The Mountain Still Teaches — Nicola Tondini
WORDS → Francesca Galletto
Pics → Enrico Veronese
DATE → 2026-09-11
A day on Pilastro Renato with Nicola Tondini, Skylotec athlete.
There’s a wall on the northwest face of Civetta that Nicola Tondini knows the way you know a street near home you’ve walked a thousand times. They call it Pilastro Renato: he opened it with colleague and friend Alessandro Baù, supported by Alessandro Beber, over multiple seasons, from the ground up, without ever placing a bolt. It’s on that same wall—still awaiting a complete free ascent attempt—that we find Tondini for a day of shooting. Not at a crag: inside the real mountain.
What does it mean to you to return to a wall like this, and what drove you to choose this particular line?
“Almost always these big climbs are born from falling in love with a wall,” Tondini explains. “When you enter Val Corpassa you start to dream, imagining super dynamic routes. Then over time you find your opening style, and trying again on a wall like this becomes almost a dream.” And then there’s ethics, he adds, which for him is different from style: “It has to do with respect for the environment, for the history that’s already on that wall. It’s entering certain places on tiptoe.”
On tiptoe, on Pilastro Renato, took quite a bit of delicacy. The first attempt, in 2024, ended with a retreat after just a few pitches: they lacked the right protection, the supply of pitons ran out. They returned the following summer, with Beber, and were stopped once again, halted by a storm one pitch from the summit. Only on the third attempt, the last week of July 2025, did they finally reach the top—and descending to the valley they discovered that Renato De Zordo, manager of Rifugio Coldai for forty-five years, had died that night. “We decided right there, in the moment, to dedicate the route to him,” Tondini recalls. “He was the pillar among the hut keepers of Civetta—the true guardians of these territories.”
Is there a specific moment from that day that stayed with you most?
Tondini thinks back to a very technical pitch, protected by an old pecker wedged into a crack just a few millimeters wide. “That piton holds if you load it in tension. But if you give it a sharp jolt, it pops out.” Below that point, the previous protection was far away; above, several more meters before finding anything to trust. “You have to let it go, as we say. Psychologically you release your certainties, and you go.”
How much does preparation—physical and mental—matter compared to the performance on the day itself?
“A huge amount,” he answers immediately. Before returning to Pilastro Renato he’d spent the spring on another demanding route, opened solo on Baldo-Garda: “It’s not the same thing climbing at a crag versus being exposed on a real wall. You have to get used to it.” He still remembers the disaster of his first high-level route, in 2010, tackled with only physical preparation: “I’d built up the grade, but my head wasn’t there.” Since then he’s considered mental preparation an integral part of training: “You have to become in tune with verticality. If that connection isn’t there, you can be as trained as you want: your head won’t work.”
How do you choose your gear when tackling a long route like this?
New ropes, checked equipment, clothing calibrated to conditions. But it’s the harness that Tondini dwells on most. “It has to be comfortable, because if you’re hanging for hours it can’t wear out your back. And it needs good gear loops, because you clip on twelve, fourteen quickdraws, ten or twelve cams.”
What is, in your view, the hardest decision to make in the mountains?
For Tondini it’s always a question of boundaries—understanding where “putting yourself on the line” ends and where unacceptable risk begins. On Pilastro Renato he recognized and respected that boundary: at the point where the pitons wouldn’t go in, he knew a fall would send them crashing into a ledge below. “At that point I said: objectively, this isn’t assessable. We turned back.” It was never an easy choice, he admits. “But if you commit to a style, that style gives you emotions regardless of the fact that you might throw away ten days.”
What does it feel like when a climb this long and complex finally comes together, and what’s the moment you’ll always carry with you?
The feelings are mixed: satisfaction, blended with a kind of melancholy for a journey that’s ending. But the moment he carries with him isn’t tied to technical difficulty. It’s an evening from the first year of attempts, around six o’clock, when the sunset light began to color the wall red and gold—the enrosadira of the Dolomites. “I felt like I was inside a photograph,” he recalls. A phrase he’d read long ago in a book about walking came back to him: the landscape seemed to be there waiting for you. “As if that beauty was waiting to be seen by someone.”
Why is it worth documenting and telling the story of a day like this, even when it means “losing” time on the wall?
“There’s a risk that today the beautiful photo counts more than the real story behind it,” Tondini says. “But if something truly has value, an ethic, then it’s worth stopping to tell it.” A shot on a wall is real. “It has different content. It has meaning. It allows you to tell a story.”
What does the mountain still teach today?
“It teaches humility, first of all. You don’t approach it saying ‘now I’ll conquer it.'” And then it teaches contemplation: “Living time in silence, being in the here and now, by necessity—because when you’re hanging on with your fingers and nails, with all the psychological commitment of the climb, you can’t think about anything else. It’s like a hypnotic immersion. For me, one hundred percent, it’s therapeutic.” It’s no coincidence, he adds with a smile, that at his gym King Rock so many people tell him the same thing: that to clear their heads they need exactly to climb. “And it’s true. Because when you’re there, you live only that.”
