The full name of the publication was “Pirelli. Rivista d’Informazione e di Tecnica”. But everyone knew it simply as the “Rivista Pirelli” – the Pirelli magazine. Published in Milan by the Group’s “Direzione Propaganda” – what we would now call the Communication Department – the magazine was on newsstands from 1948 to 1972. Unlike virtually any other publication, it was the voice with which an industrial group wished to converse directly with its target public – its “stakeholders”, we would call them today – about all sorts of different events and issues. From traffic problems to the economic situation, through to scientific discoveries and tourism, sport and architecture: its focus ranged across the board, just as the field of vision of a multinational corporation needs to if it is to make culture and social commitment one of its most fundamental intangible assets. The greatest names of the time wrote for the Pirelli magazine: Eugenio Montale and Giuseppe Ungaretti, Umberto Eco and Carlo Emilio Gadda, Domenico Rea and Vittorio Sereni, Mario Soldati and Italo Calvino.

But when it came to mountaineering, the first name was that of Dino Buzzati. Born in Belluno, Buzzati was already talking about the mountains with Bàrnabo in his first novel in 1933. One wonders what it must have cost him to write “The Stupidity of the Mountains” as the title of the article published in the Pirelli magazine no. 5, in October 1951. This is the story of Pietro B. – who is already long in the tooth, a widow, wise and wealthy – who tries to convince his nephew Enrico that climbing Mount Mishap is just a great waste of time and energy: why make all that effort to go up if you then have to come down? How stupid can mountaineering be? Buzzati’s highland spirit naturally has Enrico’s passion win out in the end: “Bye-bye, Uncle Pietro, I’m off, I’m taking the train, I’m going to those stupid idiotic moronic marvellous mountains of mine!”

Then came the famous but controversial Italian expedition to conquer the K2 in the Himalayas: this was in 1954. It was he – in Pirelli magazine no. 1, 1954 – who had the task of reporting in the minutest detail about how Ardito Desio prepared the venture, about his companions Compagnoni and Lacedelli, about the young Walter Bonatti, and about their doubts and excitement before leaving, and their meticulous choice of equipment: isothermal tents, boots for 7000 metres, anoraks with “brilliant colours, to be seen against the white snow”. It took a lot of Pirelli rubber to conquer the K2: in particular, special open-circuit breathing masks were tested in the Bicocca laboratories so that they could use the available oxygen in the air even at 8000 metres. These masks were far lighter than traditional closed-circuit ones with their extremely heavy cylinders. A full six months before they set off, Ardito Desio and the K2 project had earned the front cover of the January 1954 issue. For the decidedly forceful personality of the Friuli-born explorer, the cover was probably designed to offset another one that the magazine had devoted to Piero Ghiglione in December 1950. Considered as the father of Italian mountaineering, Ghiglione had accomplished the first “tricolore” ascension of the Rwenzori, in Africa, in 1949, before going off to conquer the so-called 6000s in the Andes in 1950. Also on those expeditions, Pirelli soles and air mattresses had made the difference.

But it was not just Buzzati, Desio and Ghiglione who talked about the mountains from the pages of Pirelli magazine. “Three Deities on the Apennines” was the title of the article by Riccardo Bacchelli in the 2nd issue of 1950. True, this is light-years from the 8000 metres of the K2 and even from the peaks of the Dolomites, but these are mountains all the same, even though gentler and enveloped in myth and mystery. In Bacchelli’s dream, it is Minerva, Apollo and Dionysus who formed the “web of rivers and mountains that huddle together in the regions of Catria and Falterona”, whence “the rivers and voices of Tuscany and Lazio, Umbria and the Marche all melt and flow”. Here we have Minerva’s Arno and the sunny Umbrian valleys of Apollo, as well as vineyards that are the “splendid gifts” of Dionysus. Mountains of the gods, on the borderline between art and legend.