Marmolada, survivor: “I’ll go back to the top where my heart is left”

Fractures heal slowly, but the heart strains harder. Leafing through the photos, seeing each other hugged and happy, is pain and therapy at the same time. There is no day, since she reopened her eyes after the avalanche of last July 3 on the Marmolada, that Alessandra De Camilli does not dedicate a photo, a thought, a song to her partner Tommaso Carollo, one of the 11 victims of the queen of the Dolomites . A small social window that returns, only minimally, the effort of getting back on your feet, psychologically and physically. The 51-year-old architect from Schio (Vicenza) has returned home after surgery and hospitalization, but recovery remains far away. That avalanche of stones and ice fractured her pelvis, some ribs and vertebrae thus forcing her to wear a bust, the foot fracture required a complex surgical operation, instead a plate had to be inserted in the arm and the knee continues to do bad. The limbs require a long rehabilitation, impossible for now even to stand up. Yet that pain of her does not prevent her from thanking Tommaso, who protected her on that mountain to the end, and from dreaming of returning to those peaks that took away the love of her life. “I’ll go back to the mountains as soon as I can walk again, of course I’ll go back to the Marmolada. My heart has remained there. He, for me, is there” she says without hesitation. “It is the place he loved most, it is as he imagined Paradise. And I have wonderful memories there. And it is not the mountain’s fault what happened, but destiny, a bad destiny”. An unpredictable event, even according to most experts, which killed 11 lives. “Now when I see the photos of the peaks and the mountains, it hurts, because I know that Tommaso can no longer live them and I will no longer be able to live them with him. It is as if he were part of everything, if everything brought me back to him. ‘everywhere, but it’s not here “. If not having wasted even a minute is a small consolation, if the honor of being able to have been with Tommaso even the last moment of his life remains, I am angry because he and I deserved more time. empty – writes Alessandra – which will always remain the place he had “.