When Angelo Dibona began his career as a mountain guide in the early years of the twentieth century, many of the great summits of the Dolomites had already been climbed. The challenge was no longer simply to reach the top, but to find new lines, tackle more difficult walls and confront problems that only a few years earlier would have seemed unthinkable. Dibona was one of the great figures in this transformation, but in the years following the First World War a new generation of mountaineers from Cortina would push that change even further.
The walls became steeper, the difficulties increased and the techniques used to overcome them began to change as well. Climbers were pushing the limits much further. In Cortina, this transition would once again involve some of the families that had shaped the history of the Ampezzo mountain guides. But this would not last long: within little more than a decade, something would change in the very way young people became mountaineers.
When the sixth grade became a reality
On 7 August 1925, Emil Solleder and Gustav Lettenbauer climbed the great north-west face of the Civetta. Their ascent would become one of the defining achievements of 1920s mountaineering and the most important benchmark for what was then considered the extreme limit of climbing: the sixth grade.
It had not, of course, appeared out of nowhere. Exceptional difficulties had already been overcome, and some earlier routes would later be considered to have reached the same level. But with the Solleder-Lettenbauer route, the sixth grade acquired a new meaning. It no longer referred only to an isolated passage of extreme difficulty: it could define a major climb, sustained over hundreds of metres of rock. The scale of difficulty had changed, but more importantly, so had the mentality of mountaineers. The wall was no longer simply the obstacle separating them from the summit: it had become the problem to be solved.
Across the Dolomites, climbers now began seeking out ever steeper and seemingly impossible walls. Italian climbers soon became part of this new era as well. In 1929 Emilio Comici and Giordano Bruno Fabjan climbed the north-west face of Sorella di Mezzo in the Sorapìs group, opening what is generally regarded as the first Italian sixth-grade route. I have already written about that ascent and the relationship between Comici and Fabjan in my article on the heroic age of mountaineering. What matters here is what was happening in Cortina at the same time, because a new generation was also emerging among the Ampezzo guides.
Angelo and Giuseppe Dimai
Angelo and Giuseppe Dimai were the sons of Antonio Dimai, one of Cortina’s great mountain guides of the previous generation. The profession seemed almost written into their destiny: Angelo, born in 1900, became a guide in 1922; Giuseppe, born three years later, qualified in 1925 and also became a ski instructor.
They were therefore still very much part of the traditional world of mountain guiding: taking clients into the mountains was a profession and, for Angelo in particular, an extraordinarily demanding one. According to Carlo Gandini and Franco Gaspari, in a single season he completed at least 110 climbs, around ninety of them with clients. But by the time the two brothers began opening new routes, mountaineering was no longer the same as it had been in their father’s day.
In 1927, together with Arturo Gaspari, they opened a new route on Torre Grande at the Cinque Torri: the Miriam route. The Cinque Torri had long been one of the natural climbing grounds for Cortina’s climbers. Relatively short walls, easy access and an extraordinary variety of cracks, chimneys and slabs made them an ideal place to experiment with new techniques and test themselves on increasingly difficult terrain.
In 1932 Angelo and Giuseppe returned to Torre Grande and, together with Celso Degasper, opened the Fessura Dimai. The following year was particularly active for Giuseppe. In addition to the climb that would permanently link his name with the history of mountaineering, he opened the Via Centrale on Punta Fiames with Ignazio Dibona and Celso Degasper; a new route on the north face of Torre Grande with Angelo; another direct route on Torre Grande with Degasper, Angelo Verzi and Giuseppe Ghedina; and a new route on Punta Giovannina in the Tofane with Degasper. Angelo, meanwhile, had opened a new route on Croda Marcora with Angelo Verzi in 1931.
The two brothers therefore represented something quite distinctive. They were heirs to Cortina’s great guiding tradition, learning a profession that had been passed down through their family for generations, yet they were climbing on the walls of a new era. And no wall embodied that new era more powerfully than the north face of Cima Grande di Lavaredo.
