Cima dei Armi

The Cima degli Armi, also called Cima dei Armi, reaches 2,951 metres in the central part of the Brenta group, within the Catena degli Sfulmini, between the Torre di Brenta to the south-west and the Cima Molveno to the north. Karl Schulz, who climbed it himself in 1887 by a new route, described it as a mighty block with a broad summit, rising like a castle; for Gino Buscaini and Ettore Castiglioni it is elegant from the west, like a rectangular tower, while the east side is shapeless, with steep walls broken by steps.

The name was given to it by Edward Theodore Compton and Alberto De Falkner, and it is not a geographical name: the Armi were a family from San Lorenzo in Banale whose members, hunting chamois and bears, were the first to explore the Brenta in depth. A mountain named after those who went there for work, before mountaineering existed.

The first ascent took place on 16 July 1884 and was made by the Munich mountaineer Friedrich Vogl with the guide Matteo Nicolussi of Molveno, by the north flank starting from the ghiacciaio degli Sfulmini. A few days later Alberto de Falkner and his son Orazio repeated the same route; Orazio had already been with his father on the first ascent of the Cima del Grostè in 1882: on the boy's age the two sources do not agree, ten years old at the Grostè and thirteen here, and the entry limits itself to recording that he was a child. The normal route, by the south-west flank, was opened only forty years later, on 31 August 1925, by Pino Prati, Gianni Videsott and Martino Vidotto.