Upon that Mountain

In the summer of 1932, Gabriele Boccalatte and Ninì Pietrasanta met. They met on the Monte Bianco, they climbed it together and fell in love. Their great alpine years go exactly from 1932 to 1936 – the year in which they got married. They, as a roped party, pioneered some of the toughest alpine routes. They used to keep journals and take pictures in order to keep a record of their achievements. Ninì, that was one of the very few female climbers of those years, would carry a 16mm film camera with her, during her climbs. In 1937, their son Lorenzo was born, and, in 1938, Gabriele died, falling from a mountain wall. Ninì, then, gave up extreme climbing and focused on her role as a mother. Some years after Ninì’s death, in 2000, her son Lorenzo found the reels his mother had been shooting, hidden in an old case.

In a village, near Parma, rows of white plastic chairs are being set up in a field. Musical ball fans will soon be rushing to the entrance to listen to Omar Codazzi, and will remain despite the rain. Omar Codazzi, or quite simply Omar on stage, aged about 40, often dressed in white with his blond hair tied back, sings of love, friendship, and childhood memories. Very accessible, sporting a wide smile, he serves out kisses and handshakes to his admirers — mainly female admirers — who are never short of praise for him.

Ascoli Satriano, Apulia. A small town in the internal areas, depopulated as one would expect. A place of “there’s nothing here”, as everybody tells Eleonora when she arrives in the town after spending most of her life in Milan, a place of “there’s everything there”, where her parents moved in the Sixties. She is emigrant, but not for her choice. A second-generation emigrant. Always being separated from this “here” she could never know, but that has always been in her mind in an image made by stories told by others. Eleonora goes down to the town in order to provide images to other’s words: those by her family and those by Adele, the kid from the town met during the only visit Eleonora made with her parents when she was very little. Adele wrote letters for years and Eleonora rarely replied. Eleonora starts today an impossible conversation with Adele: a conversation disconnected from a synchronized time and localized in a largely imaginary space.