La guerra di Joseph

"The Great War had done one good thing: it had united two different men. Without the war the count and the mountain man would have crossed the century across distant seas..." This book tells the story of the extraordinary friendship between a soldier and his officer , a man from the valley and a man from the city, two destinies united only by a great passion: the mountains. In the spring of 1916, the Matterhorn guide Joseph Gaspard and the Florentine count Ugo di Vallepiana met in the Dolomites of Cortina, where they were assigned to an impossible mission: the south-west chimney of the Tofana di Rozes. They climb it in sixteen days of acrobatic efforts, under the incessant fire of the Austrian artillery, then participate in the useless carnage of the Castelletto, survive the night ambushes in Val Travenanzes, overcome the terrible winter of 1917. Until a bolt of lightning in May, on the summit of Tofana ...