5. THE PERFECT SNOW

Goffredo Parise’s (1929–1986) éternel retour to the Ampezzo valley, as Giosetta Fioroni called it, was always in the winter. It was his favorite season. “It happened, as they say, in Cortina. For many seasons I rented a house and moved there for the entire winter.” Writers have penned countless pages about the snow of Cortina, yet Parise—author of masterpieces like The Dead Boy and the Comets, Don Gastone and the Ladies, and Abecedary —created, with his signature prose, almost a literary genre out of it. The poet Andrea Zanzotto (1921–2011), a frequent visitor to Ampezzo, also devoted magnificent poetic verses to the snow: “How many perfections, how many / how many totalities. Stinging, it adds” (The perfection of snow, from La beltà, 1968). But which snow is the best? Let’s hear from Parise again, in It Happened in Cortina, from the Corriere della Sera, January 14, 1980: “Spring snow is wonderful, but the true, the great, the sublime, the mathematical snow is that powdery, microscopic icicle snow of mid-winter, in January. Soft and so silent that no sound is heard, just the breath of the skis as the body rises and falls quickly to turn, and the creaking when standing still. The beauty of this snow is nourished by silence and light: a cold and pure light, grazing or overhead, without shadows, where the blue of the sky rests on the whiteness of the peaks and slopes, and the sun is a white, blazing disk like the mouth of a blast furnace in infinity.”