I didn't choose the mountains; it was a stroke of luck. I grew up beneath them, with the Gran Sasso watching you from every window in L'Aquila, and long before I thought of photographing them I was going up there to climb and ski tour. The camera came later, as a natural continuation of what I was already doing: more a union of two passions than a choice. To tell what happens up there is to try to convey what I have seen: the admiration, the joy, the effort, sometimes the pain. Photographing the mountains is a way of staying true to them. I know them technically, I respect them because they can kill you, and I try to tell them for what they are, not for how people like to imagine them.