In reply to shark:
> (In reply to Ian Parsons)
> I didn't know that. Does it work well in practice ?
I've no idea, Simon; sadly, despite best intentions, I have yet to climb on Marmolada, and the small amount of stuff I've done on Swiss mountain limestone was well before the guide came out and was generally spacedly-bolted rather than pure trad. However, the fact remains that guidebooks using this type of grading to cover trad and semi-trad areas already exist; part of my reason for posting was in the hope that people with more direct experience of these areas would chip in with their thoughts on how well they thought the systems worked in practice. Perhaps it would be useful to outline how the two guides approach the grading issue, and give a few popular examples for the benefit of people who have done some of the routes but don't have the modern guides.
Maurizio Giordani's Marmolada guide uses a grade made up of four figures:-
1) French grade, 1 - 8a+; an obvious question would be whether these are intended as sport/redpoint or onsight grades, bearing in mind that it's not the sort of place where most people would be working pitches! At a guess most of these will be some sort of translation from earlier UIAA grades. There might also be a supplementary aid grade - A0,A1,A2 etc - but routes are generally graded for their most free state (free-est?).
2) Protection grade; this consists of an R followed by a number from 1 to 6. R1 is described thus (in translation): "Easy to protect, always solid, safe and numerous protections. Few compulsory passages. Potential length of fall: some metres; fall without danger." whereafter the scale rises through increasing levels of nastiness to R6: "Not possible to protect but for short and insignificant passages far from cruxes. A fall could be mortal." Although it sounds a bit long-winded I would imagine that in practice it works like the Yorkshire P-system, but with more gradations. It applies equally to routes which are completely, partially, or not at all equipped with fixed gear, either pegs or threads - so not unlike, I suppose, many old trad limestone routes in this country. Where the fixed gear consists solely of bolts the R is relaced by S, and where both types of fixed gear are encountered it becomes RS. Of course, out of the 180 routes in the Marmolada guide only a handful have an S grade; the majority are R, with a few RS.
3) Time/length grade; on loan from Yosemite etc, a roman numeral I to VII. This basically gives you an idea of how long you'll be on it, always assuming you're competent and efficient at the grade. A quick skim through the book revealed only one VI - hardly surprising as this is the grade of all El Cap big wall routes; VII is reserved for places like Baffin, Patagonia and the Baltoro. It only relates indirectly to actual difficulty, in that a very easy 2000' route isn't likely to take all day, whereas one with several pitches of aid climbing probably will. I think this is possibly the least useful of the components of the system, especially as route length and normal climbing time are also given. Across the Pond, although Americans still speak of Vs and VIs, its use on shorter routes seems to have largely died out.
4) Overall Alpine adjectival grade; PD,D,TD,ED,EX (no AD, apparently) with additional + or - as necessary. It will be interesting to see how closely or otherwise these correlate with people's impressions of routes' likely E grades, this being an entirely rock area (ie not complicated by some other alpine factors).
A few well-known examples:-
Don Quixote - 6a/R2/IV/D+ (not sure about this; a few people have said 6c)
Fish - 7b/R4/V/ED+ (second pitch above cave usually gets 7b+; Giordani says 7a)
Fram - 7b+/RS4/III/EX (up to the Fish cave)
Vinatzer - 6a+/R2/IV/TD (Messner Finish - 6a+/R3/IV/TD)
Tempi Moderni - 6c/R4/IV/ED-
Cinquantenario Fisi ("Gogna") - 6b+/R2/IV/TD
Tomasson (South Face Original route, 1901) - 4+/R2/IV/D
Micheluzzi - 6a A0/R2/IV/TD
Solda - 6a+/R2/IV/TD
Larcher-Vigiani - 8a/S3/IV/EX (with 90 bolts in 13 pitches, obligatory 7b, reasonably spaced bolts [suggestion that S3 equates to 5 metre spacing on hard sections], I assume that this is fully-bolted; probably Marmolada's first).
I'll come back later with details of the Swiss guide (if anyone's still awake).