A Pole, a Frenchman and an Italian meet one day, guided by a strange impulse, maybe an internal echo, in a room on the second floor of an old palazzo in Trento. They talk about mountains and their amazing ability to reduce distances, whether these are cultural, geographical or linguistic. The members of the public who attended this meeting, moved by the same sense of urgency, were stimulated to be confronted with the notion of a meeting and to discover its meaning. It is as if each of us was going to have to leave on a long group excursion somewhere, without ever having been there before, and therefore without knowing exactly what equipment would be necessary to complete the undertaking. Even provided with a capacious back pack, you can often still lack something essential for survival. The road is long, the path is not always indicated and for long stretches you must be guided by your eyesight alone. It could rain and a sudden shower could start at any moment. So being able to share some of the con tents of our bag will certainly make it easier to get to the end of the journey. Unforeseen events will then strengthen the spirit of unity, since everybody believes in principle that they have everything they need in their own pack and wouldn’t want to exchange their new grapples for somebody else’s rope: but the journey makes the travellers change their ideas. Anyone succeeding in the face of the difficulties and unforeseen events will reach the summit and enjoy a landscape stretching to the wide horizon. The possibility that the Trento Film Festival, through the international review published by Montagnalibri and edited by Luana Bisesti, gave to the editors of the Eco delle Dolomiti to organise a meeting with Italian and international personalities (Marek Grocholski, director of the quarterly Polish review Tatry; Nicolas Boldych, French essayist and linguist; the local writer and mountaineer Vittorino Mason), to talk about mountains, has made it possible to compare the situation of Trento and Italy with far off territories, and to look at the subject from different points of view. The result was an all round vision of the manner of understanding mountains, looked at with different points of view by each speaker, so as to look more deeply into the meaning of things. The humanity and warmth with which subjects were discussed made this conference into a meeting which enriched all those who had the good fortune to be there.     www.trentofestival.it