Military cemetery on mount Ortigara.

“One day in May 1920, three young men went up the Ortigara through the Sentiero del Civeron first and the Passo di Val Caldiera then. Arriving where the trail leaves the precipices of Valsugana to merge into the Plateau,before their eyes appeared a hideous vision. Among the yellowish and crushed rocks, among sheets of dirty snow, tangled barbed wire as far as the eye can see, the remains of trenches and stations, caves, tattered uniforms, smashed helmets, shoes, broken weapons, broken arms, lunchboxes, backpacks, gas masks, any kind of ammunition, cans, cases, splinters of bombs of any caliber, under the spring sky there were hundreds and hundreds of rotting corpses, skeletons, skulls, human limbs, bones. And not a blade of grass, not a flower, not the song of a bird.”

From “Amore di confine” (Border love), “Il mortaio del primotenente Hans Stiegland” (The mortar of First Lieutenant Hans Stiegland).

The context

Mario Rigoni Stern on mount Ortigara, during the “Adunata degli Alpini” in Asiago, 2006.

In this short story the writer reconstructs the events of the war and the immediate postwar period on the other side of the front, the Austro-Hungarian Trentino, with the exodus and then the return of entire populations, and the wounds of the conflict not yet healed. The young protagonists climb the steep and panoramic northern walls of the Valsugana looking for some abandoned cannon to bring down in town to make the bells of their church, requisitioned by the Imperial Army during the war to build weapons. The terrible devastation in front of their eyes evokes more vivid and intense descriptions present in the work of the writer, in particular the Monte Zebio or the destruction of Asiago in “L’anno della vittoria” (The year of the victory).

The route

The “Madonnina del Lozze” (ph: Seergio Dalle Ave).

The Sentiero della Caldiera described in the story may be the initial part (CAI path 206) of a variant, less crowded but spectacular in terms of scenic and natural beauty and with a few passage for experienced hikers, to return from the Ortigara peaks to Piazzale Lozze. Take route 206 heading west from the Austrian war memorial, and rapidly descend down the valley leaving to the left the Passo di Val Caldiera, until you cross at an altitude of 1,970 metres, just a few metres before the Ricovero De Medo, the unmarked path that cuts to the east the northern side of the Ortigara. On this path, after about a kilometre you come to a picturesque Austrian military cemetery overlooking the Valsugana. Then, continuing east, with a difficult final climb you go up to the Passo dell’Agnella (2,008 m, Austrian fortifications) and here you find the variant of the path 840 which leads either eastward to Cima della Caldiera (2,124 m), or heading south to Baito Ortigara and the outward route.