Ardito Desio

In all likelihood, when Mr and Mrs Desio on 18 April 1897 chose to give their son the name Ardito, they had no idea how correct and almost prophetic this choice would prove to be.

It is Ardito himself, writing a letter to his friend Giotto Dainelli, who points out to himself the path to follow: 'This wandering life, half mountaineering and half seafaring, exerts a great attraction on me. It seems to me that if for the whole of my life I had to travel the world studying and working even at the cost of the gravest privations and the harshest sacrifices, I would be a happy man. I have great faith in the future and in my own strength and I certainly do not lack enthusiasm for our studies: vivere non est necesse, navigare est necesse! -Simi, 4 XII 1922"
Ardito Desio was born on 18 April 1897 in Palmanova, in the province of Udine, and already as a child demonstrated his character by an adventurous climb of the ramparts of the walls of the famous fortified citadel. A little later, in his teenage years, we find him manifesting his passion for the mountains, which translates into climbing almost all the peaks of the Eastern Alps. The young Ardito already experiences two contrasting feelings: the spirit of adventure and transgression, which is confronted with a love of discipline and respect for authority. It is precisely this sort of inner conflict that drives him to run away from home in 1915, at just 18 years of age, to enlist as a volunteer cyclist in that first year of fighting on the Eastern Front. After a brief return to civilian life, which allowed him to graduate from high school, Desio joined the Alpine Corps as a complementary officer and in this capacity took part in numerous actions, until he was taken prisoner in November 1917. A year of imprisonment first in the Wegscheid camp, near Linz, and then in Plan, in Bohemia (a period that allowed him to learn German by reading books on geology) and then he returned to his studies, enrolling in the Faculty of Science in Florence. Here he met among others Italo Balbo, the future governor of Libya, and graduated with honours on 27 July 1920. The following year he began his collaboration with the Institute of Geology in Florence.

In September 1922, the director of the Institute of Geology was appointed. In September 1922, the director of the Institute of Geology, Carlo De Stefani, invited him to visit the islands of the Dodecanese: he thus undertook the study of the Aegean islands, which he carried out in the five months of the '22 expedition and in the following two years.

On his return in 1925, Desio moved to Milan where, as well as working as an assistant professor of Geology at the Regio Politecnico, he worked as a conservator in the geological section of the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale in Milan. During this period he was given the task by the Italian Glaciological Committee to carry out a series of research on the glaciers of the Ortles Cevedale, which would prove to be a valuable source of information as well as the subject of studies that would continue until well into the 1960s.

Desio's first trip to Africa was in the 1960s. Desio's first trip to Africa took place in September 1926, on behalf of the Italian Geographic Society, with the aim of carrying out geographical and geological studies.
In 1929, the city of Milan financed an expedition to Karakorum, promoted by the Italian Geographic Society and the Milan section of the Alpine Club, with the aim of attempting the ascent of K2, after the attempt made in 1909 by another Italian expedition, led by Luigi Amedeo di Savoia, Duke of the Abruzzi. At the same time, the mission, made up of twelve members including Ardito Desio, Evaristo Croux, a famous guide from Courmayeur, Lodovico di Caporiacco, a zoologist, and the financier Vittorio Ponti, an expert mountaineer, carried out a series of scientific surveys. The programme was, however, decisively re-dimensioned by the controversy that followed the dramatic epilogue of Umberto Nobile's expedition to the North Pole with the dirigibile Italia: the mountaineering goal was in fact totally eliminated, the expedition took on primarily scientific aspects and K2 definitely entered Ardito Desio's dreams. Desio, with the collaboration of Vittorio Ponti, who volunteered to be the step-counter (and that meant counting up to 40,000 to 50,000 steps a day, for eight hours or more!), carried out the expedition's topographical survey of the area and, making himself independent of the rest of the group, explored numerous Karakorum valleys and crossed glaciers and passes that were unknown at the time, such as the famous Sella Conway. After a new expedition to Africa, in the Libyan Sahara, in the summer of 1931, the now 35-year-old Ardito faced a period of change in his life: he won the competition for the chair of geology at the University of Milan, while in January 1932 he married Aurelia Bevilacqua. But his new academic and family commitments were not enough to quench his thirst for knowledge, and as early as 1932 he travelled to the Libyan Sahara again, at the invitation of the Italian Geographic Society, on the first of seven African missions between 1932 and 1935, and then again in 1940, with the aim of acquiring technical-scientific knowledge of the territories recently conquered from Italy. The trips to Africa continued even after the end of the Second World War, in collaboration with some American oil companies. It is curious to note that Ardito himself kept a bottle of crude oil extracted in 1938 in the Mellata-Cini no.8 well, in Libya, while it was not until 1959, when exploration was by then forbidden to the Italians, that the first large Libyan oil field was identified in Zelten.
Between 1937 and 1938, Desio took part in a trip to western Ethiopia, between the White Nile and Blue Nile, as a geological consultant for a parastatal mining company. The expedition proves to be decidedly adventurous, and is characterised by gunfights with the "sciftà", the men of the Ethiopian resistance: the container of maps that Ardito carries with him stops the bullet intended for him and saves his life.

The war interrupted Desio's travels and expeditions, but did not stop his lively intellectual life, nor did it put an end to his dreams, including the most coveted: the ascent of K2, which did not come true until 1954, 25 years after the first expedition.
The new adventure began in 1953, when Ardito Desio and the mountaineer Riccardo Cassin made a preliminary trip to India and Pakistan, with the contribution of CONI and the Italian Alpine Club, to set up the actual expedition the following year. The programme foresees two objectives: to complete the scientific research started in 1929 and the purely mountaineering objective of conquering K2.

