Racconti Alpini (Italian Edition)

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About Carlo Emilio Gadda. Carlo Emilio Gadda was an Italian writer and poet. He belongs to the tradition of the language innovators, writers that played with the somewhat stiff standard pre-war Italian language, and added elements of dialects, technical jargon and wordplay. Gadda was a practising engineer from Milan, and he both loved and hated his job.

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Critics have compared him to other writers with a scientific background Carlo Emilio Gadda was an Italian writer and poet. These monuments reflect the multinational character of the forces and the reconciliation which slowly followed in the last decades. At the top of the front line of the Ortigara, among rocks shattered by artillery fire and a labyrinth of trenches, grottoes and holes, Italian and Austrian memorials are placed a few hundred meters from each other but the first was built in and the second only in the s, delayed by episodes of separatist terrorism in South Tirol-Alto Adige, an Italian province annexed after with a majority of German-speaking inhabitants.

A Hungarian-Romanian and a Croat cemetery are not far off. On Mount Grappa further structures have recently been erected by Czechs, Slovaks and Slovenians, some of which were built only after the fall of the Berlin wall, when those countries acquired independence and sought to rediscover their separate national histories.

Racconti di montagna

German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers are buried alongside Italians at the gigantic Sacrario at the top of Mount Grappa. French and British troops fought on the Italian front as well, to complete the European nature of the carnage. These mountain trenches should be a mandatory visit for those who argue that the European union is a failure and a threat to freedom. In the Italian high command became frustrated by the limited results of continued attacks. Italians had always enjoyed an advantage in troop numbers over the Austro-Hungarians, but they were at a disadvantage in terms of strategic position, artillery, machine guns, and smaller equipment Italian gas masks were of cardboard and did not have a proper filter, unlike their German counterparts.

At the beginning of the war, the Austrians had retreated to dominant positions near mountain tops which were easy to defend. The Italian offensive of June was intended to conquer those mountain tops, to threaten the valleys behind, and shorten the front line — and thereby to free more troops for the main direction of attack against Austria.

Fighting on that front line had already lasted for more than a year after the Strafexpedition had been stopped and partially rolled back by the Italians in the summer of When attacking the Ortigara, the Italians had to cross a valley saturated by gas and climb uphill against fire from hidden machine guns. Kilometres of trenches and underground artillery and machine gun placements run from the top of the Ortigara in Austrian hands and the top of the Cima della Caldiera in Italian hands, all the way down to the Altopiano.

The Italians finally conquered an important position high up the Ortigara, only to be pushed back shortly after by a counterattack of Austrian Sturmtruppen shock troops with hand grenades and flamethrowers. After the end of the war, the area of the high plateau of Asiago where the mountains Ortigara and Zebio are located was hit by unemployment and emigration. It was impoverished by the destruction of war and the hazardous presence of mines in farming land. A century after the war, unexploded ordnance still causes victims among workers ploughing the fields, despite clearing operations and a full government-led reconstruction of towns such Asiago.

In the s and s, a part of the population managed to survive by working on their own as recuperanti , digging up and selling scrap metal from the battlefields for recycling. Every type of metal had its price; such income could finance a bride's dowry or a hard winter's subsistence, as the novelist Mario Rigoni Stern recalled in his short stories Stern was born in Asiago and was an alpine soldier in WWII.

Also, various chemicals released in the process caused poisoning. The recuperanti became experts at locating artillery units, depots, and objects.

They even found an Italian military bicycle on the slopes of the Ortigara. This is one of the best European books on WWI, written by a soldier who had lived in the midst of the bloodbath. Emilio Lussu was a Sardinian student and interventionist. He enrolled as a volunteer in , after having led the agitation for war at the University of Cagliari Sardinia.

He then spent three years on the first line as a captain of the Sassari Brigade. The most decorated Italian unit of WWI, the Brigata Sassari was composed of Sardinian peasants, shepherds and hunters, nicknamed the "red devils" by the Austrians. Lussu displayed courage in trench fighting and respect for the troops.

He personally earned three medals, but also perceived the absurd way in which strategies were devised and military discipline was applied. He came to despise high-ranking officers who sent their men to useless carnage with utter stupidity and disregard for human life. After the war he created a regionalist party in Sardinia, entered Parliament, and was later sent as a political prisoner to an island under Fascism. I organised my visit to Mount Zebio's front line following Lussu's narrative. Just a month earlier I had visited Lussu's home town Armungia in Sardinia, where his house still stands and a museum is dedicated to him and his wife Joyce, an Italian poet of English origins.

