The Alps

  Ed and I leave the car to stroll along the lakeshore. I buy a few tubs of marmot oil in a souvenir shop, apparently a panacea for all that can ail a body. He busies himself with postcards. The morning is as near to perfect as possible. The scene is so benign and summery today that it is hard to imagine how harsh the winter can be here. The lake was the scene of the 1956 speed-skating races of the Winter Olympics (Cortina d’Ampezzo was the host city), the last time those events were held on natural ice.

  Alas, the prospect to the northwest, where we are headed, is one of gathering dark clouds. Undeterred, we head straight for them, for awaiting us is the most famous formation in the Dolomites. The Tre Cime (Three Peaks) di Lavaredo are a demonstrably weird quirk of geology: three independent monoliths stretching thousands of meters in the air from a sloping gravel scree. They are quite separate, and alone, with nary a trace of vegetation. It’s as though some prehistoric Poseidon planted his trident here, and the three tines have emerged from the sea floor to make this arresting display. The middle and tallest eminence, the Cima Grande, ranks as one of the six great north faces of the Alps. From its base, there is an overhang stretching more than 210 meters, followed by a sheer vertical with almost no purchase for the climber. The Cima Grande is not for the mountaineer; it is the wall par excellence for the rock climber. I have not seen such a terrific display of the vertical since beholding the Petit Dru at the Mer de Glace. Even the Nordwand of the Eiger is not as vertical as what we are gazing at now. On this face there can be no spider of ice, or snowfield, or glacier. The Cima Grande is too steep.

  Midway along the footpath at the base of the Tre Cime, there is a lovely white chapel adorned by two memorials. One commemorates a local climber, the unofficial custodian of the site, who died at the age of a hundred years and ten days. The other honors Heigl Rosl, an Austrian who fell from the face on 25 August 2008 at the age of forty-five. As I examine the latter, Ed squints, then points his finger at the westernmost peak. I am ready to listen to another retailing of his past exploits, when he says, “There are two people up there! Over on the right, about midway up.”

  It’s my turn to squint. I scan the unforgiving gray wall, starting at the bottom and slowly rising skyward. Suddenly, there is a swatch of green and blue, and another. Two climbers, like insects, cling to the rock, each one in turn inching upward. It is a study in foolhardiness and heroism, a demonstration of the lengths to which people will go to conquer these inhospitable, monstrous eminences of rock.

  Hail begins to fall. We scurry with scores of others to the distant Rifugio Lavaredo, a restaurant-inn on a scenic prominence. To get there, we have to traverse a fantastical boulder field, some of the house-sized rocks sheared in half from the impact of their plummet to reveal a riot of mineral color. The great mountaineer Gaston Rébuffat, in his memoir Starlight and Storm, records witnessing a tremendous rockfall from the face of the Cima Grande. These huge boulders could very well be the remnants of that event sixty years ago.

  The Rifugio Lavaredo is so crowded with German, Austrian, and German-speaking Italian tourists and hikers that remaining indoors gives one the distinct impression of being on a rush-hour U-Bahn. Ed and I take shelter outside under the eaves. The hailstones fall like ping-pong balls on the picnic tables of the outdoor terrace. Ed points once again and says, “They’re coming down. Must be hell up there.”

  I follow his finger and see the two insects descending the rockface at an impressive speed. They must be soaked—and bruised.

  Mercifully, the hail stops.

  ED’S WEEKLONG BREAK in Europe is nearing its end, but we have one more destination to explore together. Accordingly, we get into the Mégane to make tracks. This we do by descending through the trees, northward, to the Puster Valley, a major east–west transport artery since the days before Antiquity. Ötzi may have walked here. The valley also has the distinction of being a watershed: Its eastern rivers flow into the Danube and the Black Sea; its western ones, into the Adige and the Adriatic. The westward drive along the valley floor feels like a return to the Tyrol. The valley dwellers are overwhelmingly German-speakers, and, if there is an Italianate building in the villages we pass, neither of us sees it.

