Alone in the White Expanse – a Winter Picture from the Fundaziun Capauliana

"At 6 p.m. we were standing on the longed-for, majestic summit on soil that no human had trodden upon before, on the highest point of the canton, 4052 metres above sea level. Serious emotions took hold of us." However, Johann Fortunat Coaz and his assistants Jon and Lorenz Ragut Tscharner, who make the first ascent of Piz Bernina, do not have much time for serious emotions in September 1850. Dusk is falling. The three mountaineers have set off from the Bernina inn at 6 a.m. and return to the inn no earlier than 2 a.m.

The snowshoer we encounter in a painting from the Fundaziun Capauliana collection seems to have a little more time on his hands. He is also travelling in the Bernina region, but is obviously more interested in the horizontal than the vertical dimension. The German painter Erich Erler (1870-1946), who sometimes worked in nearby Samedan, depicts the snowshoer around 1905 with a view back to the landscape around the Bernina Pass.

The wintry landscape has a lonely quality to it. And yet, the Bernina Pass has been traversed since time immemorial. Even in winter, pack animal drivers, the Transporteurs [transporters of goods] of the Middle Ages and early modern times, travelled here with their animals. And today, red compositions regularly appear in the wintry white: the Rhaetian Railway's Bernina Express alone carries roughly quarter of a million passengers a year.