Mount Zebio was one of the strongholds chosen as a retreat position by the Austro-Hungarian army in , because of the advantages its dominance offered to defenders. Lussu's Sassari brigade arrived after several days' pursuit of the rearguard of the rapidly redeploying Austro-Hungarian army. Italian trenchwork immediately began after the first futile frontal assault on the lines that the Austrians had prepared in advance.

The front became immobile. Today the site is an open-air eco-museum; notwithstanding its dramatic history, it offers a relaxing walk in a fragrant and peaceful landscape, inspiring awe for the beauty of mountain forests pictures 14 and Straying from the main path which followed the Austrian positions, I suddenly found myself in front of a sign indicating Lussu's observation point "Lunetta Lussu" , where some of the most memorable and horrible episodes recalled in his accounts took place.

One Italian observation point offered a particularly good view of the enemy's defences and lines of communication, but it was identified by the Austrians, who posted a sniper with a rifle fixed on a tripod, to shoot every time the minuscule peephole would be opened. Despite official prohibition to use that observation hole during the day, several Italian privates and officers were injured or killed there, because they had, against orders, put themselves in the line of fire out of ignorance, arrogance or in a pointless display of courage and pride.

So I decided to sit there and read a book that I had bought the previous day in the refuge of the Alpini on the Ortigara.

• The Kaisers Yanks!
• yumenoimi (Japanese Edition)!
• Revolution Underway (Gli emersi narrativa) (Italian Edition).
• Plaidoyer dune mauvaise fille (Hors collection) (French Edition);
• Exsilium (The Seventh Seal Book 2);
• See a Problem?!

One of them saw me; amused, he turned to one of his friends: He is reading your book! I met Ruggero Dal Molin, one of the greatest experts on the wartime history of these mountains. We had a good chat about Lussu, the Brigata Sassari and Mount Zebio, at the end of which he concluded, "so you are not here by chance!

Racconti di montagna by Davide Longo

He pointed me to what he considered to be Lussu's real position a few dozen metres downwards, and then we parted company. The remnants of the Italian trenches are in poor state and not very visible, but the no man's land offers interesting discoveries and the Austrian positions are more significant to connect with Lussu's narrative. Nature has entirely reclaimed its space, new trees have grown, intense perfume, animals and insects have returned, but pieces of large shells can still be found occasionally.

Some dead trees are still standing almost a century after the end of fighting, with bullets still planted in them. As Lussu recalled, his unit was bombed by a small-calibre cannon 37 millimetres but it was not possible to trace the latter's position. Up at the top of the crest I found it: Lussu also recalled one of the many absurd exercises of hierarchical authority and stupidity, when one of his fellow officers was ordered to crawl out at dawn to cut with pincers the Austrian barbed wires in order to open a way for an infantry attack.

The Italian pincers were, according to Lussu, either in total disrepair or of base quality because of corrupt suppliers , and did not work properly; despite clear evidence, the commanding officer sent a junior officer and soldiers to a pointless death. Out of the trenches, alone in open daylight view, they had no chance of survival. On the Austrian slopes in front of the Sardinian lines I was able to find some remnants of the concrete installations supporting the barbed wire which had made the Austrian defences unassailable by classic Italian artillery fire.

The barbed wire that cost the life of Lussu's companions was still there in some areas, thick and repulsive as a century earlier. Mount Grappa was the key resistance point of Italian defences in after the collapse of Caporetto and the loss of half of the Veneto Region to an Austro-German offensive, stopped only at the Piave river. The front was so close to Venice that the Austrians bombed it copiously, as they had already done in to crush the resistance of the last Republic of Venice. The Grappa, in front of the city of Bassano del Grappa, was the connecting point between the old Dolomite front and the last-ditch defences planned to run along the Piave all the way to the Adriatic sea.

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In those days of October-November , the losses of the Italian army and the advancing central powers questioned the capacity of Italy to remain in the war — indeed, after merely fifty years of national unification, the survival of Italy itself. With their back to the wall, the Italians stood firm on the Grappa and halted the Austro-Hungarians there for a year, despite repeated attacks, until the counteroffensive of October , which concluded the war with an Italian victory and the disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Today the Grappa still shows the scars of the war, riddled with holes from explosions, trenches, and military roads picture Very little vegetation has grown to cover then, despite a favourable altitude below 1, metres. Be the first to review this item Would you like to tell us about a lower price?

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