Nives Meroi and Romano Benet enchant visitors to Glocal

Heroic moments and funny anecdotes, emotions and little pearls of wisdom that only the mountains can teach. People could listen for hours to the adventures that, yesterday evening, Nives Meroi and Romano Benet recounted to almost 500 people, during the final event of Glocal 2017.

In an extremely full Sala Napoleonica, the two mountaineers, who, as a team, have conquered all of the world’s 14 “eight-thousanders”, enchanted the audience with their spontaneity and natural approach to the mountains.

Nives and Romano, who, for over twenty years, have been companions in life and on the rope, started, almost by chance, to climb the world’s highest mountain peaks, which, even today, they climb without the aid of supplementary oxygen, Sherpas or set camps, in an honest battle with the mountain and with themselves, without the fear of failure, having learnt, as Nives Meroi explained yesterday evening, “the art of escaping without shame”, when the conditions of the mountains or of their own bodies forced them back.

But in their lives, the most difficult climb was not of a mountain. “Our fifteenth ‘eight-thousander’ was Romano’s illness,” Nives said.

A serious illness forced him to undergo two bone marrow transplants, and kept him in hospital for two years, with very long periods of isolation. “It was enough to drive me mad, and to get over those moments, I acted as if I was at base camp, when the weather conditions don’t allow you to climb, and you have to wait patiently for the bad weather to pass,” Romano said.

The bad weather passed, and 5 years after the first symptoms of the disease, Nives and Romano resumed their climbs up the world’s highest peaks. Always together, in a partnership toughened by bad weather and hypoxia.