Everest, la montagna di una vita

«Mallory», as historians have written, «was destined to become the archetypal hero of the youth of his time». It is too beautiful, elegant and charming not to be noticed. In 1921 he is thirty-five years old, he is strong, courageous, and the coveted invitation from the Everest Committee to participate in the first expedition arrives without him even making a request. He will show great determination, and upon returning to London he will be hailed as a hero. At the end of one of his packed conferences, a journalist asks him why he wants to climb the highest mountain on Earth: «Because it's there» is his ambiguous answer which has become legendary. Here Mallory recounts his explorations and attempts to climb the Himalayan giant, which slowly reveals its secrets of ice and rock. Scattered articles and texts never published in Italy form a unitary body, with the stories of the feat of 1921, that of '22 and partly of the tragic ascension of '24, as well as some more speculative compendium pages on the 'sense of' Mountain climbing'. These are not pure reports that objectively report the experience of the journey, but participatory descriptions, which allow one to immerse oneself in the author's point of view, in his icastic rigor, in his outbursts of will imbued with the most inflexible Anglo-Saxon culture. It is the precious document of an era that seems very distant to us, enriched by an introductory essay by Marco Albino Ferrari.