.... Excerpt from Dalle cattedrali della terra ai sentieri del cielo (From Earth Cathedrals to the Sky paths)......
A notebook. Way tracks, faces more or less usual.
Sentences, dates, mountain shapes. Men that still every time set about. All this in the following pages. A travel in travels that explorers and alpinists have done on the Dolomites rocks. Before, exploring those peaks put there as a challenge, then going to discover edges, chimneys, dihedrons, open walls where to draw, hold after hold, the history of classical climbing.
And then a new chase after each other on the verticals, the paths of the sinking drop, like abstract geometries, drawn like sinopite at the small table and then applied to the rock. And when the strength of the fingers becomes too little and too few are the areas of the holds and the adherence of the rocks, here arrive the nails. High precipices faced cutting at back retreat way, brave and clever passages with whom to connect cracks systems widespread along the walls. All this had been classical alpinism, the one made by brave riders, real "conquerors of the useless", dancers of vertical steps on stages placed in front of almost empty audience.
It is thin the crest that divides the healthy rock from the tale that sometimes knows how to become legend from the friable ravine of the rhetoric.
But the history of those characters is so much fascinating the more it becomes fragmentarily, episodically, anecdotic, the more it is difficult to find hidden between the pages of books out of the mass market.
This history can not (can - does not want to be) be set to follow a complete description. It is simply the history of the rocks where those man have written the best and more significant pages of their life.
And near the great cycle, some big pictures full of tiny particulars that need a magnifier to decipher them and one extraordinary knowledge of facts and references, this notebook was born. Because after Luisa-s paintings one may think, and feel more, a diligent study of books not all easy to reach, nor all easy to understand.
There are persons that have a magic gift in being able to read, between the thousand of words making a book, the most important ones, in being able to find in the history of a man those two or three episodes that merit to became draw, history, representation.
Sometimes we have tons of information, bur the Piaz's image from which knapsack the head of the dog Satana appears and the umbrella slung across a by the English alpinist Haupt or still the image of Dino Buzzati that walks in a Milan's park, with a stick in his hand and that is taken till the heart of his Dolomites (the Pale) speak to our hearts with the immediacy of images that remain in our memory.
But, when one has finished to run in the order or disorder, as on likes, this bunch of papers that (damn!) never stays put, one understands to have travelled to a strange and fascinating route in the history of the mountains and of those that have walked inside and over, making of this the terrain of expression of their life. A form of art not codified that artist Luisa has known how to read with them, passing over the many obstacles or perhaps changing those obstacles, those ravines in occasions of game, of climbing.
At the end, also climbing is visual and seeing is interpreting (giving sense) to little signals some times minimal. Remaining in a metaphor: the great alpinist is who know how to grasp and take small consecutive holds and by them to go out from the great wall. And so the great artist in one that knows how to read in deep and give back to the eyes of the others with the sign language...
Digressions. What is really important in these pages is the real unique approach to the mountains and the facts happened on their walls, maybe the first illustrated history of alpinism ... (Alberto Benini)
