2023-06-25 22:01:09
by Lorenzo Cremonesi
Traditions have their symbols. Today we seek the synthesis between inheritance and freedom, but reasonableness and respect are needed. Removing the crosses from the tops appears as an act of provocative and irrational violence
Traditions are part of our history, of individual and above all collective memory. Without traditions we are naked, condemned to an eternal present, which obviously has a past, but we no longer have the tools to know and pass on. And traditions have their symbols, whose meanings change over time. One of them is the crosses on the Alpine peaks. What to do? Shoot them down? Replace them, for example with statues of the Buddha, or with simple little men of stones? Leave the ones that are there, but not add others? The ancient debate was already discussed at the beginning of the Italian Alpine Club at the end of the 19th century, when the unitary state born of the secular Risorgimento was still clashing with the Church preceding the Lateran Pacts. Later Fascism worked to amalgamate religious symbology with that of patriotism.
In the early seventies of the twentieth century, when the wind of the 1968 cultural revolution also reached mountaineering circles, there was no shortage of voices from young rock climbers with flexible shoes determined to supplant the universe of rigid ones, who still glorified the struggle with the alp in the God’s blessing. Today those controversies are once again shaking the mountaineering world pushed by the most radical environmentalists and are obviously fueled by the wider debate on cancel culture that has grown up in Italian politics and throughout the West. And this case, too, turned into an argumentative confrontation (hard to say how useful it is). Reasonability and respect are needed. Removing the crosses from the tops appears as an act of provocative and irrational violence, it violates our history. Marco Albino Ferrari, writer and cultural director of the Cai, says he is absolutely against it and indeed explains that it is necessary to counter those extremists who cancel the difference between the natural environment and the cultural landscape. The crosses on the peaks are part of us, believers or not, Christians or believers of any other religion, tearing them down would mean erasing us.
June 25, 2023 (change June 25, 2023 | 10:00 PM)
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