Tree-climbing women have always existed, points out Leonelli, but the literary matrix that gave an impetus to the practice of having one’s photograph taken climbing a tree was the novel ‘Little Women‘, published in 1868. Jo March, in fact, the most iconic of the four protagonists of Louisa May Alcott‘s masterpiece, adored by all the novel’s readers for her rebellious and courageous character (thus, at the time, masculine), loves to read, and it is no coincidence that she likes to read in the apple tree in front of her house. Jo is the author’s alter ego, with whom Simone de Beauvoir, among others, identifies, and is brought to the screen by another passionate climber, Katharine Hepburn, who like Jo loves to climb trees.

Then there is Pippi Longstocking, born from the pen of Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren, a libertarian and independent woman who loved climbing trees, and Julia Butterfly Hill, who spent 738 days in a tree, a thousand-year-old sequoia, becoming the symbol of one of the most extraordinary struggles of the American ecology movement.

The exhibition pays tribute to three women from Trieste and Friuli, three great climbers: Bianca di Beaco, Riccarda de Eccher and Tiziana Weiss. On the other hand, who better than a female climber to continue the ascent begun in the trees? Three female climbers, two generations and a city where women have been freer than elsewhere. In Trieste they started climbing early, and no one found it strange. Like all restless little girls, they tackled their first climb in the trees, and then made their way into a world that, until then, had been strictly forbidden to half of mankind.