Carlo Gandini remembered a very different image from the one we might expect when thinking of one of the greatest climbers of his time. As a boy, walking home from school, he would often see a quiet old man sitting on the benches in Cortina, entirely unassuming, smoking his pipe. It was his friends who told him who he was: Angelo Dibona.
Only later, when Gandini began climbing and repeating Dibona’s routes with Lorenzo Lorenzi, an outstanding climber and mountain guide from Cortina, and with Lino Lacedelli, did he fully understand the stature of that seemingly ordinary man. Lacedelli, who in 1954, together with Achille Compagnoni, became the first to reach the summit of K2, would warn him with just a few words:
“Dibona’s routes always deserve respect.”
And yet Guido Mayer had described this reserved and modest man in terms that could hardly have been more emphatic:
“Dibona is the best climber in the world.”
Between these two images—the old man with his pipe sitting on a bench in Cortina and the climber admired by the finest mountaineers of his time—lies one of the most important chapters in the history of mountaineering in the Dolomites.
When reaching the summit was no longer enough
Angelo Dibona belonged to the generation that followed Antonio Dimai. When he began climbing, between the end of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, the great era of conquering the major Alpine summits was essentially over. The principal peaks of the Dolomites had been climbed, and many of their normal routes were already well known.
But mountaineering did not stop. Its purpose changed.
As Giovanni Cenacchi observed in his portrait of Dibona, quoted by Carlo Gandini in his book about the climber, a new idea gradually emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century: reaching the summit was no longer the only justification for a climb. The wall itself, the line chosen across it and the difficulties encountered along the way began to acquire a value of their own.
The route itself was becoming the objective.
Antonio Dimai had already embodied, in extraordinary fashion, the transition from the conquest of summits to the exploration of great walls. With Angelo Dibona, this transformation reached a new maturity. Seeking new routes was no longer simply another way of reaching a mountain that had already been climbed: it was becoming one of the very reasons for climbing.
Dibona was born in Cortina d’Ampezzo in 1879. In his autobiographical notes, he recalled how as a boy he enjoyed climbing on small rocks and how, while working as a shepherd on the Alpe di Federa, he would watch from afar the roped parties of mountain guides on Croda da Lago and Becco di Mezzodì.
I have also written a more extensive article about the life and major achievements of Angelo Dibona, tracing his long career as a mountain guide and mountaineer.
His path to becoming a mountain guide, however, was not straightforward. His first application was rejected in 1904, probably because Cortina already had enough guides. He therefore worked first as a porter and then as an trainee guide, until on 22 July 1907 he finally received the official booklet authorising him to practise the profession.
But Dibona did not simply learn the routes he needed in order to guide clients. He explored, experimented and trained. In his notes, he recalled climbing mountains such as Col Rosà, Punta Fiames, Cestelis and Pomagagnon during the winter “to learn new routes”.
Giovanni Cenacchi also highlighted another strikingly modern aspect of Dibona’s approach: he trained on short rock walls, climbing not to reach a summit but simply to improve his abilities.
It was a sign of a profound change. Modern climbing was beginning to take shape: an activity with a value of its own, no longer simply a means of reaching a summit.
The great era of new routes
A decisive moment came in 1909, when Dibona met the Viennese brothers Guido and Max Mayer. Together with them and Luigi Rizzi, a mountain guide from Campitello di Fassa who had already made a name for himself on major climbs in the Dolomites, he formed one of the most important climbing partnerships of the period.
From that point on, the scale of Dibona’s climbing activity became extraordinary.
Among the great unclimbed walls was the north face of Cima Una, in the Sexten Dolomites, which had already repelled numerous attempts. The Sexten mountain guide Sepp Innerkofler had also tried to climb it, managing to ascend more than three hundred metres before being forced to retreat by abseiling down the face.
One evening Innerkofler met Dibona in the valley and, realising that he too was there to attempt the same wall, promised him 100 crowns if he could retrieve a piece of cord he had left on the rock. Bad weather prevented any further attempts, however, and the wall remained unclimbed that year.
The following year Dibona returned to Val Fiscalina. After a reconnaissance, on 18 July 1910 he set off at four in the morning with Guido Mayer and Luigi Rizzi. During the climb he reached the cord left behind by Innerkofler and put it in his pocket. The three reached the summit at ten that evening in torrential rain. By three the following morning, they had finally reached the Zsigmondy hut.
With the understatement that characterises all his notes, Dibona merely observed that the climb was, at the time, “the greatest in the Dolomites”.
A few days later came the south-west face of Croz dell’Altissimo. A first attempt convinced them that they had chosen the wrong line, and they turned back.
But Dibona wrote down a sentence that says a great deal about his character:
“What is postponed is not abandoned.”
The following day they returned to the wall and climbed it in twelve hours.
