Today’s Photograph: The Mezzalama Climbers
Today’s photograph is the one with the Mezzalama climbers.
For those who may not know it, the Mezzalama is one of the most iconic and demanding ski mountaineering races in the world: over 40 kilometres, 4,000 metres of elevation gain, starting in Cervinia and finishing in Gressoney, across some of the most spectacular Alpine scenery.
The kind of challenge made for extraordinary athletes.
Completely mad, if you ask me.
And today, somehow, I feel a little like them.
A pharmacist in a mountain photography gallery
First of all, let me introduce myself. I’m Federica: a pharmacist, Gianluca’s partner in life and in business — Gianluca, known to everyone as Red, is the eye behind every photograph at La Bottega di Red.
I live in Magenta, a small town in the province of Milan, and Red and I have been together for a few years now. The obvious question is:
“What on earth is a pharmacist from Magenta doing in a mountain photography gallery in Cervinia?”
Excellent question. Fair enough.
The full story would be far too long to tell, and I would rather not bore you already in the very first article, so I’ll spare you the details. I’ll just say that one day Red looked at me and said:
“Why don’t we open a place of our own? I’ve already found the perfect space.”
PANIC.
Leave the comfort zone of my steady job, my family nearby, my friends just around the corner?
PANIC.
Among a thousand fears, which I will also spare you, of course, I eventually gave in. Mainly for two reasons.
The first is that I had always said I didn’t want to spend my whole life as a pharmacist.
The second is that Red has a contagious enthusiasm and a charisma that are very hard to resist. One of the reasons I am madly in love with him, but that is another story.
And so, after hanging all the photographs on the walls, taking them down, moving them around and turning them over another ten times, our Bottega was finally ready.
The photograph that brought everything back
Right now, I am half lying on the sofa we have in La Bottega, barefoot, with the photograph I mentioned at the beginning right in front of me.
It is the one that brings everything back: the projects, the anxieties, the excitement, and that shiver down your spine when you are doing something new, something you truly believe in.
The second obvious question is:
“What on earth does a pharmacist have to do with mountaineers?”
Well, here the answer is a little easier. Let me explain.
On the day we decided to open La Bottega, I felt exactly like the athletes in that photograph: climbing uphill, snow up to my knees, thin air in my lungs, and just one question in my head:
“Who on earth made me do this?”
I imagine the Mezzalama athletes ask themselves the same thing every few kilometres.
Of course, I felt that way not because I wasn’t convinced, but simply because I was terrified of building something like this from scratch.
And yet today I am here, in our beautiful Bottega in Cervinia, surrounded by photographs, a few months after opening, and I feel like the winner of the Mezzalama.
With less muscle pain, obviously, but with the same sense of satisfaction.
The magic of mountain photography
The further I go with this adventure, the more I realise that photography has something magical about it.
I won’t talk to you about technical details, and I won’t use specialist terms, because that is not my world. In this blog, I will only talk about emotions.
And that is why I can say, with absolute certainty, what I said before: photography has something magical about it. It has the power to make you feel something that belongs only to you.
I can say, again with absolute certainty, that I am about as far from a Mezzalama athlete as you can get.
And yet Red’s photograph managed to take me there.
It made me step into their world.
It made me feel, for a moment, almost heroic.
It gave me the feeling that I, too, had managed to climb my own mountain.
Perhaps that is what I love most about photography: it does not tell the same story to everyone.
Each of us has a photograph capable of moving us.
One of those images in which, if you look closely enough, you may suddenly recognise yourself somewhere in the background.
