La via è bella The Route is Beautiful JANUARY, 2004   For a difficult route you'd expect an impressive name that's difficult to pronounce and inevitably in English, instead I've decided to name this last route with a simple Italian name... with a double meaning. I've only opened a few routes during the my 22 years of climbing, but I've tried to give each and every one of them a name that evokes the feelings, sensations and state of mind I experienced while doing them.   For example: "Never Say Never" a mixed route in the Savaranche Valley. I dedicated this route to a Hungarian ice climber in a moment where all I did was continuously slip and slide. Unfortunately though things didn't go as I had hoped. On second thoughts maybe I should have taken out the "say" and just left it at "never"... but hope is always the last to leave the room. "Cruz del Sur" Esfinge Peru. It's the cross that you can see only from the southern hemisphere and I looked at it every evening from base camp. "Mission Impossible" doesn't refer to the famous film, which I have never seen, but to that feeling I had as I was nailing the pitons on a route I thought I would never manage to climb. The fact that it was impossible turned out only to be a feeling, not reality. "Women and Chalk". I dedicated this route to women... and to chalk! The two must-haves of life... well, at least one of them is!   "La via è bella" (The Route is Beautiful). Yes... the route is really a very beautiful route: incredible natural logic which follows a 15-metre horizontal crack with trickles of ice here and there where I could hang my ice picks. I was inspired by the film "La vita è bella" (Life is Beautiful) because as time passes I realized how we, mountaineers, are like children who still believe in fairy tales. The father, Benigni or "Mountaineering", lets us believe that the whole world revolves around a piece of rock, or much worse, a level of difficulty. This unfortunately makes us deaf and blind to what happens in everyday life so that instead of being grateful for being healthy and leading a healthy life with healthy principles, we end up hating each other and start wars because of an extra bolt or a stupid level of difficulty!   Bad experiences in the past like these made me decide that I would never be involved in useless gossip sessions ever again where there are no winners or losers, just negative energy wasted on gossip mongers.   This route is in the same cave as "Fly in the wind", in a panoramic place overlooking the Landro Valley. I'm trying hard to ensure that the sport of mixed modern, after the initial "boom" period, doesn't die out or be put into question. I want it to be seen as an opportunity to get young people back into the mountains and have fun... and why not, even dream!   I almost forgot! Compared to "Fly in the wind", my route may seem difficult. It's twice as long, but I have no idea what level of difficulty it is. I prefer to wait for the repeats...that way I won't give the gossips the opportunity to cause more havoc.   Bubu             Movie (9,25 Mb)   Light version (2,73 Mb)
				Game over (Innsbruck)       Bats with ice axes and crampons       Mister Big Ben (Landro, Italy)       Grotta Caterina (Trieste, Italy)       Laghel (Arco, Italy)       Arco 2004 (Italy)       Cineplex (Canada)       Ueshinen (Switzerland)       Musica e magia       Fly in the wind       Mission impossible
				Photos by Andrea Gallo