These were not isolated achievements. Cima Una, Croz dell’Altissimo, Lalider, Ödstein, Meije, Ailefroide, Dôme des Neiges des Écrins: in the years immediately before the First World War, Dibona tackled some of the great unclimbed walls of the Alps.
Many of those routes remained seriously difficult for decades. Writing shortly after Dibona’s death, Armando Biancardi observed that, more than fifty years after their first ascents, many of his routes were still graded UIAA V.
They were therefore not exceptional achievements only in relation to the equipment and knowledge available in the early twentieth century. They remained serious climbs for the generations that followed.
From the Dolomites to the Alps
At one point in his notes, Dibona wrote an apparently simple sentence:
“Then, for the first time, I left my home mountains.”
In fact, it marked the beginning of a new chapter in his career. The first Dolomite guides had built their reputations largely on their extraordinary knowledge of the mountains where they lived and worked. Dibona never lost that close connection with the Dolomites, but his climbing horizons became far wider.
He climbed in the Austrian Alps, the Brenta Dolomites and the mountains of Val Gardena, and later in Zermatt, the Dauphiné, the Écrins and the Mont Blanc massif. One of the most remarkable chapters in Dibona’s career came in 1913, when he spent more than two months climbing with Guido Mayer in the Western Alps.
On 27 June, Dibona made the first ascent of the Pain de Sucre in the Aiguilles du Soreiller, in the Écrins. The striking granite pinnacle would later be renamed the Aiguille Dibona. On 1 July he climbed the Ailefroide by its north arête, and on 14 July tackled the Dôme de Neige des Écrins by its north-west face, a climb of around 1,100 metres.
Later that summer, Dibona and Mayer moved on to the Mont Blanc massif. An attempt on the Grandes Jorasses ended about 250 metres below the summit, when snow and verglas forced them to retreat. On 18 August they made the first ascent of the south-east arête of the Aiguille du Plan; four days later they climbed the Dent du Requin, and on 26 August they made the first ascent of the Petites Jorasses from the south-east.
This was a very different world from the Dolomite walls on which Dibona had learnt his craft. Alongside difficult rock climbing came glaciers, snow and ice, high altitude and long approaches. Yet he adapted remarkably well. At the end of more than two months together in the Western Alps, Guido Mayer gave an extraordinary assessment of Dibona’s abilities: on the evidence of what he had seen that summer, he considered him superior to the guides of both the Eastern and Western Alps.
The 1913 campaign reveals just how versatile a mountaineer Dibona had become. He was far more than an exceptional Dolomite rock climber. The skills and experience he had developed on his home mountains transferred successfully to bigger peaks and very different alpine terrain.
His horizons continued to expand in the years that followed. In 1924 he even travelled to Britain, where he climbed on the short but difficult rock faces of the Lake District. Cenacchi saw this ability to range across the Alps and beyond as one of the most modern aspects of Dibona’s career. For a mountain guide of his generation, it was exceptional.
He was no longer simply a great Ampezzo guide known to the clients who came to Cortina: he had become one of the leading figures in European mountaineering.
And yet, first and foremost, he remained a mountain guide.
Hard climbing, but without shortcuts
To truly understand Angelo Dibona, it is not enough to know how many first ascents he made or the grades of the difficulties he overcame. It is perhaps even more interesting to understand how he thought about climbing.
In notes written in 1930, by then well removed from the great pre-war period, Dibona reflected carefully on what was happening in modern mountaineering. In his view, since the end of the war the limit of free climbing had advanced relatively little. What had changed most were the means used to overcome the walls.
“Artificial aids, pitons and pendulums are used too much today; people take too many risks and rely too much on luck.”
His position was not absolute, however. Dibona was a guide, and he knew very well that his responsibility towards those he guided came before any theoretical principle. Throughout his long career, he wrote, his fundamental rule had been to “ensure the complete safety of my client”.
A piton could therefore be used when safety required it. What Dibona rejected was the idea of turning it into a means of progression for overcoming a difficulty that the climber was unable to tackle through his own ability.
It is an important distinction. Dibona did not reject protection: he rejected the idea that artificial aid should replace the climber’s own ability.
This approach also helps explain why his routes continued to impress mountaineers from much later generations.
A fifth-grade climb that commands respect
In 1996 Mauro Corona climbed Campanile Dibona, in the Cristallo group, initially believing that he was facing an old fifth-grade route opened almost ninety years earlier. He soon discovered how misleading that assumption was.
On a long overhanging section with no protection, Corona found himself many metres above his partner unable to place any protection. Far above, he could see the large ring piton left by Dibona. To reach it, he was forced to place several pitons of his own.
He then remembered the words with which Alessandro Gogna had warned him:
“Watch out on Dibona’s routes!”
Once on the summit, Corona later wrote that old Angelo had taught him a considerable lesson in humility. It is not difficult to understand why Lino Lacedelli used to say that Dibona’s routes always deserved respect.
