Monte Daino

Two thousand six hundred and ninety-five metres, and together with the Piz Galin it is the mountain seen from Andalo: it forms the backdrop to the village and marks the eastern entrances to the Brenta group. From the summit the gaze takes in the most famous and most bizarre parts of the group on one side, the Andalo plateau and the Paganella massif on the other.

It gives its name to a subgroup, a distinction proposed by Karl Schulz in the second half of the nineteenth century and kept identical in the classification in use today. Its nine main peaks lie between 1,998 and 2,695 metres, and the rock changes a great deal: crumbly on Monte Daino itself, remarkably solid on the wall of the Croz del Rifugio, which is one of the best-loved climbing crags in the Brenta and where in 1953 Cesare Maestri also opened a route.

The north face descends with a broad wall into a glacial cirque, where more snow accumulates than elsewhere in the area: seen from there the mountain recalls the mouth of a deep-sea fish, and the long ridge its dorsal fin. The first recorded ascent was on 19 July 1883, by Alberto Falkner with the mountain painter Edward Compton, the same man who would later climb the Torre di Brenta, and two other companions. Today the summit can be reached in two days from Molveno or in a short time from the rifugio Pedrotti, without equipment.