Antonio Dimai and Dolomites mountaineering history
After exploring the great pioneering ascents of Paul Grohmann and Cortina’s first mountain guides, I would like to continue this journey through the history of mountaineering in the Dolomites. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the great summits had been climbed and it seemed there was little left to explore. In reality, a new era was just beginning — one that would forever change the way these mountains were climbed and experienced.
Within just a few years, the most important peaks had been climbed, and mountains that until recently had seemed unreachable had found their place on maps and in mountaineers’ accounts. In reality, however, a new era was just beginning.
Mountaineers were no longer interested only in unclimbed summits. The mountain itself became the challenge: its walls, pillars and chimneys. Reaching the summit was no longer enough. The difficulty of the climb, the elegance of the route and the ability to overcome obstacles that only a few years earlier would have been considered impossible were becoming increasingly important.
The profession of the mountain guide also changed profoundly. The first guides, such as Angelo and Fulgenzio Dimai, had accompanied explorers in their discovery of the Dolomites. The next generation faced a different challenge: guiding increasingly skilled clients along new routes, often on walls where no one had yet found a way through.
Among the leading figures of this new era was Antonio Dimai Deo, a man who would leave his mark on an entire period of Dolomite mountaineering.
Raised in a family of pioneering guides
Antonio was born in Cortina d’Ampezzo on November 9, 1866. His father Angelo and his uncle Fulgenzio had guided Paul Grohmann on several of the great first ascents of the Dolomites, playing an important role in the pioneering years of mountaineering.
Antonio grew up with the mountains as part of everyday life. Like many men in the valley, he worked as a farmer and carpenter, while guiding provided another source of income.
His knowledge of the mountains was not something learned from books or maps: it came from a lifetime spent among them.
He qualified as a mountain guide in 1888, at just twenty-two. His timing could hardly have been better. As Antonio began his career, mountaineering itself was changing — and the next chapter would be written not on unclimbed summits, but on the great walls of the Dolomites.
A new way of experiencing the mountains
By the end of the nineteenth century, Cortina had become one of the leading centres of European mountaineering. Climbers arriving in the Ampezzo Valley were no longer looking only for unclimbed summits. They wanted steeper walls, more elegant routes and increasingly difficult challenges.
It was in this changing world that Antonio Dimai made his name. Carlo Gandini described him as “the most famous mountain guide and one of the finest Dolomite climbers of the late nineteenth century” — a judgement that gives a clear sense of the reputation he earned over more than twenty years of guiding.
At that time, an ordinary day’s guiding could turn into a first ascent. Guides did far more than simply lead their clients up established routes: they played an active part in pushing mountaineering forward. Antonio Dimai became one of the key figures in the history of mountaineering in the Dolomites, guiding some of Europe’s finest climbers onto the great walls and into terrain that had never been climbed before.
The conquest of the great walls
If the great summits had defined the first age of mountaineering in the Dolomites, the closing years of the nineteenth century ushered in the age of the great walls.
The summit of Tofana di Rozes, for example, had been reached many years earlier. Yet its immense south face remained an open challenge. The goal was no longer simply to reach the top, but to find a way through hundreds of metres of seemingly impenetrable rock. It was an entirely new way of looking at a mountain.
It was against this background that Antonio Dimai made one of the defining ascents of his career.
In August 1901, together with fellow guides Agostino Verzi and Giovanni Siorpaes, he accompanied the Hungarian sisters Ilona and Rolanda von Eötvös on a new route up the south face of Tofana di Rozes. The climb became known as the Dimai-Eötvös route and remains one of the great classics of the Dolomites to this day.
What made the ascent significant was not simply its difficulty. The great wall itself had become the objective. Only forty years earlier, mountaineers had been concerned above all with reaching unclimbed summits. By 1901, the challenge was to read a face and find an elegant and logical line through a vast wall of rock that seemed to offer no obvious way through.
The Dimai-Eötvös route marks a defining moment in Dolomites mountaineering history.
It was not about reaching a new summit; it represented a new way of approaching the mountain itself.
More than a century later, the route is still climbed regularly. Its appeal lies not only in the climbing, but also in the chance to follow a line that has become part of mountaineering history. Discover the story of the Dimai-Eötvös route on the south face of Tofana di Rozes.
The experience of a mountain guide
Antonio Dimai built his reputation not only by opening new routes, but also through the experience, judgement and composure he brought to the mountains — qualities his clients quickly learned to value.
