Cesare Maestri

Cesare Maestri (2 October 1929 to 19 January 2021) was an Italian mountaineer and writer, born in Trento in Trentino. He began climbing in the Dolomites, where he repeated many famous routes, often solo and free, and put up new routes of the hardest difficulty, which earned him the nickname Spider of the Dolomites. He became an alpine guide in 1952, and later wrote several books and ran a sports equipment shop in Madonna di Campiglio. He is best remembered for Cerro Torre in Patagonia. His 1959 account of reaching the summit, in which his companion Toni Egger died in an avalanche, has been widely doubted. In 1970 he returned and drilled about 400 bolts with a petrol compressor to create the controversial Compressor Route, which was partly stripped in 2012.