Word: direttissima
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Stretching for 11 1/2 miles beneath central Italy's rugged Apennine mountains, it is one of Europe's longest railway tunnels and carries the nickname La Direttissima because it provides the most direct route between Florence and Bologna. Last week the Italian press renamed it the "Tunnel of Death...
...days before Christmas, Train 904, an express bound from Naples to Milan with 700 holiday passengers aboard, was roaring through La Direttissima at 90 m.p.h. when a time bomb exploded in a second-class carriage. The force of the blast blew in the double-paned windows in most of the train's 14 cars. Antonio Algieri, 33, one of those wounded by the flying glass, described the scene as "a hurricane of slivers--and then so much terrible screaming in the dark." The train came to a stop, and thick smoke billowed through the tunnel, initially frustrating rescue attempts...
...onetime dress designer for Dior and Balmain and an Air Force polar survival expert who became a noted Alpinist and the first American to conquer two of the most dreaded Alps, the Matterhorn and the Eiger, via their treacherous north faces, opened a school in Switzerland specializing in direttissima, an innovation that ignores the traditional zigging and zagging around danger spots for a damn-the-obstacles, straight-up climb to the top; as a result of a 3,000-ft. fall during the first direttissima attempt on the Eiger, successfully completed by the rest of the team three days after...
...Italy's Walter Bonatti, 34: the first successful direttissima-straight up-ascent of the 14,701-ft. Matterhorn's north wall; in Switzerland. Two days after 60 m.p.h. winds forced Bonatti and two friends to abandon a similar assault, he was back on the mountain, alone, inching up the ice-covered rock that leans slightly from the perpendicular (TIME, Feb. 26). It was four days before he finally staggered onto the summit, briefly embraced a wrought-iron cross, then started the descent to Zermatt and a hero's welcome...
...Drop of Water. For Bonatti, the trick now is to find new ways to climb the familiar old hills. And he had a really novel idea for the Matterhorn: a "direttissima" assault, straight up the mountain's ice-coated, practically vertical north wall, a climb that had been tried (without success) only once before-in the summer. It was, shuddered a Swiss guide, "the route that a drop of water would follow...
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