THE PROJECT
"Mountains mountains mountains, I love you.."
This deeply simple and intense declaration of love was made by Pier Giorgio Frassati (1901-1925), the young man from Turin - beatified in 1990 and also member of the Club Alpino Italiano - who "loved mountains and felt them as great things, a means to elevate one's spirit, a gymnasium for tempering one's soul and body."
In each of his actions, and thus also in the rough fascination of the mountains, Pier Giorgio always manifested his daily search for God: "I'm more and more in love with mountains every day," he wrote a friend "and, if my studies allowed it, I would spend whole days on the mountains and contemplate the Greatness of the Creator in their pure air." His contemplation was enriched by his joy for the company of friends, and intensified by his reaching ever higher summits: "I always desire to climb mountains, the conquer the most challenging peaks; to feel the joy you can only find in the mountains."
Pier Giorgio Frassati bore witness to a life that was deeply focused - briefly stated - on "joyful charity", which was the reason and the goal for all of his commitments (in the social, familiar, religious and political spheres) and blazed "the trail" for all young people who truly, as he said, want to "live and not just survive."
The day after his beatification, therefore, it was altogether natural, within C.A.I., to consider naming a trail after him, possibly in every region of Italy, rather than a mountain peak, as in the past Father De Agostini had done in Patagonia.
With the motto "To find God in Creation" we thus started, in 1996, from Sala Consilina (in the Salerno province) with the "Frassati Trail in Campania", the region where the idea had originated.
Since then new "Frassati Trails" have been opened nearly every year, as the list of inaugurations shows.
However, we do not want the reader to get the impression, from quickly going through the list of trails dedicated to Pier Giorgio Frassati so far, that this initiative hinges on merely recalling the exemplary life of this blessed Piedmontese young man. Far from it!
From the beginning, the dedication of a selected trail in an environment that is rich with naturalistic, historical, and religious values to Pier Giorgio Frassati was intended as a true life experience for those who participated in the project and followed in his footsteps.
It is appropriate at this point to let speak the many friends who have worked with so much passion, entrusting the true meaning of this experience to the symbolic but very intense gesture of blessing each new trail, mixing the waters that come from all previous paths.
They can all be represented by the words spoken by Vito Oddo, then-President of the C.A.I. of Syracuse, for the inauguration of the southernmost "Frassati Trail" in Italy: "Dedicating a trail to the Blessed Frassati may almost seem like an act of selfishness. It's as if we wanted to dedicated to ourselves, to the passion for the mountains and the love for nature which we, as C.A.I. members, share with Pier Giorgio Frassati. In fact, it's an act of love to the One who created these things and who, in His infinite goodness, by giving us Pier Giorgio's example, wanted to remind us that our life should be enriched by other vales. By faith and the willingness to devote ourselves to those in need, which lighted the way for Pier Giorgio Frassati."
|