L'Alpe 19 - Alpi in guerra nel Novecento

The Alpine wars of the twentieth century often combined war and mountaineering skills, resentment for the enemy and love for the mountains, defense from cannons and safety from avalanches, from the void, from frost. Paradoxically, the battle was fought in the most beautiful places in the Alps, from the crests of Adamello to the walls of the Tofane, from the Ortles to the Cime di Lavaredo. Absurdly one died in paradise. The unnatural border: the twentieth-century connotation of high-altitude wars corresponds to the artificial but very successful theory of the "border crest". The First World War and the eastern Alpine landscape: if we consider mountain warfare on its long-term effects, it appears in its extraordinary complexity. 1915-17. The front of the infinite winter: from the Dolomites to Adamello, the fighters experience a double war, because they have to defend themselves from a second enemy: winter. Geologists at war on the Trentino front: the Kriegsgeologen of the Imperial Austrian Army were high-ranking military geologists, called into war to help the sappers and sappers. Asiago. The stepmothers of the recoverers: armies more powerful than the spirits of lightning and winter had brought to the plateau two monsters that could swallow the peaks: Chemistry and Ironworking. June 1940. Don't kill, don't get killed: diary of "war" in the Mont Blanc massif, between the guides of Courmayeur and Chamonix. The wounded mountain and the long shadow of the world wars: the partisan's mountain is different from that of the Alpine troops of the Great War, but the symbolism is equally pregnant and lasting. War landscapes in the western Italian Alps: it is extraordinary that works built for war allow us, today, to read, as the French would say, the montagnité of the mountain. Towards the Maginot Line: the massive presence of the army has forever transformed the landscape and the people of the cross-border regions of the Maritime Alps. Alpine poor Christians and good Christians: after the Second World War the Alpine identity in terms of a natural barrier loses its meaning and the Alpine troops invent a new identity. That lifelong retreat: Russia's dramatic retreat: a testimony.