10. DINO BUZZATI

It’s not only the craggy peaks of the mountains that can be glimpsed in The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily. Neither is the mountain range that limits Drogo’s gaze in The Tartar Steppe, or the “old woods” guarding ancestral secrets. Nor the spires of the Milan Cathedral transformed into crags. Born in the Bellunese Dolomites, a skilled mountaineer, writer Dino Buzzati (1906–1972) always professed a deep love for the mountains. As Lorenzo Viganò commented, “The peaks often recur in his novels, short stories, paintings, and journalistic prose, sometimes as metaphors for the mysterious, giants to be reckoned with, goals to be conquered, or as symbols of missed opportunities”. When in Cortina, Buzzati stayed in his house in Cojana, on the edge of the Faloria forest, with his young companion and future wife Almerina, whom he met in 1959, and with Neri Pozza and Lea Quaretti. There he met many writers, poets, and artists. Rolly Marchi was there along with ski instructor Franco Mandelli. It was in this place, in the summer of 1971, that he gave his farewell interview to friend and scholar Yves Panafieu, Dino Buzzati: un autoritratto. Croda da Lago was both the first peak Buzzati ever climbed at sixteen and the last one in 1966, accompanied by Marchi and Lino Lacedelli. In his youth he wrote, “If I go to Croda da Lago, I will be a happy man in every sense of the word, for it is the mountain that I love the most. It is the most mysterious, in that it’s far from any village, so far that it can only be seen at a distance from Cortina”. He dedicated magnificent pages of prose to these mountains, collected in I fuorilegge della montagna. “Then, within a few kilometers, the Dolomites truly explode all around, gleaming above the green hills, and if the sun is shining, they appear like the picture of complete and solemn happiness.”