How can you fall in love with a mountain?
A true story by Raniero Regni – It happened in summer2014
I wasn’t exactly a city dweller or a man of the plains — I came from the heart of the Apennines — yet I still couldn’t fully understand how someone could end up falling in love with a mountain. You walk somewhere, or you wander for the sake of wandering. And yet, I could already sense the pull of that boundless, intransitive freedom.
“Shall we go for a walk?”
I first heard that question many years ago from the people who would soon become some of my dearest friends—the friends of Cortina. And so I started walking, and I discovered the mountains.
Summer and winter, weaving together high-altitude trails and words, sweat and silence, listening to thoughts and breaths. The wandering soul let itself be guided by friendship, tasting the deep quiet of snow when the air becomes a diamond that makes the peaks sparkle.
As Rigoni Stern wrote, “among snow-covered trees, even the things of life appear clearer.” Moments of eternity, escapes from time under the gaze of what is vast and profound—under the divine gaze of the mountains.
It has been said that a mountain can only be truly known by ascending it. For someone like me, who even suffers from vertigo, this may remain incomprehensible. And yet, during my wanderings around Cortina, my friends introduced me to someone who had once sat upon the roof of the world: Lino Lacedelli. Now that he has climbed even higher than his eight-thousand-metre peaks, I like to remember him.
Two impressions still live within the humane warmth of that encounter: his hands—strong and supple, the hands of an elderly youth.
Hands of someone who had earned, palm by palm, in a face-to-face struggle with rock and ice, the hard and ineffable kingdom of the summits.
Hands of a man, a mountaineer, a “conqueror of the useless,” of that fleeting and precious goal that resembles life itself, which must be lived with the same smiling determination.
The second memory is tied to his pleasure in storytelling, which I believe Lacedelli truly possessed. As the saying goes: if you don’t have a good story—and someone to tell it to—you’re truly lost. Lino always had good stories, and he naturally became the storyteller who animated the table.
And that’s exactly what happened the evening we had dinner together after a conference organized by the friends of the association “Facciamo un nido.”
Among the thousand anecdotes of his exploits, one expression stayed with me. His words when he first stood before K2:
“When you see a mountain like that, you fall in love.”
His eyes sparkled, but I—stubborn as ever—didn’t understand.
How can you fall in love with a mountain?
Another question without an answer.
And yet now I’m beginning to understand.
That was his landscape, and one can fall in love with a landscape just as with a face.
The overwhelming vertical mass of that mountain—saturated with restlessness and peace—had made him fall in love.
He had loved his mountains since he was a child, just as his grandchildren—and all the children of Cortina—love theirs. These mountains enclose, like fortresses more than any other landscape, the mystery of creation, and it is no coincidence that humankind has chosen them as privileged symbols of transcendence, the absolute, of God.
They compel the soul to lift its gaze toward regions where “what cannot be reached by willpower alone” resides.
Now I understand Thoreau’s invocation: Man, are you free? Then walk.
Now I often find myself saying to my friends from the Apennines, “let’s go for a walk,” and they understand.
Now I catch myself looking with a lover’s gaze at the profile of the mountains, and I understand Lino Lacedelli.
Montessori comes to mind.
Yes, because it was the Montessori school of Zuel that brought me to Cortina for the first time. She said that two forms of faith save humankind: faith in God and faith in oneself. And two temptations risk destroying it: the temptation of possession and the temptation of power.
The mountain Lino Lacedelli loved teaches us that we must travel light, that every possession is a burden, and that perhaps nothing truly belongs to us except in the purity of our gaze.
That there is an ambition greater than power: the inner strength that pushes us not toward “more,” but toward “beyond,” in the gentle conquest of ourselves.
Until, looking at the mountains, we discover with Lino that: “calmly / eternity waits / at the crossroads of the stars.”
Raniero Regni – friend and lover of Cortina, Full Professor of Social Pedagogy at LUMSA University in Rome.
A Montessori educator, he is the author of numerous works on education.
He has written many books on Nature and Landscape, including “Geopedagogia” and “Paesaggio educatore,” as well as numerous articles.
If the topic interests you, here is one of his writings: “The Children’s Mountain.”