Cervino, il più nobile scoglio

On 14 July 1865, the twenty-five-year-old Englishman Edward Whymper, setting off from Zermatt, was the first to reach the summit of the Matterhorn, the «noblest rock» as the poet John Ruskin wrote, or the «Gran Becca» as it is still called in the Italian valleys at the foot of the mountain. On the way down, however, following an accident, the rope that tied the seven climbers broke, and four of them lost their lives falling into the void. A few days later, Jean-Antoine Carrel reaches the summit from the Italian side. Carrel is the true "hero" of Reinhold Messner's compelling story of the "conquest" of this splendid mountain: Carrel, the Valtournenche guide who was the first to dare to think of climbing the Matterhorn, until then considered impregnable due to weather conditions which characterize it, for the severity of its walls, for the majestic appearance which has fueled fearful myths and legends since ancient times. And Carrel is temperamentally the opposite of the "dandy" Whymper: taciturn, instinctive, dominated by a sense of responsibility for the people who climb with him, reliable until the very last hours before dying himself on the Matterhorn, twenty-five years later, after having ensured the safety of his companions. Why the rope that held the English broke has been clarified for some time now, but it is the question of the "sense of responsibility" that interests Messner above all. And in this fascinating book, which takes its inspiration from Guido Rey's great classic, Il Monte Cervino, Messner is as if he were part of both the consortium of the two opposing characters, Whymper and Carrel, who represent two radically different to experience the mountains, although united as they are by the same burning passion. Because Messner wants to understand: «I want to climb with these two mountaineers. I want to understand what drove them, I want to understand what they had to endure."