Turin, Italy, Jul 16, 2025 / 08:45 am

When alpine climber Edoardo Ricci clips into a harness or prepares for a steep ascent in the Alps, he says a silent prayer to Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati.

“I think that I was saved by him,” Ricci said, recalling the moment an avalanche struck during a ski tour. “I was the victim of an avalanche … and I survived without any injury.”

Ricci and others who love to hike, climb and ski in the mountains will soon have a patron saint for their high-altitude pursuits.

As the Catholic Church prepares to canonize Frassati — a 24-year-old Italian from Turin who died of polio in 1925 — a new generation is rediscovering his passion for the peaks and his profound spirituality, captured in his now-famous phrase, “Verso l’alto” — to the heights.

“Mountain alpinism is a way to, you know, touch the untouchable,” Ricci said. “When you are alone or just with a couple of friends, you can see and you can feel the silence. You can feel … very close to God.”

Ricci is currently mapping Frassati’s alpine itineraries, many of which are difficult climbs requiring advanced skill.

“He was for sure a really good climber at that period,” Ricci said, noting that Frassati was a member of the Italian Alpine Club.

While popes have encouraged young people to follow Frassati toward the summit of sanctity, Ricci advises modern climbers to consult a certified alpine guide before literally attempting to follow in his footsteps.

The peaks Frassati loved

Among the most challenging climbs Frassati completed was Mount Grivola, a 13,000-foot peak in the Alps in Gran Paradiso National Park.

“It is a difficult [ascent] — not because of the technique, but because the rock is not so solid,” Ricci explained.

After his successful two-day climb, Frassati triumphantly wrote “Grivola victa est” — Grivola has been conquered — in Latin on a photograph taken from the summit.

“Every day I fall in love with the mountains more and more, and if my studies would allow me to do it, I would spend entire days on the mountains contemplating in that pure air the Greatness of the Creator,” Frassati wrote in a 1923 letter to a friend.

Another demanding climb was Grand Tournalin, an 11,086-foot peak in Italy’s Aosta Valley. Frassati made the two-day ascent with a guide, pausing at mountain shelters along the way to rest before reaching the summit, which offers sweeping views of the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa.

“It was a quite complex ascent, but the panorama was wonderful,” Ricci said.

Though Frassati dreamed of climbing the Matterhorn, his father forbade it, considering it too dangerous. “He also asked his father … to climb the Monte Bianco, the highest peak in Europe, but his father never granted permission,” Ricci said.

Frassati did manage to climb Château des Dames, which stands at 11,443 feet in the Valtournenche region. “There are some parts of the itinerary that are quite difficult to ascend,” Ricci said, adding that Frassati earned praise from his alpine guide for completing the climb.

Closer to home, Frassati often climbed Mount Mucrone, which was visible from his bedroom window in Pollone, the town where his grandparents lived.

“Mountains, mountains, mountains, I love you,” he once scribbled on a note taped to his bedroom door.

In 1920, Frassati recounted in a letter how he attended Mass atop Mount Mucrone at the end of one of his climbs.

Frassati was also an avid skier. He frequented the Susa Valley, now home to ski resorts such as Sestriere and Cesana.

“Typically at the time there were no roadways … so the idea was to go up with the skis … and then go down the slopes,” Ricci said. “His passion was the mountain in every shape.”

Just weeks before his death, Frassati climbed again in the Valli di Lanzo, a challenging route he completed with friends. A photograph taken during that climb shows him mid-ascent. On the back, he wrote his enduring motto: “Verso l’alto.”

Pilgrimage in the peaks

Not all of Frassati’s mountain outings involved ropes and ice axes. Some were pilgrimages. Each time he visited his grandparents’ home in Pollone, he made the steep six-mile hike to the Sanctuary of Oropa, home of the Black Madonna of Oropa — a darkened wooden statue of the Virgin Mary venerated for centuries.

“Tomorrow, as is my custom every time I leave Pollone, I’ll go up to Oropa to pray in the Holy Shrine. I’ll remember you at the feet of the brown Madonna,” Frassati wrote in a 1925 letter.

Christine Wohar, president of Frassati USA, a Nashville-based nonprofit apostolate dedicated to spreading awareness of his life, shared one of the future saint’s more creative routines for making the early morning hike.

“He had to get up and out of the house very early, so he devised his own ‘alarm clock’ — a rope tied to his wrist or his nightstand and dangled from the window so that the gardener could come and tug on it and be sure he was awake without disturbing the rest of the house,” she said.

Hiking to and around the Oropa shrine is one of the most popular trails for pilgrims seeking to hike the “Frassati trails” today. Those looking for a more strenuous challenge can continue on to the peak of Mount Mucrone, which towers above the sanctuary.

Before Frassati’s beatification, St. John Paul II visited Oropa in 1989 and encouraged young people to follow Frassati’s example.

“Crossing the mountains, pilgrims have come here for centuries to venerate the Virgin and to seek in this sanctuary a place of peace and meditation,” the pope said. “Dear young people listening to me, may you also discover, like Pier Giorgio, the way to the shrine, embarking on a spiritual journey that, under the guidance of Mary, will bring you ever closer to Christ.”

Climbing life’s mountains

Yet summiting peaks was not the only challenge Frassati faced.

Father Luca Bertarelli, the parish priest of Pollone, said Frassati’s path to heaven included many crosses.

The first, Bertarelli said, was with his family, who did not understand Frassati’s piety and simple lifestyle.

“He was very different from them,” Bertarelli said. “Pier Giorgio felt this misunderstanding, and it was a great difficulty.”

Frassati also faced challenges in his academic pursuits as he studied for a degree in mining engineering at the Royal Polytechnic University of Turin.

“He was very intelligent, but he chose a faculty in the university that was very difficult for him,” Bertarelli said.

Even prayer was hard-won. “He was a man of great prayer, but in some letters he wrote that prayer was very difficult for him,” Bertarelli said. “And this is the sign of great interiority, the spiritual [battle].”

For Bertarelli, Frassati’s motto “Verso l’alto” means striving not only for mountain summits but for the heights of holiness.

“God is the heights that you want to reach,” he said.