The impossible wall
The north face of Cima Grande was unlike the great walls that had been climbed before it. Seen from below, it seemed to rule out any possibility of ascent: a wall hundreds of metres high, vertical and in places overhanging, crossed by bands of yellow rock that appeared almost devoid of holds. For years it was considered one of the great unsolved problems of the Dolomites.
Giuseppe Dimai became interested in it as early as 1930. At the Principe Umberto hut, today’s Auronzo hut, he learned of the attempts made by Hans Steger and Paula Wiesinger. They had tried the wall several times, but had managed to gain only a few dozen metres. Other leading mountaineers also studied and attempted it.
Giuseppe and his brother Angelo began to study it carefully. At first they too doubted that it could be climbed, but gradually that conviction began to change. In the account Giuseppe published in January 1934 in the Rivista Mensile del Club Alpino Italiano, later reproduced by Carlo Gandini and Franco Gaspari in their book Antonio Dimai Deo – Una famiglia di guide alpine, he described very clearly what was happening to him: the wall had become more than a project; it was “an obsession”. Throughout the winter he thought about the north face and imagined succeeding where others had been forced to turn back.
Meanwhile, Emilio Comici had also made an attempt. In August 1932, together with Renato Zanutti, he had climbed beyond the high point reached by Steger and Wiesinger, gaining several dozen metres more. Before retreating, he left a white handkerchief on the wall, clearly visible from below. But the mountain still resisted.
Giuseppe Dimai attempts the north face
On 20 July 1933, Giuseppe returned to the foot of the wall with mountain guide Ignazio Dibona and photographer Giuseppe Ghedina. This time he did not intend merely to look. They carried two forty-metre ropes, a hammer, fifteen pitons and ten carabiners—very little compared with what would be needed only a few weeks later.
Giuseppe reached the high point of the previous attempts, climbed beyond the point reached by Comici and Zanutti and continued onto the yellow, overhanging rock. Ahead of him he found an overhanging, cracked dihedral and climbed part of it before deciding to descend. But he had discovered what he needed to know: the difficulties were exceptional, yet the wall no longer seemed impossible. He returned to Cortina convinced that what he called “the greatest problem in the Dolomites” was now close to being solved.
Over the following days he continued training on the walls around Cortina, often with Ignazio Dibona and other guides. Then he prepared for another attempt.
This time it would not be a reconnaissance.
Two hundred metres of rope and ninety pitons
On the morning of 11 August, Giuseppe left Cortina at half past five. Once again, Ignazio Dibona and Giuseppe Ghedina were with him. Their equipment immediately reveals how much mountaineering had changed since Angelo Dibona’s era: around two hundred metres of rope, another 150-metre length of cord, etriers, ninety pitons of different shapes and sizes, forty carabiners and equipment for a possible bivouac.
It was no longer simply a matter of finding holds and cracks that would allow a climber to pass. On walls of this kind, fixed ropes, pitons, etriers and other techniques were used to make progress where free climbing alone was not enough. The contrast with the previous generation is clear: Angelo Dibona had always been wary of turning the piton into a means of overcoming a difficulty that a climber could not tackle through his own ability. By the 1930s, that boundary had shifted.
This did not mean that free climbing had lost its importance. Quite the opposite: Comici, Giuseppe Dimai and the other leading climbers of those years were exceptional free climbers. But when faced with the walls they were trying to overcome, they were prepared to use other means as well.
Giuseppe once again climbed to the point reached by Comici the previous year and continued above it. The rock was overhanging and friable. Some of the pitons seemed so precarious that, he wrote, they would probably not have held his weight in a fall. Bad weather brought the attempt to an end that afternoon, but before descending they left much of their equipment and several fixed ropes on the wall.
The meeting with Comici
That evening, at the hut, Giuseppe met Emilio Comici. Comici was naturally aware of the attempts under way and offered to help. Giuseppe gladly accepted.
