ROME: Two Italian climbers on Thursday made it to the top of Nepal’s Annapurna peak, and at the same time set a record as the first couple to conquer the world’s 14 highest mountains. Romano Benet and his wife Nives Meroi, both 55, reached the 8,091-metre (26,545-foot) Annapurna summit on Thursday morning, without using oxygen or porters just as they have in all their ascents, according to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. The final climb to the top starting at an altitude of 7,200 metres was “the hardest but also the most beautiful,” Meroi told her sister Leila, the newspaper said.

Annapurna and K2 (8,611 metres) are considered the most difficult and most dangerous summits for climbers, apart from the world’s highest peak, Mount Everest (8,848 metres). Before the Italian couple, only 34 mountain climbers had been able to conquer the Earth’s 14 highest summits — all over 8,000 metres — and only half of them did it without oxygen. —AFP