The Alps

by Stephen O'Shea

  The final kilometers of the descent compete with the Italian side of the Stelvio for the number of giddy hairpins. At last we reach the valley town of Zernez, where yet another bike rally is just ending. I drive across a bridge spanning a fast-flowing river: It is the Inn, my old friend from Innsbruck. Engadine means “Valley of the Inn People” in Romansh. And that bewitching language can be heard in the streets and café terraces of Zernez. I try to get in the swing as the waitress approaches our table. “Allegra!” I cry out, using the Romansh word for “hello.” She looks bored and replies, in English, “We don’t serve cocktails.”

  We drive upstream for the final stage of our journey. Villages with such intriguing names as S-chanf, Cinuos-chel, and Zuoz file past. The last is a particularly picturesque village, its old houses exhibiting the colorful sgraffito plasterwork typical of the Engadine. Façades and entranceways are embellished with figurative and geometric decorations, lending the Romansh settlement an Italianate air. These age-old places—many date at least from the ninth century—have kept up traditions that seem to predate Christianity. One is an Alpine whipping day, the Chalandmarz (First Day of March), when boys roam the streets with cowbells and then later lash the ground to drive away evil spirits and awaken the fairies of spring.

  The Engadine’s most famous destination, St. Moritz, is a lakeside jewel of grand hotels and luxury shops and the granddaddy (or perhaps dowager) of Alpine winter tourism and sport. In 1864, local hotelier Johannes Badrutt changed the course of Alpine history by inviting four well-heeled English tourists who had summered in St. Moritz to come and visit in the winter. Badrutt would foot the bill. That foursome of intrepid Britons came and loved what they saw: stunning scenery, pristine snow, and a frozen lake under sunny skies (St. Moritz enjoys three hundred days of sunshine annually). The genie was out of the bottle. Within a generation, hordes of wealthy foreign tourists flocked to the resort, and the boom in winter sports had begun. Grand hotels sprang up to meet the demand and ski slopes were created and groomed. Polo games were staged on the lake, sleigh rides tinkled through the streets, and string quartets played in hotel lobbies. The Alps would never be the same.

  What Monte Carlo is to the Med, St. Moritz is to the Alps. Throughout the twentieth century, the resort grew in importance and was emulated elsewhere, as at Megève in Savoy. In 1928 and 1948, St. Moritz hosted the Winter Olympics, elegant affairs staged for the moneyed leisure class. Interestingly, the town was going to team up with neighboring Davos to bid for the 2022 Winter Games, but the cost of infrastructure improvements and the like led to the bid being withdrawn, showing that the present-day Olympics have become such a monster that even two of the most exclusive resorts in the world cannot afford to host them.

  And exclusive it is. In a fruitless search for a cheap hotel, Ed and I drive through a pounding rainstorm up hilly boulevards of relentless upscale merchandise. En route, we pass St. Moritz’s famed (in St. Moritz, anyway) leaning medieval church tower, which tourist brochures invariably state is more askew than its iconic cousin in Pisa. At last we settle on two hostelries, which then engage in a most un-European war of price-cutting for our business. It is definitely the off-season.

  Soaked from our walk, we take dinner at Pavarotti and Friends, a terroir Italian establishment hung with ham and bursting with bottles. The owner is the spitting image of the late, great Italian tenor. The resemblance is uncanny. Like Pavarotti, he is a native of Emilia-Romagna, settled in St. Moritz for twenty years, but we cannot tease out of him an admission that he is related to the singer. Expectation quashes nosiness when the Pavarotti doppelgänger recognizes Ed, following his wine choice, as a fellow bon vivant and tells us he “will take care of us.” A plate of mind-boggling salumeria arrives at our table, followed by plates of steaming pappardelle laced with white truffle shavings. The effect is narcotic. The Wiener schnitzel of Bolzano fades into memory, and the lard line becomes mercifully elastic. Ed and I fall into gustatory thralldom, barely able to pay attention to the flat screen where the World Cup final is taking place. We finally rouse ourselves to sporting awareness after a shared tiramisu and a caffè corretto or three—that is, a shot of espresso laced with grappa. We don’t need to be totally sober as the Germany–Argentina final reaches its inevitable conclusion, the game of soccer having been immortally defined by the English footballer Gary Lineker: “Football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for ninety minutes and at the end, the Germans always win.”