This is an important point, because the story of the north face of Cima Grande is often condensed into a few words: Comici, with Angelo and Giuseppe Dimai, made the first ascent of the north face in 1933. That is true, but told this way, almost everything that happened beforehand disappears. Giuseppe’s account reveals a much more complex story: the Dimai brothers had been studying the wall for some time, Giuseppe had already attempted it in July, and on 11 August he had begun the decisive assault with other members of Cortina’s mountaineering community. Comici therefore entered a story that was already under way and, from that moment on, became one of its central figures.
Over the following days, several men contributed to the attempts on the lower part of the wall. The difficulties were enormous and bad weather continued to hinder them. Giuseppe attached particular importance to the work carried out on 11 August. In his account, he noted that this day had not been mentioned in Comici’s later report and maintained that some of the most difficult and dangerous passages on the entire wall had been overcome then.
There is no need to decide which of the two had the greater claim to the glory of the ascent. It is far more interesting to listen to both voices.
Three men on the north face
In the end, three remained: Giuseppe Dimai, Angelo Dimai and Emilio Comici. On 13 August they returned to the wall. The ropes left in place during the previous days allowed them to regain the previous high point quickly, and from there the struggle with the still unknown upper part of the north face began again.
Comici climbed some sections free, but higher up he encountered an area of compact rock where even placing a piton was extremely difficult. He tried several times, and one of his arms began to hurt.
At that point Giuseppe took the lead. The passage was extremely delicate: Comici belayed him from a piton, while Angelo was lower down. Giuseppe managed to traverse across and finally reached ground that allowed further progress. He continued through cracks, overhangs and dihedrals until something happened that he had been waiting for for years.
The great overhanging wall was behind him.
He wrote that at that moment he knew the wall had been won. Never before had he felt so deeply moved during a climb: there was a lump in his throat and he felt like crying. At half past seven that evening, the three were forced to bivouac on a small ledge, tied to pitons and pressed close together. They spent the night with almost no sleep.
At dawn on 14 August they set off again. Giuseppe once more took the lead, climbing another hundred metres or so through cracks and chimneys; higher up, the difficulties eased. At 9:15 they reached the summit.
The north face of Cima Grande had been climbed.
It was more than just a wall
The first ascent of the north face caused a sensation. This was not simply another new route in the Dolomites: it demonstrated that even walls seemingly devoid of any natural line could be climbed. The limit had been pushed once again.
But in the history of mountaineering in Cortina, the ascent tells us something else as well. On the north face we still find the world of the Ampezzo mountain guides: Angelo and Giuseppe Dimai, Ignazio Dibona, Angelo Verzi and other men who had grown up within a professional tradition stretching back to the nineteenth century. At the same time, however, everything had changed. The difficulties, equipment and techniques were different, and even the way climbers imagined a possible route across a wall had changed.
The Dimai brothers were Antonio’s sons, but they now belonged to a different era. And theirs would be the last generation to preserve so naturally the connection between major mountaineering exploration and the profession of mountain guiding.
Because something new was about to happen in Cortina.
Young climbers at the Cinque Torri
By the end of the 1930s, a new generation of young people from Ampezzo had begun climbing regularly on the walls around Cortina. They were not guides, they had no clients to take into the mountains and, at least initially, they did not think of climbing as a profession. They climbed because they loved it.
Many years later, looking back on that period, Albino Alverà expressed it with a simplicity that is difficult to improve upon:
“At the beginning, we Scoiattoli had nothing but a great passion for rock climbing.”
In 1939 Albino was sixteen and helped his father, who was a farmer. The world of mountain guiding that had produced Angelo Dibona and the Dimai brothers was still very much alive, but in Alverà’s recollection it was going through a period of evident decline. The previous generation had already given its best, and a new generation of young guides had not emerged with the same strength. The guides, occupied primarily with their clients, no longer played the same role in training Cortina’s young climbers.
So these young men began learning together. The Cinque Torri became one of their training grounds: they watched one another, tried moves, exchanged information and learned climbing and belaying techniques. In a sense, the group that was taking shape functioned as a small, informal and free climbing school.