It is a feeling I know myself. Over the years I have climbed several of Angelo Dibona’s routes myself and, regardless of the grade given in the guidebooks, I have always been struck by how committing they are compared with other routes carrying the same grade.
Torre Leo, leaning against Torre del Diavolo in the Cadini di Misurina, is one example. The same is true of the Dibona arête on Cima Grande di Lavaredo, his route on Torre Grande di Falzarego and the one on Torre Grande delle Cinque Torri.
The long Dibona route on the west face of Sass Pordoi deserves special mention. Here, technical ability must be combined with excellent route-finding skills and the instinct needed to read the wall and identify the correct line.
These climbs are very different from one another, but they have something in common: the grade printed in the guidebook tells only part of the story.
The Dibona arête on Cima Grande is also connected with a tragic chapter in Ampezzo mountaineering. In 1968, Ivano Dibona, Angelo’s grandson and a mountain guide from Cortina, lost his life there. His story deserves to be told separately.
The guide and the mountaineer
It is perhaps here that one of the most interesting aspects of Dibona’s character emerges.
He was simultaneously one of the strongest climbers of his time and a professional responsible for the safety of those who placed their trust in him. The two roles could not always coincide.
Dibona drew a clear distinction between what a great mountaineer might choose to attempt and what a guide had the right to ask of a client.
Looking at the new climbs of the 1920s, he observed that some involved risks he would never have accepted on a professional ascent.
His reflections ended with a thought that goes far beyond climbing technique:
“A true climber must know where the pleasure of a climb ends and unhealthy nervous excitement begins.”
It is difficult to find a sentence that better expresses his understanding of the mountains.
Dibona was not modern simply because he sought ever greater difficulties. He was modern because he understood that difficulty itself could become one of the purposes of climbing, while continuing to question the point beyond which that pursuit lost its meaning.
A career spanning half a century
The First World War abruptly interrupted the great period that had begun with the Mayer brothers. Like the other men of Cortina, who at the time were citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Dibona was called up for military service. His mountaineering experience was put to use at the front, where he built ladders, trenches and equipped routes, and laid telephone lines across extremely difficult terrain.
In his notes, he described the return to normal life with his customary simplicity:
“Mountaineering slowly began again after the war.”
And for him, it truly did. He continued guiding, climbing and even opening new routes when many men of his generation had long since stopped.
In 1944, at the age of sixty-five, he opened another new route on Punta Michele in the Cristallo group. At around seventy, he was still leading on the arête of Punta Fiames. His final season as a mountain guide was 1951.
There is also a small coincidence that illustrates just how long Dibona remained part of the story of Ampezzo mountaineering.
On 1 July 1939, while ten young men from Cortina were founding the Scoiattoli group, Angelo Dibona was on Croda da Lago guiding two clients.
The world of mountaineering was changing once again. A new generation was arriving.
Dibona simply carried on guiding.
Dibona’s routes always deserve respect
Angelo Dibona died in Cortina on 21 April 1956.
Carlo Gandini, who as a boy had seen that quiet old man smoking his pipe on the benches in town without realising who was sitting before him, would only many years later come to understand the stature of the man by climbing his routes.
Those lines had been opened by a man using equipment incomparably simpler than anything available today, often on walls that at the time were completely unknown. Yet they remained logical, elegant and demanding.
This is probably the best way to understand Angelo Dibona’s legacy.
Not through the number of his first ascents, nor through any impossible ranking of mountaineers from different eras, but by looking at what remains on the mountains.
With Dibona, Dolomite mountaineering had definitively entered a new era. Reaching the summit was no longer enough: the wall, the line, the style and the difficulty all mattered.
Climbing had begun to acquire a value of its own.
And more than a century later, for anyone following one of his routes, those few words of Lino Lacedelli still retain all their meaning:
“Dibona’s routes always deserve respect.”
Bibliography
- Carlo Gandini, Da Cortina d’Ampezzo alle Alpi – Angelo Dibona alpinista e guida, Edizioni ULd’A – Union de i Ladis de Ampezo, 2006.
- Armando Biancardi, article published in Scandere, 1957–1958.
- Mauro Corona, Nel legno e nella pietra, Mondadori, Oscar Bestsellers series, 2005.
Photo credits
The historic photographs of Angelo Dibona published in this article come from the photographic archive of Franco Gaspari, a mountain guide from Cortina. The same photographs are also held in the archive of the Cortina Mountain Guides.
In the next article
A new generation of mountaineers
In the 1920s and 1930s, climbing in the Dolomites changed once again. The difficulties increased, great walls that had once seemed impossible were tackled with new techniques and, in Cortina, a new generation of young climbers grew up alongside the mountain guides, climbing above all for the sheer passion of it.
That change would lead, in 1939, to the founding of the Scoiattoli di Cortina.
