Mountain High Museum
An eccentric museum in South Tyrol, Italy, reflects one man’s unique view of mountaineering
I FOUND MYSELF 1524 METRES up the Dolomite peak of Kronplatz mountain, lost, alone and completely happy. As I gnawed my way up, I had to stop every 100 metres and catch my breath. But whatever panic and lung-burn I experienced were mitigated by the frosted clover and edelweiss and gentians. The air smelled sweetly of manure and cut grass; the tinkle of cowbells and the call of cuckoos echoed through the valleys.
Wait ing for me at the top of the mountain was Reinhold Messner. At age five, Messner scaled his first mountain in South Tyrol, the autonomous province of Northern Italy where he was born and still lives. In the decades that followed, he went on to climb another 3500 peaks and became one of the most celebrated mountaineers of the 20th century, wrote more than 50 books, loaned his name to a line of toiletries and represented the Italian Green Party in the European Parliament.
Now 72, Messner no longer climbs professionally. Instead, he has spent the past decade focusing on the Messner Mountain Museum, six high-altitude institutions in separate locations devoted to the history and culture of mountain climbing.
The first museum opened in 1995 in the Vinschgau region. The latest, Corones, a crashed spaceship of a building that opened in 2015, is here on Kronplatz, the nearly 2275-metre mountain that I exuberantly and somewhat stupidly volunteered to climb. Construction of the 1000-square-metre concrete building
involved the excavation of more than 3900 cubic metres of mountain.
Like the other five museums, it recreates, in a pleasurably primitive way, the experience of scaling a mountain. The multilevel space is cool and smells faintly of snow. Making your way through the galleries’ tunnels, you often find yourself disoriented, returned almost to where you began, as if having miscalculated a switchback. Staircases are mirrored with diagonal glass vitrines filled with ice picks, boots, scrapbooks and carabiners.
“In mountaineering, there is not only the activity, but the philosophy behind it,” Messner told me outside the Corones museum. “Some say a moral, but I am against that because all moralit y is dangerous. All nationalism is dangerous; all religions are dangerous.”
Photos, clockwise from top: Villnöss Valley on the Austrian border of Northern Italy, where Reinhold Messner was born; Ripa museum, housed in a 13th-century castle in the Puster Valley; a typically idiosyncratic display; Reinhold Messner
He urged me to look north. Below are South Tyrol’s verdant pastures and distant outcrops. We both inhaled. “You don’t see one bad situation,” he said. Then, in a humble concession to reality, Messner pointed to a distant smokestack and squinted with vague contempt. “Only there, I guess, a little bit.”
The sinister, toothy Dolomites, which rise up all around, both exaggerate the loveliness below and cut it with the necessary bit of harshness that is otherwise lacking. It’s all too easy to imagine, in a fairy tale-like way, a local child growing up feeling as though his character were contingent upon a successful confrontation with these threatening peaks. Which is, of course, exactly Messner’s story.
“For me, when I was a boy, I went beside this beautiful mountain there” – Messner pointed west from the museum’s prow-like balcony towards a pleasingly round summit – “and I looked up for a few days with binoculars, and I invented a line where I could climb up. Then, one Sunday I went up with my brother and we did it. It’s like a piece of art. The same with the museum. I have an idea, I do it.” NO SPORT ENCOURAGES the ostensibly paradoxical impulses of meditative, in- the- moment focus and past-tense memorialising quite like mountain climbing. It seems that everyone who has even dabbled in the endeavour has gone on to document it. But how to do it in a way that begins to approximate the scale of even a small hill?
For Messner, the answer has been interdisciplinary. He told me that he learned how to open and organise a museum by doing it himself, “not by going to museums.” His autodidacticism is apparent in the Mountain Museum displays, which are at once charming and confounding and weirdly ambitious.
