Italian Alpine Club

The Italian Alpine Club enters the narrative less as an active institution than as a source of mountain knowledge and a name attached to the possibility of recording a climb. Its gray booklet and guidebook pages help frame the family’s practice of reading routes, remembering ascents, and imagining how a mountain history might be preserved.

Guidebooks and the Practice of Climbing

In the evenings, Giovanni Guasti unfolds a map on the table and consults a gray booklet of the Italian Alpine Club while planning the next day’s route. He uses the map to teach Pietro how to distinguish terrain and interpret the marks that indicate altitude, steepness, paths, and summits. The scene presents the club’s publication as part of a practical education: the map and booklet make the mountain legible, while the father’s explanations turn that knowledge into a shared routine.

Years later, Pietro reads the pages of the Alpine Club Guide during the winter in Milan. Its old-fashioned route descriptions let him imagine retracing climbs while he is away from the mountains. The guidebook thus serves not only as instruction but as a substitute for presence, sustaining his attention to mountain paths when city life has made those experiences feel remote.

A Private Record Beside Public Authority

The Italian Alpine Club also becomes a point of reference when Pietro considers the idea of an official record. Climbing above the usual route toward Grenon’s summit, he imagines that a first ascent of the north-west crest might be entered in the club’s annals under his name and the year 2008. The possibility briefly gives his route the shape of a documented achievement; finding old food tins on the ledge immediately shows that someone had reached the place before him. The imagined credit yields to evidence of an earlier, unrecorded passage.

The novel distinguishes this aspiration from the actual traces Pietro encounters. At a summit, he finds a weather-damaged notebook holding the names and brief comments of climbers, including Giovanni’s 1997 entry recording his time up from Grana. The book does not identify this notebook as an Italian Alpine Club register. Its significance instead lies in the personal record it preserves: a terse, good-humored trace through which Pietro pictures his father making the climb alone.

Maps, Memory, and the Club’s Significance

The club’s guidebook sits within a wider pattern of mountain records. Giovanni’s wall map, gradually covered with routes in different colors, has become an intimate history of his excursions and of the climbs he shared with Pietro and Bruno. Unlike the printed guide, the map is private and densely marked; together, however, the two forms show how routes can be both learned beforehand and made meaningful through repeated journeys.

The Italian Alpine Club’s significance in the narrative is therefore specific and bounded. It supplies a language of routes and a framework for imagining recorded achievement, but the story’s deepest records are personal: a father’s marked map, a summit notebook entry, and the memorial inscription Pietro makes at the house he builds with Bruno. The club provides a public horizon for climbing; memory and shared labor give those climbs their lasting meaning.