By Andrea Milani
with photos by Giovanni Danieli and Davide Terenzi – outThere Collective

The question I am often asked is extremely simple, yet at the same time very difficult to answer. People ask me “When did you start climbing?” and I struggle to give a precise reply. I cannot place the exact moment in time, but I definitely remember the place and the first sensations. I remember a kind of terror I had never felt before when my foot slipped and I sensed that feeling of emptiness that embraces you in a second, a strange fire rising from the tips of your toes all the way to your ears, your nose and every single hair on your head. I did not enjoy that day at all, but looking back it clearly sparked a passion, or rather a way of life, that has defined me for a long time and has made me who I am.

I was lucky to have a family who allowed me to approach outdoor sports from a very young age, from skiing to hiking, then climbing and easy outings with a more mountaineering character. Skiing was certainly an excellent springboard and I have to say I was quite good at it. Then suddenly something broke. That routine made of training, school sacrifices, Saturdays and Sundays spent always on the slopes, had worn me out. It overflowed the cup and I wanted to see what lay beyond. Even now I think that was a clear breaking point, especially with my family. I often think about that moment and how much they cared, how they imagined my adult life more on skis than on rock. I also have to admit that I have never had the courage to talk about it directly with them, even though I am now a twenty eight year old who should not be afraid of such things.

Now my life is the rock, the vertical world. It is the feeling of the body moving in a perfect dance, shaping itself to the movements that mother nature has offered us. It is an incredible sense of lightness, with the breath sometimes tightening and sometimes softening, with the mind shifting from moments of absolute clarity to moments of lucid dreaming, of trance.

The mind is certainly the most important muscle to train, as the strong climber Wolfgang Gullich once said. Yet I often find myself frightened, even oppressed, by what lives inside it. With the small amount of intelligence that belongs to me I feel overwhelmed by thoughts in which I ask myself what I am even doing in this world, or rather, how I am using my space and my time on this earth. I realise at times that I am a poor dreamer, thinking that one day I will do something great, something remarkable, something that will leave my name in the records. Instead I am just a tiny grain of sand rolling along, carried by the desert wind.

I found myself in an uncomfortable situation, a kind of golden cage. I have a job as a mountain guide that for many would be a dream, but it had become too tight for me. Working to allow others to experience the mountains is turning into a symbol of extreme consumerism. I want to experience the mountains myself. Every single day, every single wall, every single season.

In recent years I have dedicated body and soul to what I feel I love. I have climbed routes that enchanted me and made me feel alive. I decided to tell this story of climbing, a story of sharing between people, between lives that cross, separate and meet again. I am not a very strong climber, or rather, I think I am fairly good but not strong, not an athlete. I often carry this feeling with me: the sense of always being second, of arriving too late. You might come home after a great day on the rock face or on skis, decide to unwind with a nice cup of tea, take a look at social media, and realise there are hundreds of people doing something better than you, better than what you’ve done and better than what you ever might do. Despite all the hard work I’ve carried on my shoulders, the sweat, the effort it took to reach a goal that was mine, I often find myself sinking into that dark oblivion where you feel you mean nothing to others, and perhaps not even to yourself. Everything you’ve done feels relative, marginal, and ultimately like it doesn’t mean a damn thing.

No, here I am doing it again. I keep diminishing what I do, another fruit of this cursed head, this box I have sitting on my shoulders. In any case I have truly given everything to this, to that place where I felt good, where I felt accepted by the few people who were with me. When you stand under the wall the weight of the world presses on your shoulders, but when you start climbing those are the most beautiful minutes of your life, when the mind is free from everything.

I told this story in a short video that Patagonia gave me the opportunity to present around Italy. I tried to show every fragility, every thought, every shade of this strange life I am living. It is beautiful to feel the embrace of the people who watch and listen, it loosens that grip I feel on my neck, those hands that seem to take away my air and tell me I am not good enough, that I am doing nothing right, that I am a disappointment, that I am nothing.

Climbing is sharing and this is life.

Everything I have inside, I have never told anyone. I have never asked for help. Friends, or those I thought were friends, have always expected help and support from me, but I realised that my presence, my life, was always something secondary for them.

Now there are only a few people around me, but I feel a warmth that is sometimes enough to turn a day around. Climbing for me is the essence of life, it is life itself. Falling and starting again, no matter how many times. It does not matter whether you succeed, what matters is knowing that we are not alone. Living our fragilities is the purest thing we can do, learning to manage our flaws, our fears, our dark holes.

I too often feel that I am falling into that hole, but mother rock, nature and the feeling of being alive bring me back towards the light.

We climb to live, because up there everything is different.

Words by Andrea Milani 2026 – Photos from outThere Collective by Giovanni Danieli and Davide Terenzi.

Andrea’s film is currently showing in Italy but we hope to share it with you soon.