Vittorio Sella, 1859-1943

Publication Year: 1945.

VITTORIO SELLA

1859-1943

The American Alpine Club has lost an Honorary Member in the death of Vittorio Sella, in his eighty-fifth year, at his home near Biella, Italy. His connection with the Club was chiefly due to Professor Fay’s acquaintance with members of the Duke of the Abruzzi’s expedition to Mt. St. Elias in 1897. Linda Lake, in the Canadian Rockies, is named for Sella’s wife.

Vittorio Sella was the son of a woolen manufacturer who, as early as 1858, wrote a treatise on photography which was translated into French and German. Vittorio’s uncle, Quintino Sella, was the Italian minister of finance who was also the founder of the Italian Alpine Club and with whom Vittorio began climbing when he was fifteen years old.

Alpine photography became his field and he photographed the Alps from one end to the other with an enormous apparatus taking plates 30x40 cm! Sella was a brilliant pioneer in the first winter ascents of Matterhorn (January, 1882), Monte Rosa (1884), Lys- kamm (1885) and Mont Blanc (traverse to Chamonix by the Aiguilles Grises). His usual guides were J. J. Maquignaz and J. A. Carrel. As photographer he accompanied Freshfield to the Caucasus and the Himalaya, and the Duke of the Abruzzi on his expeditions to Mt. St. Elias, the Himalaya and Equatorial Africa.

Sella’s pictures, exhibited at the Geographical Congress at Turin in 1893, became the nucleus of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s collection,1 while the American Alpine Club has a large and representative group.

J. M. T.

1App. vii, 229. Portrait. Courtesy of Appalachia.