  Just north of here, the Brenner Pass, one of the busiest Alpine passes and by far the lowest in the area, sits astride the border between Italy and Austria. The approach road is an elevated expressway. On hills rising from the valley floor, once-mighty castles stare impotently at the autostrada viaducts bringing the rush of traffic practically to their doorsteps. I am eager to see the Brenner, as it has played an important role in trade and war for thousands of years. Prehistoric man crossed this pass, as did the Romans, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, and the great armies of the Habsburgs, but when we reach the pass, it is not a letdown, it is a crash-and-burn. The pass teems with strip malls and outlet shops with such mysterious names as Marc O’Polo. The border checkpoint, now rendered unnecessary because of the Schengen Agreement, has been transformed into a shop peddling luxury goods. The only thing of remote interest is a line of trucks awaiting their turn to load their containers onto flatbed railroad cars for the long journey to voracious Milan and points south.

  We planned on staying the night in Vipiteno (Sterzing, in German), just south of the pass in Italy, but the outer town turns out to be a huddle of factories and logistics centers shivering under the expressway bridges. A few kilometers to the south lies the town of Bressanone (Brixen, in German), the birthplace of the greatest mountaineer of all time, Reinhold Messner. The first to summit all fourteen eight-thousand-meter peaks of the Himalayas and the first to summit Everest solo without using supplemental oxygen are just two of the many awe-inspiring distinctions Messner can claim in climbing circles. And, like our friend Sergio in Bolzano, the great man identifies himself as a South Tyroler first and as an Italian second. Judging our time to be short, we decide to skip Bressanone and continue westward, to the city of Merano.

  This entails crossing the Jaufen Pass (Passo di Monte Giovo). I have never heard of this pass, so I assume it to be unremarkable. I will never learn. The ascent from Vipiteno is promising, a broad, kindly road leading gradually upward through trees and meadows. Once the tree line is passed, the road narrows, but not alarmingly so, and the views open up. Behind us, the Eisack Valley, where Vipiteno is located, spreads out as a distant patchwork of green and auburn and, far beyond to the east, the first peaks of the Dolomites can be glimpsed. It is a glorious golden summer evening, and Ed and I fall into silent contemplation.

  The Jaufen Pass is crested, amid slopes covered in moss and lichen rendered less severe by the gentle light of the early evening. The mood of subdued elation gives way to befuddlement, then concern. The road downward narrows dangerously, and the first in a series of lunatic switchbacks comes up at us suddenly. Soon I am forced to play the stick shift as if I’m in a video arcade. The vertical drops are brutal, the guardrails flimsy—when they are there at all. To the north, beyond the valley floor far, far below, rise the forbidding snowcapped peaks of the Ötztal Alps, where Ötzi lay undisturbed for millennia. The descent is such that even Ed—no acrophobe, as his rock-climber days prove—clears his throat nervously whenever I take a hairpin at too fast a clip. And this happens frequently, as the gradient is very steep. The Jaufen Pass is punishing me for my insouciance as I approached it.

  At last we reach the village of San Leonardo in the Passeier Valley and its wonderfully level ground. For Tyroleans, San Leonardo is sacred turf, as it was the birthplace and home of Andreas Hofer, whose rebellions against the Bavarians and Napoleon’s troops temporarily wrested control of the region from allies of the French. He was eventually captured and taken to Mantua in chains. Napoleon, according to apocryphal accounts, personally ordered his viceroy there to “give him [Hofer] a fair trial and then shoot him.” He instantly became a martyr to the cause of resisting Napoleon in German-speaking Europe. Hofer is to the Tyrol what William Tell is to Switzerland; the only difference is th
at we know Hofer actually existed. A folk song about Hofer’s trial and execution, Zu Mantua in Banden (At Mantua Bound), is today the official anthem of the Austrian state of Tyrol. It is not hard to imagine what Sergio and perhaps Reinhold Messner think of the hometown of Andreas Hofer now being a part of Italy.

  The spa city of Merano is reached within a few minutes. I note the K.u.K. (Kaiserlich und Königlich) sign on a couple of buildings. Apparently, Merano was another haunt of Sisi, who came here to take the waters and relieve her neuroses. Grand nineteenth-century buildings are everywhere, as are establishments offering special spa treatments. Both Ezra Pound and Franz Kafka availed themselves of Merano’s facilities. I find the place confusing and drive around aimlessly. After the third pass before the train station, beside which a small park celebrates Andreas Hofer, Ed yells out, “There’s a hotel!” I pull over and he jumps out. “I’ll see if there are rooms,” he says, impatiently.

