The Giant of Ice

 

by Eva L. Maffei Gueret

”the most beautiful mountain in the Americas, an iceberg of 2400 metres height floating in the sea".
Saint Loup

 

The daughter of one of the mountaineers who, 50 years ago ascended the Sarmiento, gives a comment on the photographic exhibition to remember the event organized in Pinzolo in cooperation with: Museo Nazionale della Montagna Duca degli Abruzzi CAI di Torino, Cervino International Film Festival, Archivio Fotografico salesiani Don Bosco Roma, Biblioteca SAT Trento, Comune di Pinzolo, Comune di Trento, Studio d'Arte

“A coming back from the mountains of the Tierra del Fuego, that for many years had been the favourite destination of my trips and my explorations, looked as a dream to me. And the dream came true in the January 1956...” The beautiful book Ice sphinxes by Father Alberto Maria De Agostini published in 1958 in Italian and Spanish, starts like this. It talks about the alpinistic and scientific expedition that has ascended Mount Sarmiento and Mount Italy.
The enterprise engages mountaineers and scientists for 43 days of tempests and storms, during which rare openings among the clouds allow you to see the peaks. Together with Father De Agostini, the technical and scientifical head, professor Giuseppe Morandini, the phisiologist doctor Luigi Sperti, the engineer and geologist Arvedo Decima, the guides Luigi Carrel, Camillo Pellissier, Luigi Barmasse and Clemente Maffei Gueret, the academic of C.A.I. Carlo Mauri, the film operator Edmondo Raffaldi, the major Artuto Ayala Arce, topographer, the radiotelegraphist Belisario Cabeza, the Andes expert Michele Saavedra and the cook Angelo Gaez.
Forty-one photographs make up a dense and poetic heritage for enthusiasts of true adventures, lived in the intense will to get there, to succeed, to come back as winners. The working-out of old films has created chromatic effects and glares that seem to illustrate the state of mind of the protagonists. The tale, made up by geographic and alpinistic data and quotations, is able to evoque the direct contact between man and natural forces.
The glaciers touching the sea are the scenery of an exploration that does not give in for any reason. The souls of the conquerors are loaded with solidarity and of faith that make them stronger and able of the maximum determination. I reckon this is one of the true messages between the lines of this exhibition: the capacity of cultivating human depth in the relationship towards the others and the nature within a soprts discipline. this leads us to be more courageous and sincere, also in other aspects of life. Looking for the frequentation of valid alpinists and of faithful people is like desiring a warm refuge in the storm of indifference and of social climbing.
The photographic itinerary, enriched by new photographs taken during the conquest of Mount Italy gets reproposed during the 9th edition of Cervino International Film Festival from July 19th through to 23rd in Breuil-Cervinia and Valtournenche.

 

“Up here time is precious. We are absolutely not to waste it. We are intensively fighting with our strength and our mind. We cannot move from this intensity. We feel close to the final destination. Inside each one of us everything is outstreched towards it. [...] Carlo calls for me.[...] A shout! Hey, man! We are on top! It is a scream that moves everything inside us, that makes tour blood boil within our hearts and pump it to our heads with an improbable impulse [...] Yes, it is really the Eastern top of Sarmiento, the most tremendous and the most wonderful peak of my career as a mountaineer” (Clemente Maffei)