Mauro Corona

Mauro Corona (Baselga di Piné, 9 August 1950), is an Italian writer, mountaineer and wood carver.

Author of several books, some of which are bestseller, he dedicated himself to mountaineering, by climbing many Italian and foreign peaks and opening over 230 climbing routes in the Friulian Dolomites.

Childhood

Son of Domenico Corona and Lucia Filippin he was born in Baselga di Piné. After the first years of his childhood spent in Trentino, the family returned to Erto, the village of origin in the Vajont valley, at that time part of the province of Udine and then, in 1968, passed to the province of Pordenone, where he spent the next few years in the San Rocco district. Since he was a child, he has followed his father on hunting trips as a poacher and his grandfather on his first climbs. It was right in those places, where he spent most of his youth, that the passion for mountains and mountaineering grew up in him.

The relationship with his parents was difficult and troubled, due to his father's behavior, considered a crazy and a violent man. For these reasons his mother left home, abandoning him and his brother, gesture that Mauro never forgave. To replace her presence, Corona dedicated himself to reading: Tolstoj, Dostoevskij and Cervantes were his favorites writers. At the same time he learned the art of wood sculpture from his grandfather, who was a wood carver.

After attending elementary school in Erto, he began the middle school in nearby Longarone, in the province of Belluno. The 9 October 1963 his life radically changed due to the Vajont disaster, which swept away the lower part of Belluno and the hamlets near the lake between Veneto and Friuli, causing over 2,000 deaths. His family suffered no losses in the disaster, but a few years later he wrote what happened in his novel Aspro e dolce.