On Saturday 30 September 2023 at the Teatro Sociale in the city of Trento, the show dedicated to Giovanni Battista Piaz called "Tita" will be staged.
It's no stranger, Tita, to prison, but this is the first time in Italy. He was imprisoned in Bolzano, his hometown, where he had attended, as a boy, the Schuleverein, which financed young Ladins by directing them to German culture and language. His is a preventive incarceration, since there are no obvious charges against him. But he is a Bolshevik, a communist! This is the complaint received anonymously by the SS from some of its bitter enemies in the Val di Fassa.
The Nazi police are thus able to get rid of an anti-regime element that has a great grip on the Alpine communities:Tita is a passionate man, a political agitator. From the cliffs of his cell No.56 he admired, to the east, the Catinaccio, Rosengarten, which is the Dolomite group where he had taken his first steps in climbing, not far from the municipality of Pera that had given him his birth, up there in the Val di Fassa. Before the towers of Vayolet he had become a man, a unique and formidable rocker. His mountaineering exploits had been talked about by enthusiasts, and not only, from all over Europe, baptising him the "Devil of the Dolomites".
You don't always come out of prisons alive and this Tita looks good. In his cell, Tita confides in a young jailer who collects, as if he were a son, the testimonies of his mountaineering exploits and his deep humanity of a contradictory man. A devil of a Tita, of course! But, God willing, a real man.
