The sole, the rope, the thread. Irina Podgorny

 A material history of mountaineering based on objects from the Museo della Montagne Duca degli Abruzzi in Turin

By Irina Podgorny

The history of mountaineering is often centered around a few individuals whose discipline is combined with the challenges of high peaks, and sometimes with teamwork. The Duca degli Abruzzi Mountain Museum in Turin is an account of this and of the technical, social and economic transformations that have shaped the relationship between humans and the mountain ranges through the practice of mountaineering.

This museum dates back to 1874 and the creation of a panoramic observatory of the Alps stretching north of the city. It is located on the other side of the Po and was the initiative of members of the Italian Alpine Club (CAI), established in Turin in the 1860s, who proposed using the premises of the former Capuchin convent given to the City Council in 1871 to set up a pavilion with a mobile telescope to admire the mountains. The inauguration coincided with the VIII Congress of the CAI, but the rooms would be organised shortly afterwards. In August 1885, on the occasion of another Alpine Congress, the photographic and industrial collections were displayed and, by the end of the 19th century, there was a cosmorama on the ground floor and a diorama on the upper floor, ensuring that, even on cloudy days, the view could be enjoyed. In 1901, Prince Luigi Amadeo di Savoia, Duca degli Abruzzi donated the belongings used in the 1900 expedition to the North Pole. Today, the museum bears his name and includes the collections entered after the Turin International Exhibition of 1911. In 1935, its surface area was tripled, but was damaged by bombs in 1943. And although activities were resumed immediately, in 1966, it was decided to modify it completely, a work that was postponed until March 1981 when the rooms were fitted out to house the old collections but also the new ones, such as the archive and the objects of the mountaineer Walter Bonatti (1930 – 2011). In the 21st century, the Documentation Area was added, bringing together the National Library of the CAI and the Museum Archives.

The visit begins with a room dedicated to wood in Alpine culture: Tyrol sacred art, furniture, clogs and walking sticks, objects that remind that human life cannot be thought of without the materials and techniques that shape it both on the plain and at high altitudes. The meaning of the Alps, as the museum explains, changed over history: in Roman times, they were the great problem in coordinating the rule of the northern and southern empires. For the naturalists of the 18th century, the Alps were a place of experimentation and, in the 19th century, a hinge in the communications between the new states connected by railways and the first tunnels, the infrastructure that also allowed the fashion of hiking in the mountains. The most important change would come with the individual mobility provided by the automobile in the mid-20th century: thanks to oil, the mountains came closer to the city while the gentry lost their monopoly on the passion for alpine dangers, which awakened the profession of guiding, the profane interest in the mountains and the challenge to reach their less accessible summits. The walls, the precipices, the ridges, gradually began to be linked to the summer or winter achievements of the sons and daughters of the middle and working classes. Mountaineering, as the museum points out, will give rise to new materials that will make it possible to climb, survive, descend, but also to make a fortune with the development of things designed to face the extremes of the mountain. An all-too-human resistance born of mountaineering, of the industry of northern Italy and of the technical and entrepreneurial skills of those who cultivated it.

The museum exhibits several examples with different scales of success and expansion. The first is the bivouac manufactured since 1937 by the Ravelli brothers of Turin. Francesco, who was born in 1885 and died a century later, began his mountaineering career in 1906, at the same time cultivating a love of photography to document the preparation of excursions and the landscapes seen from a perspective that most people would never see with their own eyes. He joined the Alpine Club after crossing, with his relatives, the Matterhorn, a mountain icon, the image of Toblerone chocolates. The Ravelli brothers would transform their father’s mechanical workshop, located in Corso Ferrucci, into a sporting goods business and an alpine equipment laboratory. From there would come the easily transportable prefabricated bivouac made of wood and galvanised sheet metal, of which 20 were built for civilian use and 7 for military use, an indication of the importance of the mountains for the armies of these countries, which, as the films of the Lumière brothers testify, have ski corps dating from the same period as the museum and the CAI.

The second example is the rope, a symbol of mountaineering and safety which, since the second half of the 20th century, has rested on the synthetic fibres which archived hemp in the tragedies of the 19th century due to the breakage of the strands. It was not the only material to succumb to the chemical-textile industry’s furnace: woollen clothing and soles studded with metal to cling to rock and ice would have a similar fate.

