Guida dei Monti d'Italia

Drafting and writing the guidebooks involved a much editing and many on-site inspections, and the series soon became a reference work both for amateurs and professional alpinists.^[1] The serie as a whole was considered monumental,^[2] and the novelist Dino Buzzati defined it an arduous and remarkable achievement.^[3][4] The "Guida dei monti d'Italia" is the best example in Italy of a systematic alpinistic guidebook or, in other words, a work describing, as much as possible, all the features and the routes of the mountain groups described in its volumes.^[5] In the early 2000s the death of the alpinist Gino Buscaini, who coordinated for a long time the publishing activities, and the resignement of his wife Silvia Metzeltin, who had replaced him for a while, endangered the publication of titles left to complete the coverage of the Italian mountains. Thus in 2007 a group of mountaineering experts addressed an appeal tho the Club Alpino Italiano chairmanship aimed to save the series and to revive it thanks to a new cooperation deal between CAI and TCI.^[6] The series was indeed completed with in 2013 with its last volume, Alpi biellesi e valsesiane. Many professionals and enthusiasts in mountainering still own and consult the volumes devoted to the mountain areas of their interest.^[7] Some of the older issues of the series nowadays are very difficult to find, and its volumes aren't any more updated.^[6]