The expedition is prepared with the utmost care and attention. The expedition is prepared with the utmost commitment, the mountaineers' selections are particularly demanding, as is the testing and sometimes the creation of the necessary equipment; two winter camps are also held, on Monte Rosa and under the Little Cervino, to improve training and to test the equipment.
The expedition set off in early May 1954, and consisted of two teams: one of six scientists and the other of eleven mountaineers.

The scientists are:

• Ardito Desio (57 years old);
• Paolo Graziosi (47), ethnographer;
• Francesco Lombardi (36), geodesist and topographer at the Military Geographical Institute;
• Antonio Marussi (46), geophysicist;
• Guido Pagani (37), physician;
• Bruno Zanettin (31), petrographer;

The mountaineers are:

• Erich Abram (32), from Bolzano;
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• Ugo Angelino (31 years old), from Biella;
• Walter Bonatti (24 years old) from Monza;
• [[Achille Compagnoni]] (40 years old), from Breuil-Cervinia;
Mario Fantin (33), from Bologna, photographer and film shooter; Cirillo Floreanini (30 years old), from Cave del Predil; Pino Gallotti (36), from Milan;
• Lino Lacedelli (29), from Cortina d'Ampezzo;
Mario Puchoz (36), from Courmayeur;
• . Ubaldo Rey (31 years old), from Courmayeur;
• Gino Soldà (47 years old), from Recoaro;
• Sergio Viotto (25 years old), from Courmayeur.

The Italian participants in the expedition are joined by some Pakistani members, who are participating on behalf of their government: they are medical colonel Ata Ullah, three officers and an assistant topographer. Finally, one cannot forget the porters, who number between 500 and 700, plus those specialised in high altitudes, belonging to the Hunza ethnic group.
The caravan meets on 31 May at the base camp at the foot of K2. During the month of June, the camps along the K2 slope are set up according to the strict programme established by Desio. Only the sad episode of the death from pneumonia of Mario Puchoz, who despite treatment died on 21 June, momentarily interrupted the fervent activity. After the moments of discouragement caused by this tragic event, the work of equipping the wall with fixed ropes and setting up the camps at higher and higher altitudes resumed with alacrity. Despite the less than optimal weather conditions, nine camps are equipped along the mountainside.
On 31 July 1954, Compagnoni and Lacedelli, reached the summit of K2, crowning with this success the intense teamwork of the previous months.
The team of mountaineers returned to Italy shortly afterwards, while Ardito Desio prolonged his stay in Karakorum to complete his explorations and scientific research, and on 9 October he returned to Milan, where he could finally enjoy his share of the honours.

In the years following the K2 feat, his scientific commitments continued to take him around the world: to Afghanistan in 1961, back to the Karakorum in 1962, to the Antarctic continent in the same year, to Burma in 1966, to Tibet in 1980. At the same time, his academic and scientific activities did not stop: in 1963 he founded the National Order of Italian Geologists, of which he was the first president, after promoting the creation of a degree course in Geological Sciences and founding the National Association of Italian Geologists (ANGI).

In 1987, at the age of ninety, he was in his nineties. In 1987, now in his nineties, he published an autobiographical book entitled 'On the Roads of Thirst, Ice and Gold: Extraordinary Adventures of a Geologist', which added to the numerous scientific publications already published under his name. But Ardito Desio's adventurous spirit is not easily quenched: when, in 1987, George Wallerstein of the University of Washington announces that, according to measurements he carried out with new and sophisticated equipment, K2, and not the Everest, is the highest mountain in the world, he does not hold back from devising and promoting a new and great initiative.
Thus, the EV K2 project is born. This is how the EV K2 CNR project was born, i.e. a new expedition to Asia to verify the actual height of the two mountains, organised together with Agostino Da Polenza, the mountaineer who climbed the north face of K2 in 1983.
The feat is realised thanks to the sponsorship of the CNR (National Research Council); measurements are taken using the GPS (Global Positioning System), still a state-of-the-art instrument at the time, provided by a private group. The highest mountain remains the Everest, whose height is determined at 8872 m instead of the traditionally estimated 8848 m, while K2 is raised to 8616 m, five more than the height known at the time.
The expedition's results are widely publicised thanks to the sponsorship of the CNR. The results of the expedition are widely publicised, but this fact does not imply the end of the EV K2 CNR project, which continues, on Desio's own initiative, with the construction of the Pyramid laboratory, built in 1989 at about 5050 m altitude, at the foot of the Everest, with the aim of allowing multidisciplinary research at high altitude.
Ardito Desio currently lives in Rome and can boast, in addition to all the experiences he has had in his busy life, a whole series of recognitions: he has been awarded the Gold Medal of the Italian Geographic Society, is a member of the Accademia dei Lincei, a Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of the Italian Republic, and an honorary member of Italian and foreign societies. On 20 May 1999, an untouched Himalayan peak was climbed by American mountaineers John M. Climaco and Chris Breenere, which was named 'Mount Desio' in his honour.
Ardito Desio, who died on 13 December 2001 at the age of 104, lived an intense life, succeeding in realising his deepest aspirations: after having seen three centuries, he concluded his autobiographical book by writing: 'Science, a great philosopher wrote, is full of doubts, of questions, but provident of gifts. I have benefited greatly from such experience'.
And above all, he begins it with a dedication to his children that may be meaningful for all of us: 'To my children Gianluca and Mariela so that they may remember that with hard work and tenacity one can win the most difficult mountain climbs and the hardest battles in life'.

We would like to thank the Desio family for the photographic material granted to us (http://www.arditodesio.it)