Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers

Qui si parla di Leslie Stephen, il padre di Virginia Woolf. E dell'età d'oro dell'alpinismo.

"Three factors, and probably more, came together to get the sport going: railroad travel, which made the Alps accessible; the Romantic development of the concept of the Sublime, which drew tourists to the peaks; and the hard-driving Victorian development of exploration, technology, science, muscularity, and leisure."

[...]

"He came to the sport with an outstanding level of fitness, unperturbed by walking thirty to forty miles or more in a single day, and from spring onwards he would have spent a day or two each week rising at dawn and walking until well after nightfall."

Peaks and Valleys: Leslie Stephen, Mountaineer, Alex Siskin, The Paris Review, 26 novembre 2012.