There have long been questions about how and when modern mountaineering was born. The question is certainly not new and it is well known that scholars recognize that mountaineering is a relatively recent episode, which has affected the Alpine world since the 18th century.
“The story of the birth of mountaineering is told according to a pattern that has been repeated the same for two centuries,” he writes Andrea Zannini in the preface to his latest book, Counterhistory of mountaineering (2024), published byLaterza Publisher in collaboration with the Italian Alpine Club. “At the origin there would be the great rationalist discovery of the Alps as a laboratory of nature: a revolution that would open up unexplored territories to man that the rough Alpine populations populated with superstitions. The eighteenth-century passion for the high mountains would therefore pave the way for the city’s conquest of the peaks and the invention of mountaineering”.
These beliefs, now stratified and accredited by scholars, are now contrasted with the research of Zannini, teacher of European History at theUniversity of Udine, which has to its credit, among many others, scientific investigations and publications on the economic and social history of the Serenissima, the history of emigration and the history of the Resistance. With his book Counterhistory of mountaineering Zannini reverses this way of looking at the Alpine universe and the history of frequenting the high lands.
Can we really and fully talk about this or that “first ascent” of various Alpine peaks? Can we really give credence to those late 18th or 19th century mountaineering reports which, with an enthusiasm not devoid of a certain rhetorical triumphalism of romantic ancestry, report on the daring undertaking of the first conquest of the summit? In his beautiful book Andrea Zannini explains, through always dry and clear prose, why, very often, it is not appropriate to blindly trust those reports when dealing with the mountains of the Alps and the Apennines.
Those high lands, even before configuring themselves as a call for naturalists and, therefore, for citizens eager to reach the peaks, had been the stage for native populations which, on those same mountains, had moved for centuries. Not only along valleys and slopes, but also reaching the top of the mountains. And for multiple reasons. They had moved in them hunters, woodcutters, herdsmen, collectors of crystals and minerals, artisans, religious people, border supervisors intent on defining and then verifying border lines of territorial demarcation, often established right along the ridge lines.
“The history of mountaineering”concludes Zannini, “it is rewritten from the ground up and all its founding events thus take on a completely different light”.