Housed in a crenellated castle in the quaint town of Bruneck, Italy, the Ripa museum has an extensive collection of fascinating, bewildering artefacts often presented without context. There is a room filled with models of traditional mountain homes in places such as Patagonia, Peru and Kandahar. There is a gallery devoted to international water vessels, another stocked with Tibetan musical instruments, and another with Incan weapons. There are a few human skulls (unlabelled) thrown in for good measure.
Atop a modest mountain 120 kilometres southwest of the Ripa museum is Juval, the 13th-century castle in Vinschgau where Messner lives with his family for part of the year, and which he opens to visitors. There
Photos, clockwise from top left: A 13thcentury castle in the Vinschgau houses Juval museum, which opened in 1995; viewing platform of the Dolomites museum, in an old fort on Monte Rite; the Firmian in Sigmundskron Castle
is an organic farm with animals on the premises, along with a sprawling collection of Asian masks and effigies. (The theme is holy mountains.) Messner’s personal library, consisting mostly of books about Alpinism, is kept here in an ornately carved room.
Positioned at what was the highest place of the former Austro–Hungarian empire, the Ortles museum in Sulden am Ortler is ‘devoted to the world of ice’. What this mostly means is that it is bone-chillingly cold inside. There are walking sticks, ice picks, skis, reportedly 200 years’ worth of mountaineering boots, a rescue sled from 1940 and Sir Ernest Shackleton’s binoculars. But most of the contents are paintings, dozens from the late 19th and early 20th centuries and a not insignificant number of contemporary works, all of which depict ice.
Bolzano, the largest city in South Tyrol, is the site of Firmian, the largest museum. Housed in Sigmundskron Castle, which dates back to CE 945, it’s focused vaguely on “man’s encounter with the mountain.”
There’s an eclectic mix of exhibits and settings – Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ plays in a gallery devoted to those who died while climbing, and bronze figures from Himalayan legends look down from high in the castle’s towers. Artefacts here include ancient and wildly inaccurate maps; old hiking
‘boots’ that were really just wooden paddles with hand-forged iron cleats hammered into footbeds made of straw; Nepalese crystals; a model heart in a case; leather-strapped goggles; and a Plexiglas chamber filled with ‘Everest refuses’ (rusty cans, discarded clothing, tarpaulins, a teapot).
“This is not a classical museum; it’s not an art museum or a museum of natural science. It’s a museum where I tell stories about the mountains,” Messner had told me at Corones.
He has sworn that Corones will be the last of the museums. The plan is for his daughter Magdalena, who has studied both art history and economics, to take over the project.
I ASKED MESSNER why this museum will be the last. “There is no other issue,” he said in a throaty German accent. Issue? “One museum is for the ice, one is for the rocks, one is on mountain people, one is on holy mountains and this one is on the traditional Alpinism,” he says impatiently. “There is no other issue.”
“Mountains are not fair or unfair – they are dangerous,” Messner wrote. Maybe that’s the real appeal of climbing one, something that books and films and museums can’t ever quite recreate. In a world that can so often feel rigged, there is an undeniable relief to experiencing so impersonal a struggle.
Perhaps that is why I quickly came to feel as though it were an absolute necessity that I climb to the rest of Messner’s museums, all of which are accessible by car.
Messner’s feats were to my ‘climbing’ what a professional swimmer’s are to taking a bath, but I still found myself grinning with pride every time I made it to the top.
By their early 20s, Reinhold Messner and younger brother Günther were among Europe’s best climbers. In 1970, the brothers successfully reached the summit of Pakistan’s 8126-metre Nanga Parbat. Tragically, however, only Reinhold survived the descent – losing seven toes and several fingertips to frostbite. The following year, Reinhold returned to try and find his brother’s remains but was unable to do so. They were only found in 2005. In 1980, in true ‘alpine-style’ mountaineering (minimal equipment, no satellite phones), Messner completed the first solo ascent of Mount Everest without extra oxygen, crevasse ladders or the help of sherpas. He believes standard ‘expedition-style’ climbing is disrespectful and damaging to nature.