We welcome the young mountaineer from Biella, already selected among the emerging talents of the CAI Eagle Team, among the Ferrino athletes
Matteo was born in Biella in 1996, on the slopes of the Pennine Alps, descendant of a character who harks back to the same origins of Italian mountaineering. Quintino Sella from Biella was in fact the founder of the Italian Alpine Club and Vittorio Sella was one of the great fathers of mountain photography, whose black and white images still today continue to make mountain enthusiasts dream and enchant.
In the love of twenty-seven-year-old Matteo for climbing there is certainly also a bit of the legacy of these ancestors, a legacy that he has collected since he was a boy, taking it with him on the many ascents he has made in the Alps and on mountains outside Europe, from Patagonia to the Yosemite Valley, passing through the great peaks of the Andean mountain range.
Matteo, how did your passion for the mountains begin and when?
My approach to the mountains began when I was very young because my parents and grandparents all loved this environment. We always went skiing every winter and for walks. Mountains but also sea... in short, there was a passion in the family for spending free time in nature. It was not a sporting approach, but rather a way to be together in beauty. When I was little, sport for me was mainly artistic gymnastics, which I practiced at a competitive level for about eight years.
When did your passion for climbing and mountaineering come?
It was a gradual process. Despite the commitment that gymnastics required of me, I never gave up hiking, especially with my father. Little by little, the dream of climbing a 4000 meter peak was born in me. This dream was mainly fueled by the photographs of our ancestor Vittorio Sella, the great mountain photographer from Biella, which hung everywhere in my house. I was fascinated by the mysterious world of high altitude that those images described so wonderfully. Pursuing this dream, at 12 years old I went with my father to Gran Paradiso and from there things continued, involving me more and more: other climbs at high altitude, then at 16 the first trad style climbs on rock in Valle dell'Orco and on Mont Blanc.
In short, a progressive but inexorable approach...
Yes, this passion, once discovered, never left me. I remember my high school years, when, with a friend a little older than me, who therefore already had a driving license, we spent every weekend in Valle dell'Orco, to climb cracks, our great passion.
From the Orco Valley your activity continued with many beautiful climbs on the Alps and also on mountains outside Europe. But what is the type of mountaineering that you like the most and the terrain that is most congenial to you?
Mont Blanc is a perfect example of the terrain I like, that is, an environment where the altitude factor is important and where you have to know how to move both on rock and ice. I like things that require a certain type of commitment, the large traditional routes, trad climbing without bolts, multi-day climbs, in distant places and with a long approach... Then, in reality, I like everything about the mountain! I like living it, being in it. I'm also a paragliding pilot and I don't necessarily have to climb to savor certain special moments.
Of the various climbs you've done, which have been the most significant for you?
A difficult question to answer... But surely among the climbs that I carry in my heart is the Central Pillar of Freney, climbed last summer with my father and my brother. Something really special for us.
What is the Eagle Team experience giving you?
A lot from different points of view. The fact that I have met the other 15 of my companions is certainly an opening towards many potential adventures in the future. Then I am growing and I am learning a lot from a technical point of view and from my wealth of experience. But it is also an experience that is making me reflect a lot, in a more "philosophical" perspective, on the meaning of mountaineering today: what are the new frontiers that can be opened? What spaces are left for adventure? Fascinating questions, perhaps without an answer, but which it is nice to share with the other guys of the Eagle Team, who live the same burning passion as me.