Leather, rope, wood and studs were to be replaced by rubber and synthetic fibre. So, Walter Bonatti, in order to breathe the pure air of the mountains and the confines of the non-industrial world, turned for his equipment to the Milanese-Turinese firm SNIA Viscosa, which, at the end of the 1950s, awarded him several medals for his ascent of Gasherbrum IV, the 17th highest mountain on Earth. The SNIA had been founded in 1917: that year Riccardo Gualino and Giovanni Agnelli – owner of FIAT – created the Società di Navigazione Italo Americana (SNIA), dedicated to the transport of fuel from the United States. The company, slowed down by the Great War, turned to trade in textile and synthetic fibres for internal and external consumption from 1919 onwards. In 1922, it took over the Società Italiana della Seta Artificiale factory in Pavia (opened in 1905), but before that it had acquired the Società Italiana Fabbriche Viscosa in Venaria Reale (1920) and the Società Italiana Seta Artificiale in Cesano Maderno (1921), as well as other smaller establishments scattered throughout northern Italy. In 1927, SNIA Viscosa takes control of the Artificial Silk Group with plants in Varedo and Magenta. SNIA becomes SNIA-Viscosa and breaks into the artificial fibre production market: by 1927, it produces 13 million kilograms and in 1928, its pavilion stands out at the International Chemical Industry Exhibition in Turin, which not only celebrated the quality of viscose or artificial silk but also the machines capable of spinning the strongest fabrics. In 1937, SNIA marketed LANITAL, a fibre obtained from casein, the milk protein. By 1935, the SNIA was a colossus with twelve plants and 20,000 workers.

In Venaria Reale rayon was produced by a process which entailed health risks for the workers as it required the production of carbon sulphide, with foul-smelling fumes which damaged crops and water. The Altessano plants, which employ almost exclusively female workers and are dedicated to the production of continuous yarn, are much less harmful. In the 1950s, the production of fibres and fabrics in these factories was suspended, while the mechanical section survived for a time, employing 496 workers. The SNIA sold the Turin structure to Michelin, which used it until the end of the 1980s. Today it is the site of a hypermarket, while the mechanical building houses the city’s Statistical Office. For the ruins of the Venaria Reale factory there are plans to transform them into an industrial archaeology trail.

The link with the automobile industry and mountaineering can also be found in the soles of shoes, in the so-called Carrarmato (armoured carriage), a 1937 innovation that combined the use of rubber with the grip of climbing boots and the robustness of mountaineering boots. It was the invention of Vitale Bramani, born in Milan in 1900 into a family of woodworkers, who, enrolled in the Milanese Hikers’ Society, soon passed the marks of difficulty required to join the CAI, which, in 1933, awarded him the gold medal for alpine courage. But before that, in 1928, on a similar path to the Ravelli family, he had opened a business specialising in this practice on Milan’s Via Spiga, where he met, among others, the brother-in-law of Leopoldo Pirelli, the owner of the tyre factory. In 1935, Bramani witnessed an accident in which six hikers lost their lives due to poor footwear. Bramani, associated with the Pirelli – the museum exhibits the “Pirelli alpina” soles – began experimenting with vulcanised rubber applied to the soles so that they would guarantee stability, flexibility, traction and adhesion to the rock/ice. To this end, he designed rubber studs/nails in the shape of a cross to allow snow and slush to drain away. To test them, in 1937 Bramani and his partner climbed the northwest wall of the Pizzo Bafle, returning safely. In 1947, in the post-war period and in the context of the industrial development of the region, he opened “Gomma Tecnica” in Gallarate, an establishment with 40 workers which, in 1958, moved to Varese, where Vibram was born, the laboratory company of sports footwear, the acronym of the owner, a consequence of the conquest of Karakorum 2 by the Italian expedition of 1954 equipped with Dolomite boots and Bramani soles.In the 1960s, Vibram spread to the American continent through licences. In Argentina, they were acquired by Gatic, the firm of Eduardo Bakchellian, who, on flat ground and the absence of mountains, made Vibram the guarantee of safety for Argentinean schoolchildren.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
alexiacomte (September 19, 2023). The sole, the rope, the thread. Irina Podgorny. SciCoMove — Scientific Collections on the Move. Retrieved April 28, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/twus


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