  The rain lets up the next morning. A few short kilometers west of St. Moritz, past shimmering blue lakes, lies the village of Sils Maria. It is exquisitely situated, attracting tourists from the time when tourism was not the mainstay of the Engadine. Hermann Hesse came here, as did, famously, Friedrich Nietzsche. The latter summered in Sils for much of the 1880s, untroubled by whipped horses, as he was in Turin, though supposedly he was pelted with pebbles by local schoolchildren as he moodily walked the lakeshore. Nietzsche wrote much of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the village, claiming that the book’s promotion of the eternal recurrence of things—a philosophical notion positing, very broadly, that there is nothing new under the sun—occurred to him when regarding a “pyramidal block of stone” to the west of Sils Maria. Indeed, that fearsome block of the Alps is clearly visible from the door of Nietzsche’s house, now a museum, in the village. Alas, as this is Monday, the Nietzsche-Haus is closed to the public.

  I am doubly disappointed, as the view from Nietzsche’s writing desk, aside from taking in the Alpine block of stone, also affords a glimpse of a little chalet behind some trees. That chalet’s claim to fame lies in a vacationing young Dutch girl who stayed there in the 1930s—Anne Frank. Her father, an avid photographer, documented their stays there, with Anne playing beneath the window once pensively looked through by Nietzsche. Both were, in different ways, victims of the Nazis. Anne was deported and killed in a death camp, and Nietzsche’s exalted thought was perverted by them to become virulent racism. The juxtaposition is as arresting as that in the salt-mountain village of Altaussee in the Salzkammergut, when, with a generation separating them, Theodor Herzl and Adolf Eichmann stayed. Local lore in Sils has it that, upon the opening of the museum, an elderly woman of the village entered it on a whim and saw, to her great surprise, pictures of a childhood friend with whom she had played in the 1930s. It had to be explained to her who that friend was: Anne Frank.

  Latterly, the place has become known through Clouds of Sils Maria, a French film, starring Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart, about the cruelty of aging for an actress and the vagaries of opportunity for her younger counterparts. The clouds in the title refer to the Maloja Snake, a meteorological phenomenon observed in the autumn, when warm air from the neighboring Italian lake district crests the low Maloja Pass (which is alongside Nietzsche’s “pyramidal block of stone”), turns into mist at the higher elevation, then descends into the Engadine and its lakes to follow their serpentine contours to well beyond St. Moritz.

  Back in the car, Ed and I marvel at the multiple stories of this week, legendary and lived, in these mountains. Pagan, Christian, fairylike, plutocratic, tragic—they all seem connected to the unearthly landscape. These are the human stories of the Alps, each one trying in its own way to make sense of what, until recently, could not be explained. But the communities living in the Alps are not geologists, they are observers of their surroundings and creators of their languages and of their worlds. Their imagination has tried to account for these gigantic stone monsters. That effort is noble but doomed to failure. The Alps cannot be encompassed, tamed, understood—they surpass our powers and always will.

  _______

  * Henceforth, all toponyms in the Dolomites will be given in Italian, to avoid confusion. As an example: The name of this town in German is Wolkenstein.

  11. PLÖCKEN AND VRŠIČ PASSES

  THE LAST STAGE of my Alpine summer has its beginnings in a reunion with two rocky acquaintances. To the north of the town where I have spent the night�
��Lienz, Austria—rise the forbidding heights of the Grossglockner; to the south of town stand the Dolomites, here a screen of tall mountains corrugated by ravines and divided into sharp, hostile rockfaces. Locally, their zombie apocalypse appearance has never escaped notice: they are known in Lienz as “the Fiends.”

  My reason for starting here is to score the trifecta in one day. I want to go from the Germanic through the Latin and end in the Slavic. My travels have convinced me that the Alps, so magnificent in their rocky majesty, are also subversive, almost underground agents (a strange thing to say about mountains) in creating and crafting human geography. We cannot truly understand geological time, but we can get our heads around our shared human past and present. The cleavages and partitions—the lard line, the linguistic divide, among others—are fostered by the spectacular topography placed square in the middle of Europe.

