The final event of the Argonautilus 2026 “Naviganti” festival in Quartu Sant'Elena: tonight, September 12, at 9:30 pm, Alessandro Carlini, an ANSA journalist and writer, will close the festival by presenting his book “I battiti della montagna,” published by CAI Edizioni.
Carlini, after having long written about partisan resistance, today delivers to his readers a memoir, in which he also addresses the experience of illness.
It's an intimate story that I wanted to translate in a choral way, because the book contains my own personal experience, namely the double heart and kidney transplant I underwent in 2021 after a long illness that had prevented me from experiencing the mountains for decades. I therefore began this journey of rebirth by following the paths of the great authors I had read during the years of illness and the long hospital stays I had to endure; the great authors of the highlands, from Mario Rigoni Stern to Beppe Fenoglio to Emilio Lussu, to whom I dedicated an entire chapter.
Even a chapter for our captain of Armungia?
Yes, traveling to the Asiago plateau and along the trails of Monte Zebio, where Emilio Lussu fought and which he described in his book "A Year on the Plateau." With this strong sense of antimilitarism and the desire to carry within me the life of a person who is no longer with us, visiting the places of trauma that are also places of supreme beauty. I tried to channel my rebirth through a great pilgrimage of memory, remembering those boys and those women. Especially the women, the partisans.
Why?
"Because it's well known that it was a woman who donated my organs. So I also felt the need to do this search, to the highest place I could reach to thank her."
At 12, they told her she could only be a bookworm. What did books give her?
"The vision to overcome the barrier of fear, the darkness I faced. In the book, there's this idea of imagining places I couldn't reach through books, finally going there, experiencing them, and finally translating them onto the paper of my book, thus conveying this idea of a closing circle that begins with the books of my most beloved authors."
You spoke earlier about resistance and antimilitarism. What do they mean to you today?
These are timeless words. Every day we see conflicts, peoples fighting for freedom, and dark ghosts still haunting Europe today; therefore, more than ever, what we are experiencing forces us to rediscover the words that should never be consigned to history, because current events still force them upon us. The war in the Middle East impacts our lives every day, but even before the cost of gasoline, it should be a question of human sensitivity.
Instead, we're all a bit anesthetized between reels and TikToks.
There's the sliding, meaning everything slides past us, the scrolling: it's emblematic of how different the page is. They are two completely different physical movements. The page forces your attention to a circumscribed space, between the black characters and the white background; scrolling is just scrolling, meaning I let everything flow. I think we need to remember the value of words, how much books still call us to reflection today.
What mountain would Alessandro Carlini like to climb today?
"The value that mountains should have has been completely lost, which is no longer altitude, but the meaning we give to the journey itself, to how much we manage to grow along the path of a mountain that, with climate change, must now be protected more than ever. A journey no longer based on altitude, but on existence."