  There are, and the innkeeper’s son, Manfred, immediately invites us out to drinks when he learns I’m from Canada. Apparently, his road to Damascus occurred in Vancouver. And it really was a road. When I tell him that the Austrians of Italy are the rudest, most impatient drivers I have encountered this summer, he concurs and says, “I had to go abroad to learn how to relax at the wheel.” We speculate that the mix of Germanic and Latin temperaments might be toxic. Manfred informs us that the mix is by no means a given. Although Merano is half-Germanophone and half-Italophone, the surrounding countryside is overwhelmingly German-speaking. “People here are either bilingual or stupid,” he says gravely, “and most of them are stupid.”

  THE ROAD WESTWARD from Merano through the Val Venosta (Vinschgau, to its German-speaking inhabitants) initially traverses apple orchards and vineyards, proof that this Alpine valley is blessed with a mild climate. They soon give way to Tyrolean villages with needle spires on their churches and a profusion of blooms in their flower boxes. The town of Schlanders boasts the tallest church tower in South Tyrol, its pencil-­like red spire rising ninety-two meters into the sky. These upcountry villages are a favorite destination of German holidaymakers intent on hiking in a sylvan setting surrounded by towering mountains. The Val Venosta does not disappoint.

  At a holiday village called Trafoi, gifted with a magnificent panorama of the surrounding snow-topped peaks, signs appear for the Stelvio Pass. This pass I have heard of and fear. It is the second highest paved pass of the Alps, just twelve meters lower than the Iseran Pass in Savoy. The approach to it is fearsome: forty-seven hairpin turns clinging for dear life to the side of a mountain. The presenters of the BBC’s Top Gear, the popular automotive show, deemed the Stelvio to be the greatest drive in the world.

  I gear up around the twentieth switchback. The guardrail is a sturdy stone wall, knee-high. Just as well, as there are horrifying views of rocks poised to hurtle down the slopes and crush humanity. At one point we pull over and get out of the car. Across the way is a solid wall of stone and cloud. But it is the view downward, from where we have come, that amazes. The roadway and switchbacks seem strewn over the steep green mountain slope like a long length of black string uncoiled. And whoever uncoiled it looped back and forth, back and forth, almost obsessively, so that no straightaway lasts long; the hooklike switchback is king. The dizzying vista stretches on for miles.

  The thinning air is heady, so I let down the windows to feel the breeze. The extremely tortuous approach road to the Stelvio puts me in mind of James Bond. If Rousseau and Mary Shelley made the Alps titillating and Romantic, then the film version of Ian Fleming’s character made them sexy. Of the twenty-four Bond movies, fully a third, by my count, have used the Alps as a location, as an accessory to danger and seduction. This is only natural, for mountains are the terrain of choice for those cursed with an anthropomorphic imagination, which is to say, all of us. There are phallic pinnacles, breast-shaped hills and mountains—and even valleys, when viewed from a great height, can be suggestive. The Dolomites’ lore of legend owes a lot to their arresting shapes. Add to these formations a sense of the perilous, of the sublime, of letting-go, and you have a recipe for the primal. One doesn’t need a dirty mind to think of sex when looking at the Alps; one needs only a subconscious, an id.

  Not that such thoughts are entertaining me as I round yet another excruciating bend. I am focused on keeping the asphalt under us. But the rapid gear-shifting does seem Aston Martinish, like something Sean Connery or Daniel Craig would do, so the difficulty of the task replaces thoughts of sex with those of masculine glamour. I regret that my itinerary this summer will not take me to the peak of Piz Gloria in the Bernese Alps, where a museum devoted to Bond adorns a revolving restaurant used in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as the locale for the nefarious doings of Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

  When we arrive at the pass, slightly carsick, surprise comes in the form of a finish line made with inflated blue tubes. The road beyond it is closed to automotive traffic. The mystery of the absence of oncoming traffic on our way up is resolved: A bicycle rally is taking place. The riders toil up the final few meters on a journey that took them from Bormio, in Lombardy, up to this remote height. The participants are boisterous, talkative, theatrical, gesticulating—in a word, Italian. It took a 2,400-meter climb from Alto Adige/Südtirol finally to feel back in Italy. At lunch, the Wiener schnitzel of Bolzano is replaced by blessed polenta.

