Piccole storie di grandi valanghe

Large avalanches, those that overwhelm residential areas, destroy homes and human lives, are not just a thing of the past. The Rigopiano tragedy in January 2017 demonstrates that these are not just disaster movie fantasies and last winter's record snowfalls are another signal for those who are convinced that nature can be challenged with impunity. Renato Cresta, one of the leading experts on the subject in Europe, talks about the great avalanches of the past with an eye to today and the future. To do this he personally visited the old villages, some abandoned precisely because of the snow that devastated them, he went up the slopes from which the avalanches fell, and he promptly examined the causes. The ancient tragedies become current again, the mountaineers of Avieil, the hamlet of Arnad destroyed in 1888, or those of La Mòja, in Valsesia, canceled in 1845, come back to life. Cresta still talks about the white hell of the San Gottardo in 1951, when on the entire Alpine arc over 250 people died in the snow. And the extraordinary story of survival under the legendary Bergemoletto avalanche, above Demonte, when three women were found alive after thirty-seven days buried in the snow. He ends his narrative right in Rigopiano, trying to understand the reasons for an apparently inexplicable tragedy, the most serious in Italy, with its twenty-nine victims, caused by an avalanche since 1916.