Perhaps nobody in the world knows the rose garden like he does. For Antonio Bernard – who was born there in Val di Fassa, lived there for a few years because his family brought him to Parma as a boy, but always returned – that mountain range in the heart of the Dolomites between Trento and Bolzano, he has no secrets: Bernard has traveled all the mountaineering routes and also created new routes, between the towers that have made him famous, the sheer walls, the typically rugged peaks of the Dolomites and the hidden gorges up to three thousand meters above sea level at the highest point that touches the sky seems.
In 2008 he decided to make his extraordinary wealth of knowledge and experience available on the wall, creating “The New Guide to the Rose Garden” (Sport Natura series by Edizioni Mediterranee), a work so appreciated by experts and professionals and the Itas Prize won. combined with the Trento Festival, the most prestigious literary prize for non-fiction books on mountain themes. «I’ve written several guides dedicated to our mountains – explains Bernard – but I love this one more than the others, not so much for the awards I’ve received, which I’m sure flattered, but because the book combines three passions that guide my life have coined . The first is mountaineering: when I was eight years old, my sister and I climbed the mountain in front of my house for the first time, tied to a rope. The second passion is the almost instinctive attachment to the Catinaccio group, which is practically my home: from my room in Pozza di Fassa I can see its walls, I have climbed them all, even together with famous mountaineers like Alessandro Gogna and Graziano Maffei, and with some of them I have identified several new itineraries. The third passion is writing. Guides are niche books, but they have their own market. As a failed writer, I also like to write short stories, but they have always stuck with me».
Bernard loved literature, but the vicissitudes of his life led him to graduate in languages from Bocconi and to teach English in high school (last at Ulivi High School) until retirement age: ‘The teaching – he points out – has enabled me I have plenty of free time to pursue my passions, but it made it virtually impossible for me to tackle the Himalayan walls for a very trivial reason: the school holidays coincide with the rainy season. When I tried I bought plane tickets but the ministry advised me not to go because there was war between India and Pakistan. So outside of Europe I have only climbed Mount Kenya ».
Bernard, enrolled at the Cai since he was twenty, founded the Mountaineering School of Parma together with Pietro Menozzi, directed the National School of Youth Mountaineering and was also elected President of the Cai Parma, but he did like Celestino V: “I turned down the post – he admits – because I didn’t feel qualified to cast it”.
His 1200 climbing tours were experienced mainly in the Alps, in Italy, but also in France, Austria and Switzerland. He describes himself as a “Dolomitist”. On the east face of the Rosengarten, the summit he climbed as a child, he mastered 20 routes, but spanned the entire Alpine range: “On the Weissen – he remembers – I rode the direct route of the Americans. To conquer the summit of Dru we climbed 23 hours without a break, we left at night and arrived the night after ». And the Steger Direct Trail is also reminiscent of another undertaking, descending an abyss of 700 meters in altitude alone without abseiling, which no one has done before. Who knows how many risks he will have taken in his countless face-to-face adventures with the rock! But Bernard has a philosophy of his own: “I don’t think I took any risks – he specifies – because I’ve always been afraid, not afraid but that fear that requires you to always be attentive and focused, with three of four supports when climbing without a rope”.
But once it happened. Overconfidence and a moment of distraction betrayed him 5 years ago: “I was in a climbing gym in Val di Fassa – he recalls – I gave information to another climber, I thought I had already secured myself for a missed maneuver instead , I found myself almost 75 years old, flying 30 feet, with 23 fractures, a punctured lung and the memory of that fact erased. It was tough but went well, archived experience and I have resumed climbing albeit in an age appropriate manner. That between me and the mountains there is a love that never ends – he concludes – because the mountains are nature, I like to experience the environment, enjoy the landscape. Mountaineering is an adventure surrounded by nature. That’s why I teach climbing to young people, although I know it’s not true that climbing a mountain makes you better, but the mountain helps you discover what you have inside you, if you don’t have anything you don’t discover anything ».
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