbs told in the book.