Relations with the guides were not always easy. Some regarded the young climbers with suspicion: seeing them climbing difficult routes in front of their own clients could be embarrassing, and behind that suspicion there was inevitably some concern for their livelihood as well. But it would be wrong to imagine a simple conflict between old and young. Some guides helped them. Albino Alverà particularly remembered Angelo Verzi, Ignazio Dibona and Piero Apollonio, as well as the advice they received from the Dimais. They showed them routes, explained the moves and passed on some of the experience that came directly from Cortina’s great mountaineering tradition.
The thread, then, was not broken. It simply began to follow different paths.
1 July 1939
On 1 July 1939, ten young men from Ampezzo founded a group. They called it the Società Rocciatori e Sciatori gli Scoiattoli. No one could have known then what place that name would one day occupy in the history of mountaineering.
They had very little equipment, little money and gear that today would seem incredibly primitive. Their ropes were made of hemp; their shoes were sometimes adapted by hand; pitons and carabiners were few and precious. But they had the walls and, above all, they had one another. Friendship, Luigi Ghedina would later recall, “came before everything else”.
Perhaps this is where the transition that had begun many years earlier was finally completed. Cortina’s first mountain guides had learned their profession by accompanying explorers into mountains that were still unknown. Antonio Dimai and Angelo Dibona had transformed that profession into great mountaineering. Angelo and Giuseppe Dimai had carried that tradition onto the extreme walls of the 1930s. Now ten young men were beginning to climb together simply because they loved doing it.
The mountains were no longer simply a profession. They had become a shared passion.
Only a few months later, Europe would descend into war, abruptly interrupting the story of these young climbers as well. But a new generation had already emerged, and mountaineering in Cortina would never be the same again.
A new generation
Something had now changed in Ampezzo mountaineering. Mountain guides continued to play a leading role on major climbs, but alongside them a generation of young climbers had grown up who climbed first and foremost for the sheer passion of it.
From the great walls of the 1930s to the Cinque Torri, where these young climbers learned, experimented and tested themselves against one another, the transition was now complete. On 1 July 1939, that passion also acquired a name: Scoiattoli di Cortina.
The war would interrupt that story almost immediately. But it would not end it.
After the war, those same young climbers would return to the walls of the Dolomites. And from there, another chapter in the history of mountaineering in Cortina would begin.
Bibliography
- Carlo Gandini, Franco Gaspari, Antonio Dimai Deo – Una famiglia di guide alpine.
- Giuseppe Dimai, La “Nord” della Grande di Lavaredo, in Rivista Mensile del Club Alpino Italiano, January 1934, no. 1.
- Giovanni Cenacchi, Gli Scoiattoli di Cortina – Storia e memoria di 50 anni d’alpinismo ampezzano.
- Livio Fabjan, Compagni di cordata legati per la vita: Emilio Comici e Giordano Bruno Fabjan, in Alpinismo Triestino, year 37, no. 194, April–May–June 2025.
Photo credits
The historic photographs of Angelo and Giuseppe Dimai, and of Giuseppe Dimai, Emilio Comici and Angelo Dimai after their ascent of Cima Grande, are reproduced from the book Antonio Dimai Deo – Una famiglia di guide alpine by Carlo Gandini and Franco Gaspari.
The images relating to the Scoiattoli di Cortina, including the composition showing the ten founders in 1939 and the photograph of Carlo Alverà on the Via Franceschi at the Cinque Torri, come from the Scoiattoli di Cortina Archive.
In the next article
The Scoiattoli and the great post-war era
The war abruptly interrupted that first chapter, but not their passion for climbing. After the war, the Scoiattoli returned to the walls of the Dolomites and became leading figures in new routes and major ascents during a period that would leave a profound mark on the history of Ampezzo mountaineering.
That story, which had begun on the rocks around Cortina, would eventually take some of them all the way to K2.
