My sister Anna, who – according to my after-death
hypothesis – will regret for a limited (by our mother) amount of time to have abandoned her older
brother, scanned and sent me by email some pictures of my dad when he was young
and used to climb the Adamello mountain, I put here a couple of very old
pictures that show my dad – as always in his youth – smoking a cigarette while
hanging out with friends who climbed with him that challenging mountain of rock.
I sent
these pictures to my son - because he truly is my dad’s reincarnation – to see
what a stud my dad/his grandpa (nonno) used
to be and feel my dad to be still close to him. I love to have these pictures
because they are from 1941 when photography was still very new and because they
can really give a good idea about where my dad came from, in terms of character
and determination (like mine) .
I can still
remember the plenty Sundays spent hiking in mountains not far from where we
were living and some of the stories he was telling us about those times for
him, but what still sticks in my mind is about the time when the Adamello
glacier had an exceptional melting due to the global warming and a great number
of WWI soldiers surfaced still holding their weapons and wearing the uniforms,
my dad looked really shocked and kept saying that he couldn’t count the times
he had walked over that natural cemetery.
One of
these pictures shows my dad holding two small cannon shells over his head which
means that already in his times it must have been easy to find tools of a very
bloody war that truly devastated all of Europe.
However,
these pictures are really very precious to me not only because I can see my dad
when he was young (he was already in his 40ies when I was born), him with his friends and what he loved to do
his entire life, but very much too because my hero-son can see my dad a very
long time ago close to a mountain that I’m sure he’d love to climb himself. One
of the pictures in fact shows with a pen the line followed by my dad when he
climbed there. Looking at old pictures is just like watching a documentary that
you can make in your head just with what can be seen in the picture and I hope
that my dad’s reincarnation is going to have as much joy as I’m having looking
to the man who in a very short time was able to influence his character very,
very much.
- http://www.guns.com/2014/01/16/frozen-bodies-wwi-soldiers-found-preserved-italys-melting-glaciers/
- http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141017-white-war-first-world-war-italy-austro-hungarian-mountains-history/
- http://newsfeed.time.com/2014/01/14/italys-melting-glaciers-contain-the-preserved-bodies-of-wwi-soldiers/
- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-one/10562017/Melting-glaciers-in-northern-Italy-reveal-corpses-of-WW1-soldiers.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenta_group
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