  I follow the River Drava out of town. As Lienz is located in a tiny enclave of Tyrol, I cross almost immediately into the Austrian state of Carinthia, the one that hitchhiker Reinhard characterized as being peopled by Fascists. Unlike Tyrol, which looks longingly southward toward its lost province of South Tyrol in Italy, Carinthia turns its back on the south, where the Slavs of the Balkans live. Some of these Slavs have crossed the Alps to settle in Carinthia, which has caused friction with nativist Austrians. This, combined with economic distress in the 1980s, led to the rise of a far-right party headed by a colorful provocateur, Jörg Haider. Twice governor of Carinthia, the xenophobic Haider was in the habit of saying nice things about the Nazis and bad things about the Jews. Much of the rest of Europe recoiled in horror from his antics. That all came to an end on 11 October 2008, when Haider, after a booze-fueled evening at a gay club, drunkenly crashed his car on a bridge, dying in a blazing inferno near Klagenfurt, Carinthia’s capital. Thirty thousand people showed up for his funeral, and a bridge spanning the Drava was named after him. I have decided not to stay in Carinthia.

  Instead, I’m heading for the Plöcken Pass and Italy—more specifically, the region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia. The Friuli part of that tripartite region has a distinctive language, which is spoken alongside mainstream Italian. Once again, the Alps wreak havoc with communication.

  The ascent begins in a village called Oberdrauburg. The drive up, while steep and studded with switchbacks so pitched one has the impression of driving in a velodrome, holds no terrors for me. Trees are everywhere, crowding the roadway, hiding the horrifying views, although every now and then a limestone monolith appears in the distance, stretching far into the blue. Two Austrian bikers, a mini-schnitzel whose leather jackets display a NASCAR-like multitude of brand advertisements, pass me at tremendous speed, then take the bend ahead, their knees a mere inch from the asphalt. Why do these soon-to-be-seriously-injured young men like to lean so much? And why can’t they understand the don’t-be-stupid road signs? A sign in German with an exclamation mark announces a rough ride in one hundred meters—and it is not kidding. For the first time in my Alpine summer, the road surface takes on a New-Hampshire-in-the-spring aspect, with frost heaves torturing the pavement. The consequent juddering is hard on the shocks and the coccyx.

  At last I reach the pass. No sign, no bikers, only a restaurant resolutely on the piggy side of the lard line. I ponder this as I begin the easy descent through the trees. Why the discretion? After all, the pass marks an important invisible boundary between the Germanic and the Latin. Eventually I come out on level ground—a high valley floor with three villages: Laas, Kötschach, and Mauthen. All of the signage is in German. I scratch my head: Is Friuli another Alto Adige, a place where German-­speaking Italians vent their frustration at not belonging to Austria? Enlightenment finally comes in one road sign that reads: PLÖCKENPASS ITALIEN 14.

  I was mistaken, I am still in Austria! After scrutinizing my road map, I realize that the height I just cleared, in the Gailtaler Alps, is called the Gailberg Saddle. Ahead of me, to the south, rise the Carnic Alps, which is the frontier of Italy and Austria and thus the location of the international pass. Yet another sign informs me that there is a World War I museum in this high valley, evoking in my mind the frightening, bloody past of these mountains. The Carnic Alps and the Dolomites, unbelievably, formed part of the Italian Front of the Great War, fought here between Italians and the multiethnic armies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Whereas the Western Front consisted mostly of a dreadful slog in the wet plains of Flanders and northern France, the Italian Front was a high-wire act of natural danger added to that supplied by the opposing army’s artillery. It comes as something of a shock when I see that the Dolomites’ Tre Cime di Lavaredo (the Three Peaks visited with Ed in a hailstorm) and the summit ridge of the mighty Marmolada formed part of the no-man’s-land of this front. This was beyond madness, clinging to mountainsides in the depth of winter and taking potshots at a similarly shivering enemy, all the while enduring the usual perils. On 11 December 1916, known to history as White Friday, several thousand soldiers died in avalanches. Tradition usually cites ten thousand deaths, though this is now disputed. What is not disputed is that far more of the Great War soldiers perished by being buried in the snow than by being gassed. As the annual snows retreat, corpses of these unfortunates are still being found in the mountains.

