20 Questions
Describe your climbing background:
I started climbing in 1983 during a time when we were free climbing but not yet sport climbing. A time when climbers were coming down from the mountains, carrying inside them the values and the beauties of the life they lived while there. Climbing was about feeling alive, enthusiastic and adventurous.

Was there a big breakthrough or defining moment for you?
After four years of sport climbing on shorter walls and focusing on climbing as hard as possible, I visited the Verdon gorges. For the first time there I was climbing at my limits on routes with many meters below and above me. This experience allowed me to breath in a deeper spirit of the climbing life and to travel to incredibly wild places.

Describe a memorable climbing experience:
Besides all the memories of the hard climbs I’ve done, it would be the memories of climbing alone, in the summer, on very easy and long routes in my home mountains, the Dolomites. Climbing on third- and fourth-class terrain for eight hundred meters brings me to another dimension of climbing. Climbing there is not about thinking, but instead about feeling free and believing that the power of gravity doesn’t exist any more. When you feel free from its pull, climbing is something else and very, very special.

Who or what inspires you?
Every climber that I see moving so effortlessly, wild spaces and isolated walls

Care to comment on: pre-clipping more than one draw on sport routes or pre-placed gear on trad routes, chipping/comfortizing holds, glue vs. no glue?
Everybody is free to climb, as they want. When you climb a route with pre-placed gear you do nothing bad to the community of climbers. But when you chip a hold or you change the morphology of a rock it is a shame and negatively affects the whole community of climbers, on many levels—the spirit of climbing is about adapting to your environment.

Do you have any vices and what are they?
I’m have plenty of vices and their temptations are strong. After twenty-three years of climbing, I have a deep love for the rock and sometimes I think that I couldn’t live without it.

Are you a fan of climbing history? Explain?
I love the history of climbing and climbing makes me feel like I’m part of its evolution.

What are your future plans or goals in climbing?
Climbing and dreaming of climbing—both make my life richer and bring me closer to my ideal of what our experience, here on Earth, is about.