One episode gives a good sense of this. In December 1891, together with his brother Pietro, he guided the Dutch mountaineer Jeanne Immink on the first winter ascent of Croda da Lago. Today, it is easy to focus on the climbing itself, but in those days the challenge began long before reaching the rock. Simply approaching the mountain from Pocol in the depths of a late nineteenth-century Dolomite winter was an undertaking in itself. During the ascent, the guides also had to cut steps in the ice with a small axe, then a standard part of a mountain guide’s equipment.
What is most striking about the episode is what it reveals about the work of a mountain guide at the end of the nineteenth century. Guides had to deal with whatever the mountains presented using the tools and knowledge available to them, long before modern equipment, reliable weather forecasts or organised mountain rescue existed. It was this ability, as much as his climbing skill, that made Antonio Dimai one of the most highly respected guides in the Dolomites.
A war that brought an era to an end
For more than twenty years, Antonio Dimai was one of the leading figures in Dolomite mountaineering. As he guided clients from across Europe in the mountains around Cortina, mountaineering itself continued to evolve. The great walls of the Dolomites had become the arena where the finest guides and climbers of the time pushed their skills to new limits.
That era came to an abrupt end in 1915, with the outbreak of the First World War.
In May 1915, Italy entered the war against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Dolomites were suddenly transformed. Mountains that only days earlier had been the domain of guides and climbers became a battlefield. Rock faces, passes and mountain paths turned into military positions, trenches and supply routes, while the sounds of climbing gave way to artillery fire.
According to Franco Fini and Carlo Gandini, after the Italian occupation of Cortina, Antonio was asked to guide Italian soldiers along the route he himself had opened on the south face of Tofana di Rozes. He refused. Men from his own valley were fighting on that mountain in the Austro-Hungarian army, and he would not lead soldiers against his own people.
His refusal had serious consequences.
Antonio was arrested and removed from Cortina, then sent into forced residence in Tuscany. His story might have ended very differently had one of his former clients not intervened: Albert I, King of the Belgians.
Albert I was not simply a king; he had also been one of Antonio’s most distinguished clients. Having known him personally, he was able to vouch for Antonio’s character and loyalty, helping to secure his release.
The episode says much about the respect Antonio had earned over the course of his career. He was more than an outstanding climber and an experienced guide. Through his work and the way he conducted himself, he built relationships of trust and respect that extended far beyond the mountains.
Antonio Dimai’s legacy
Looking back at the history of mountaineering in the Dolomites, it is easy to remember Antonio Dimai for his many first ascents or for the celebrated route on the south face of Tofana di Rozes.
But his legacy goes much deeper.
Antonio belonged to the generation of mountain guides who witnessed — and helped shape — a profound transformation in the Dolomites. When he began guiding, mountaineering still retained much of the pioneering spirit of Grohmann’s great explorations. By the time his great years as a guide were drawing to a close, the Dolomites had become one of the great centres of European climbing.
The change did not happen overnight. It came climb by climb, client by client. Mountain guides were no longer simply leading climbers along established routes: they were helping to imagine new lines and develop the techniques that would open the way for the generations that followed.
In this sense, Antonio Dimai stands as a bridge between two eras.
On one side were the pioneers who had conquered the great summits; on the other, the climbers who would turn the great walls of the Dolomites into one of the most important arenas in the history of climbing.
The war brought that era to an abrupt end, but it did not stop the evolution of mountaineering.
In the years that followed, a new generation would build on that legacy and take Dolomite climbing to an entirely new level.
By the time Antonio Dimai’s great years as a guide were over, he had already left a lasting mark on the history of mountaineering in the Dolomites. The great walls on which he had written some of its most important chapters would become the stage for a new generation of climbers to carry the story forward.
Building on the legacy of guides such as Antonio Dimai, mountaineering in the Dolomites continued to evolve, leading into the age of Angelo Dibona and modern climbing.
Bibliography
- Carlo Gandini, Franco Gaspari, Antonio Dimai Deo. Una famiglia di guide alpine, Gruppo Scoiattoli, Cortina d’Ampezzo, 2016.
- Franco Fini, Carlo Gandini, Le guide di Cortina d’Ampezzo, Zanichelli.
Photo credits
- Archive of the Cortina d’Ampezzo Mountain Guides.
- Carlo Gandini Carlin photographic collection.
In the next article
Angelo Dibona and the age of modern climbing
Discover how Angelo Dibona transformed climbing in the Dolomites, opening a new chapter that would influence generations of mountaineers.