  The Italians entered the war in 1915, after toying with the idea of fighting with Germany and Austria, with whom they had formed the Triple Alliance in 1882. Instead, they picked the Triple Entente (France, Britain, Russia), after being promised territorial gains at the expense of the Austrians in the secret Treaty of London. The Entente promised the Italians the moon, so eager was it to keep them on its side. Rome wanted all of the Dalmatian (Adriatic) coast down to Albania. There were pockets of Italian-speakers in what is now Slovenia and Croatia, but hardly enough to justify annexation to the Kingdom of Italy. After the war, the French and the English reneged on most of the provisions of the Treaty of London, particularly those relating to the Dalmatian coast, causing widespread furor in Italy and spurring its interwar expansionism in Africa.

  As for Austria-Hungary and its war goals, the empire just wanted to hang on to its possessions south of the Alps, particularly the city of Trieste, which had been its major port for more than two hundred years.

  When Italy attacked the Austrians in May of 1915, the tenor of the war was expressed by Gabriele d’Annunzio, a novelist and journalist known for his carnal enthusiasms and nationalist exultations as the self-styled “poet of slaughter.” He became Italy’s chief propagandist of the war effort, writing on the first day of the first offensive, “We are fighting with arms, we are waging our war, the blood is spurting from the veins of Italy! … The slaughter begins, the destruction begins. One of our people has died at sea, another on land. All these people, who yesterday thronged in the streets and squares, loudly demanding war, are full of veins, full of blood; and that blood begins to flow…. We have no other value but that of our blood to be shed.” D’Annunzio would get his way: By war’s end, 689,000 Italian soldiers were dead, about one million were seriously disabled, and an estimated six hundred thousand Italian civilians died due to harsh conditions created by the war. Most of the Italian and Austro-Hungarian military deaths occurred in the Alps.

  I grip the wheel tightly in expectation as I near the approach road to the Plöcken Pass, once the Alpine no-man’s-land of World War I. If the Gailberg Saddle was tough, then the higher pass will undoubtedly be an ordeal. But no, to my surprise, the road upward is a breeze, its only demerit being the horrific rockface in front of me, which I will somehow have to drive around. After a dozen or so disorienting switchbacks, the road heads into a long avalanche gallery that then becomes a tunnel. When I emerge from this—blam!—I’m at the border and I cross the invisible language line, from the German to the Italian. Plöcken Pass becomes the Passo di Monte Croce Carnico. I pull over beside my friends, about forty motorcycles gleaming in the sunshine. The men lounge on a restaurant terrace, a sea of black leather.

  The
descent from the pass is mercifully free of other drivers. As I head downward, I experience and approve of an Italian innovation: hairpin tunnels. The Italians, by common agreement, are the best Alpine road and rail engineers. Switzerland’s marvelous transportation infrastructure owes a lot not only to Alfred Nobel’s dynamite but also to the Italian engineers and workers who crafted many of its tunnels and viaducts. The roadway off this mountain, its tunnels numerous, seems specifically created to calm the fears of the acrophobe. But it’s not that I’m afraid of heights….

  When I arrive on the valley floor, the houses are more colorful—orange, even red—than their Austrian counterparts. Is it my imagination or is the color beige in Italy brighter than elsewhere? As the billboards flash by, I realize that there is a new Anglicism that has conquered the Continent. In the nineteenth century, it was the water closet, the WC, demanded by persnickety English tourists. Now it is Outlet, never translated into the local language, as in Outlet Shops, Outlet Village, and Factory Outlet.

  “DOTTORE! Dottore!”

  I look up and see an old man wagging his finger at me. I am in the main piazza of Tolmezzo (in Friulian: Tumeiç), fishing for change to feed the meter. I glance at my watch. Noon. Parking is free at lunchtime. I thank the gentleman and head under the old arcades to a restaurant terrace bedecked with checkered tablecloths. As the insalata caprese—yet another imitator of the Italian tricolor—is placed before me, I sigh with contentment. No heavy creamy dressing on this side of the lard line. I lift my fork to my mouth and watch a large flock of pigeons flap its way up and over the bright piazza.