  But not for long. The small eminence above the pass is called the Dreisprachenspitze (The Peak of Three Languages). Before World War I, this was the meeting point of Italy, Switzerland, and Austria-Hungary. The last has vanished, but, as we have seen, the German language is alive and well in northern Italy. And, of course, Italian thrives in Lombardy. That leaves just Switzerland, or, more precisely, the canton of Graubünden (or Grisons), where the Alps are up to their usual linguistic tricks. There, one of the languages spoken is Romansh.

  ROMANSH, yet another legacy of the Roman legions, is a distant cousin of Provençal, Occitan, and French. In truth, the plural cousins should be used, for Romansh consists of five entirely distinct dialects whose speakers are unintelligible to each other. To remedy that, a standardized Romansh—Rumantsch Grischun—was created in the 1980s, only to be met with fierce opposition from the dialect speakers who felt their identity threatened. Still, the tongue is a national language of Switzerland, of equal rank with Swiss German, French, and Italian, even though Romansh-speakers make up only half of one percent of the Swiss population. Even in their home canton of Graubünden, Romansh-speakers constitute just one-fifth of the population, ahead of the Italian-speakers there but far behind the Swiss-German–speakers. In an already confusing country with regard to languages, Graubünden takes the palm for linguistic complexity: It is the only Swiss canton to be officially trilingual. Graubünden/Grisons is the exemplar for the human havoc wreaked by tall mountains.

  Ed and I finish our meal and get ready to leave Italy. The rally is over, the road is open. The way down from the Stelvio on this side is as tortuous as the approach to it from Alto Adige. We navigate about a half-dozen switchbacks in the snow until reaching a plateau and a crossroads. To the left, the road to Bormio, Italy; to the right, the road to Switzerland. We go right and pass the international frontier. Almost immediately I regret our choice, for the guardrails on the dozens of hairpins on the descent are flimsy planks of wood horizontally attached to drunken posts. Replacing the wooden planks with toilet paper would be just about as efficacious in deflecting a wayward vehicle.

  I calm my petty automotive despair by making a small detour. The town of Müstair, near the Swiss–Italian border, sits in a high pasture surrounded by Alps. It is the easternmost village in Switzerland, a pretty, linear, Romansh-speaking settlement famous for the Benedictine nunnery of St. John. The convent complex is ancient, said to have been founded in 775 by Charlemagne, out of gratitude for surviving a snowstorm when crossing the Alps. The main church is thus a Carolingian monument, with other buildings added throughout the Middle Ages. But its tr
ue claim to fame—one that merited its inclusion as a UNESCO World Heritage Site—lies in its frescoes, the largest ensemble of medieval frescoes anywhere. Unlike the medieval art at Trent’s Castello del Buonconsiglio, which is Gothic and secular, St. John’s frescoes are Carolingian (ninth century) and Romanesque (eleventh century)—as well as entirely religious in nature.

  Entering the grand old church is akin to stepping inside a pious kaleidoscope. Every available wall surface contains figurative art—we are definitely not in a mosque. We crane our necks as the tour guide enumerates the scenes exuberantly depicted: events from the life of Jesus, a chilling Last Judgment, and a wealth of biblical stories. Behind the high altar, Salome dances before a banqueting King Herod as a servant displays on a platter the head of the convent’s patron, John the Baptist. Ed rightfully remarks that since there are so many stories and legends depicted here, the convent really should be in the Dolomites. Somewhat bedazzled, we leave the church and exit through the gift shop. I pick up a packet of Sister Clara Cavigelli’s aniseed biscuits, which we munch on the way back to the road leading down to the valley known as the Engadine.

  That road, sinuous and steep, soon leads us into a wilderness. This swath of mountain, forest, and lake is Switzerland’s only national park, created in 1914. In a country so fashioned by the hand of man, the park reminds us of what Switzerland was like before the dawn of tourism, the rise of industry, and the encroachment of the agrarian and pastoral. At a turnout where we stop to admire a panoramic view, we are delighted to see a marmot scrambling across a gently sloping rockface. Display boards tell of other creatures thriving here: chamois, ibex, and eagle.