Snow, Summits and the Reach of Suburbia
Reflections on a visit to Breuil-Cervinia in January 2025
I have recently returned from a skiing holiday in the Italian alps at the North-Eastern end of the Aosta Valley. I stayed in the village of Breuil-Cervinia which is dominated by Mount Cervino, but more commonly recognised from the Swiss side as the Matterhorn. It is one of the highest peaks in the Alps at 4478 meters. It was first summited by a group of seven climbers in 1865 led by Edward Whymper of which only three climbers survived, the others having fallen to their deaths on the descent. Unsurprisingly, it is one of the deadliest peaks in the world as it attracts
Mount Cervino and the Matterhorn different sides of the same mountain as seen from the Italian and Swiss sides respectively
alpinists like moths to a candle flame. The Victorian polymath John Ruskin (1819 -1900) was a great lover of mountains and Robert Macfarlane, in his book The Mountains of the Mind, quotes him as saying, “The effect of this strange Matterhorn upon the imagination is indeed so great.” The Matterhorn was Ruskin’s favourite mountain which he would have seen with his parents during a visit to Zermatt in the summer of 1844. He makes the comment, “…that even the gravest philosophers cannot resist it.” I think it is my most favourite mountain too, and I would happily vouch that being in the presence of large mountains certainly invokes a feeling of awe. This is a place where, as an individual, you can feel totally insignificant. It is perhaps unsurprising that the religiously minded feel close to their “God” and want to commemorate this with some form of symbolic monument. Indeed, returning from a trip from Zermatt back to Cervinia we took the cable car from Trockner Steg up to the summit of the Klein Matterhorn (3883 meters) which, as part of the Matterhorn Glacier Paradise, has a viewing platform.
Panorama with views of the Swiss Alps from the platform at the Kleine Matterhorn: from left to right; The Matterhorn – Mount Cervino (4478 m), Dent Blanche (4357 m), Grand Cornier (3961 m), Ober Gabelhorn (4063 m), Zinalrothorn (4221 m) and Weisshorn (4505 m). Zermatt lies in the valley on the left of the picture where the Matter Vispa River flows broadly North before becoming a tributary to the River Rhone
Looking due East from the viewing platform of the Matterhorn Glacier Paradise is a wonderful view of the Breithorn (4164 m), and interestingly, bolted onto the side of the platform is a wooden cross onto which a sculpture of the crucified Christ has been attached. It would appear that mountains and religious sentiments are often connected in the Western imagination. But, not only the Western imagination, a whole travel industry has grown up around visiting Buddhist and Tibetan Monasteries that are indeed located high in the Himalayas. Today, there is an undiminished appetite for the well healed Westerner to climb Everest, and for the not so well healed to trek to the Everest base camp or, perhaps a little nearer, Kilimanjaro. What is it about altitude and Mountains? As Ruskin pointed out, he saw mountains primarily as the skeleton and musculature of the earth, but in his book on Modern Painters he states, “…mountain scenery, though considered as disagreeable for general inhabitation, is always introduced as being proper to meditate in”.
The Breithorn (4164 m) and a Christian Crucifix displayed on the Kleine Matterhorn viewing platform
What is it in the Western psyche that finds mountains so magnetic and alluring? On reflection I don’t think it’s just mountains, I think seascapes, oceans and the heavens above, also have a magnetic attraction that beguiles. Indeed, during the early 1970s when the first colour TVs programmes were just beginning to be broadcast there were several promotional programmes designed to attract the public to the delights of colour television. Some of these programmes used travel to draw in their audience and in one particular programme, if I remember correctly, the narrator asked the question as to why are so many people drawn to the seaside for their annual holiday?
Etymologically speaking the word holiday is interesting, it is derived from the word Holy Day, a day to make yourself mindful and whole again. But why the seaside? The commentator’s take on this was that the strip of land between high and low tide was impossible, or at the very least it was very difficult, to domesticate. It was a part of nature left to its own devices with minimal human intervention; it was a place where people could connect to a non-industrial timeframe. A similar argument could be made for mountains in that traditionally they were a region of land that, as Ruskin said, “…were disagreeable for general habitation.” Before the onset of winter, the upland pastures were cleared of domestic animals, they were taken down into the valleys, and then in the spring the animals were returned to the upland meadows. These high alpine meadows were an area of land that could not easily be domesticated or industrialised. This annual migration from valley to uplands and back was due to the annual winter freeze. It was this annual cycle that would prohibit the uplands from being domesticated – until now – with the invention of winter sports!
Image of winter sports on the wall of the Restaurant Bontadini, above Breuil-Cervinia.
Skis as an aid to moving around on snow date back to prehistory, but the biathlon, cross country skiing combined with rifle shooting, grew out of army training in Scandinavia in the 18th Century. As a sport the biathlon was present under the name of Military Patrol in the first Winter Olympic Games which took place just after the first section of the cable car to Aiguille du Midi had been installed in Chamonix in 1924. The Norwegians are credited with the development of the modern cambered ski (curved so that unloaded the middle was not in contact with the flat ground) with its slightly wider nose and tail, in Telemark in Norway. The development of this modern type of ski proved more manoeuvrable and controllable in turns. This manoeuvrability in the turn led to downhill skiing, sensu stricto, and it was allegedly invented by the British when they introduced it to the Alps at the beginning of the 20th Century. In the early days skiers had to make their own way up the mountains to ski back down and initially this was more akin to what today would be called ‘ski touring’. But skiers racing down a coiffured piste is a modern-day phenomenon, and a sign of an extended suburban domesticity. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Cime Bianche Laghi cable car station to Plateau Rosa (3480 m)
Initially, the powered mechanisation to help skiers gain altitude for runs downhill was the T-bar. T-bars were attached to a circulating cable and powered by an engine could pull two skiers at a time up a slope. But as skiing became more popular getting increased numbers of skiers up the mountains became progressively sophisticated. The first cable cars were developed initially in San Francisco and ran on tracks on the ground across the hilly city. But when at the end of the nineteenth century Josef Staffler bought some buildings 900 meters above Bolzano in Italy to develop as a hotel, he decided to develop a system whereby hotel guests would be transported up the mountain by a cable car that was hoisted aloft on a wire rope lift The domestication of the Alps had begun in earnest and suburbia was being extended. There is here a certain irony because technological development and our energy-based civilisation is producing a change in climate that had likely contributed to the devastating floods in Cervinia reported some months previously.
Charles Darwin (left) and Jacob Bronowski (right) achnowledgement Wikipedia
There are of course here, several elephants in the room! The ingenuity of the human mind has led to the technological developments we all associate with modernity and progress, from the wooden ski of prehistory to today’s smartphone on which I took several of the photographs used in this blog. As Jacob Bronowski pointed out in the first chapter of his TV series The Ascent of Man entitled Lower than Angels, the human being who had been in prehistory a figure in the landscape has become the shaper of that landscape and this overwhelming transition has been recognised by calling the present era the Anthropocene. As Charles Darwin concluded in his final paragraph of his book The Descent of Man:
“… man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”
Notice the optimistic wording of Bronowski’s Ascent of man compared to Darwin’s Descent of man. There is a tension here! It is a tension between our intellectual ideals and the reality from which we cannot escape. We cannot escape the Laws of Nature, but as William Blake, painter, poet and printer, said, “Great things are done when man and mountains meet; This is not done by jostling in the street.”
