The day Toni Gobbi died, it was forbidden to mention his name in Courmayeur, the town that guards the access to Mont Blanc from Italy. It was not an official matter, there was no municipal side that imposed such silence. It was an emotional consequence, the pain, the disbelief of the loss, a hole that banished from conversations the name and surname of the most beloved, charismatic and revolutionary mountain guide that the people had known. To avoid having to bear the open wound of losing him, everyone pretended that a bad dream had taken him away. Toni Gobbi's grandson, Oliviero Gobbi, never met him, and his figure was always ghostly: neither his father, his mother, nor his grandmother spoke about him. “But I went to my grandmother's house, and that was like a frozen image in which I could see Toni's mountain jackets, his crampons, his ice axe, his skis… everything seemed ready for him to return from the mountain in a moment. to another”… only it never happened, explains Oliviero. An avalanche had killed him, along with three of his clients, on a simple mountain skiing trip to Sassopiatto, in 1970, when he was 56 years old. Everyone believed, however, that he would die at the wheel, because he had learned to drive late and loved to push the accelerator. No one would ever accept that the mountain took them away.
When his grandmother died in 2008, Oliviero decided to bring his grandfather's inheritance to light, resurrect him in a way. It seemed too sad to him that oblivion finished him off. fifteen years later the documentary has just premiered at the BBK Mendifilm in Bilbao Toni's footprint, which is both a tribute to the lost figure and a legacy for new generations of guides and mountaineers who wish to understand his way of relating to the mountains.
Toni Gobbi was, surely, the first Courmayeur guide who was not born there. He came from Veneto and had studied law: he was a cultured guy, extremely elegant, with the demeanor of an actor and an irrepressible love for the mountains, but all of this was only an obstacle to being accepted in the town and to joining the company of guides. In a rural, isolated community (the Mont Blanc tunnel had not yet been built), strangers were strangers for life. He began working as a teacher, along with his wife, opened a bookstore and a store selling mountain articles and in 1946 he managed to be accepted as a local guide: “He had the intelligence not to force our world with his presence and at the same time he brought a “breath of fresh air, with education,” recalls Ruggero Pellin, also a guide, and one of those interviewed by Oliviero.
If Toni had his store, his grandson Oliviero is now the CEO and owner of Grivel, a world-famous company that manufactures, above all, crampons and ice axes and that sponsors a good part of the mountaineering elite. In the 1950s, the image of Walter Bonatti, for many the greatest mountaineer who ever existed and ever will exist, shone like a beacon. If Bonatti was God, those who were accepted as rope companions could be designated as his apostles. Toni Gobbi was one of them, and together they solved the first ascent of the Grand Pilier D' Angle, a 4,243 meter mass of rock and ice whose summit remained unreached and which appears as one of the guardians of Mont Blanc. The documentary recovers a television interview in which the journalist asks the protagonists if they would do it again: “Why, if we have just returned?”, Bonatti replies with some sarcasm.
More correctly, Gobbi tries to put out the small fire by trying to explain that there are many challenges to face and that mountaineering is not a mere repetition of the same move. Toni Gobbi was always willing to create a healthy atmosphere. “But he had a slightly dark side, let's say: in the mountains he had a military behavior with his clients and if he said that this was white, it was. He could scold his clients if they didn't do what he said, but I think the guide has to be authoritarian when making decisions that affect the safety of the group,” explains Oliveiro and echoes other testimonies that assure that his Gray eyes could oscillate between sweetness and cold. “Bonatti and Gobbi got along very well, but Bonatti got along badly with almost all of the Courmayeur guides because he had a strong character, a trait that should not be confused with having a bad character,” he explains. In 1958, Bonatti and Gobbi joined again in a great Italian expedition to take on Gasherbrum IV (7,925 m), a mountain that, although it barely reached 8,000 meters, is much more technical and complex than any of the eight thousand that surround her. On this occasion, everyone knew that Bonatti had chosen Carlo Mauri to reach the top, and Gobbi was one of those who worked the hardest in this regard, accepting that he would lose prominence. His ability to read the mountain and organize strategy was one of the reasons for the success of the expedition.
The process of investigating his grandfather's life gave Oliviero a unique perspective on his figure and numerous surprises: “It is incredible with how intensely and clearly these 90-year-old people remembered my grandfather, anecdotes, dates, everything as if there were It happened not 50 or 60 years ago, but yesterday. We found almost four hours of video filmed by different clients in which my grandfather appears, and that made me decide to make a documentary instead of just writing his story.” One of the most accurate testimonies comes from Toni's younger sister, Marilena, who was born 17 years later. Toni was almost a father to her, and now, despite her 92 years, he moves the camera with a speech full of sincerity.
Possibly, Toni Gobbi's great feat was to revolutionize the way of guiding, which had barely changed in 150 years of history. “The young guides of today will value this documentary especially because they don't know what it was like to guide 70 years ago. Before, guides worked in July and August because sport climbing, neither on ice, nor mountain skiing as we know it now, existed. My grandfather wanted the guide to be able to work all year round, or for as many months a year as possible. Nowadays a guide can always work, traveling, of course. My grandfather was the one who introduced mountain skiing into the guiding culture. He was revolutionary because his education was superior and he was very entrepreneurial with business. Also because his passion was enormous and he worked hard to be able to make a living from what he loved. I think that today you would not like to see that there are many taxi guides, guides who could be anything and who have neither passion nor mountain culture. He said that the guide is useful because he offers a public service,” reasons Oliviero. Few guides know that Gobbi promoted the creation of the International Union of Mountain Guide Associations. Ultimately, he says, the reason for his documentary has to do not only with the search for myth but with the need that mountaineering has to be counted, because “more than an activity it is an attitude towards life.” That is why he regrets that Gobbi's premature death deprived him of writing several books as a legacy: “My grandfather was clear that mountaineering must be explained.”
Those who knew and survived Toni Gobbi still cannot shake the surprise of his absence, like his sister Marilena: “There was a point when we all hated the mountains, of course… but we couldn't hate them because Toni loved them so much…”
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