New Book About Giir de Mont By Filippo Fazzini
Filippo Fazzini, the race director of Giir di Mont for the last 20 years, has written the definitive book about this iconic race, pouring over years and years of stories, images and documents and bringing them together in this great new publication.
Initially intended to be a small book to serve as a gift for friends of the Giir di Mont committee for Christmas 2019, once Filippo started sifting through 20 years of photos and documents he couldn’t contain himself. A year later he published ‘Giir di Mont: Beyond the Race’ (in Italian), the story of the race behind the scenes, as well as a country and community that, together, made the history of skyrunning.
“The idea was born after the Giir di Mont 2019. Slowly, without saying anything to anyone, I started looking in the archives and in my documents for all the information on the history of Giir”, says Filippo Fazzini, “Needless to say, I found myself having to line up a huge amount of stories, documents, photographs, rankings … it was getting too big, Christmas 2019 has passed and the project has remained there. With the lockdown in March for the book it was the turning point: there was no shortage of time to work on it and so I took it back in hand. The idea was still to do something for friends, but when I realized that there was so much to tell, I asked for a hand and the book you see today came out”.
“Giir di Mont – Beyond the Race” is a volume of over 270 pages that collects old documents and images of the time, it’s full of photographs. You will find in the book the long list of those who contributed, several images are by Alberto Locatelli, who was one of the guardian angels in this adventure: “I had an abundance of material, it was a matter of putting everything in order because everything was catalogued for this, which was used to organize the race, but not to write a book. I did a lot of research on the charts even though some, especially the older editions, could not be found or were incomplete. Then, thanks to an aunt of mine who kept all the editions of ‘Il Corno’ from the 1960s, I was able to sift through all the issues and extract the articles that talked about Giir “.
What message would you like to get across with this book? “There are two aspects: first of all I would like to let my country know what Giir di Mont out of Premana means. We don’t have this perception fully and when I talk to fans and organizers of other important races, I have been told several times that we don’t realize what we have created. From the outside, however, I would like this book to be the starting point to talk about a union between skyrace and mountain running because this is the only way to think about the Olympics for this specialty”.
The book is available in sales outlets of the Premana Consumer Cooperative, Sabidea by Fazzini Sabina (Premana), Pensieri e colori by Combi Beatrice (Introbio). The entire proceeds will be donated to charity to support the work of the Premana Sports Association and Run2gether. Info: www.giirdimont.it.
Translated and adapted from an article in Italian by Marco Milani. See the original article here: Un libro sul Giir di mont, Filippo Fazzini racconta la storia della corsa di Premana – Lecco Notizie
