Tre Cime di Lavaredo

Where it sits. The Tre Cime di Lavaredo, called the Drei Zinnen on the German-speaking side, stand on the watershed ridge between the Sexten valley in South Tyrol and Auronzo di Cadore in the province of Belluno. That line was the Austro-Italian border until 1918 and remains a provincial and linguistic boundary today. Three towers of Dolomia Principale rise from a shared plinth of scree: Cima Grande in the centre at 2,999 metres, Cima Ovest to the west at 2,973 metres, and the slimmer Cima Piccola to the east at 2,857 metres. Seen from the north the three north faces line up as flat, near-vertical plates six hundred metres high; seen from the south, from the road head, they look squat and disappointing. Almost everyone who photographs them does so from the north, which is why the walk around the group runs anticlockwise.

Reef, border, battlefield. The rock is a Triassic carbonate platform, built by algae and sponges in a shallow tropical sea roughly 230 million years ago and lifted more or less intact during the Alpine orogeny, which is why the strata in the faces are horizontal rather than folded. Paul Grohmann made the first ascent of Cima Grande on 21 August 1869 with the Sexten guides Franz Innerkofler and Peter Salcher; the Innerkofler family went on to climb most of the surrounding summits. From 1915 to 1917 the front line ran straight through here. Italian and Austro-Hungarian troops tunnelled into Monte Paterno and the Toblinger Knoten, fought at close range in positions above 2,500 metres, and left the galleries, ladders and gun emplacements that today form the region's via ferrata network. Sepp Innerkofler, the most famous guide of his generation, was killed on Monte Paterno in July 1915 while leading an assault on a position he had climbed for pleasure many times before.

The wall that changed climbing. In August 1933 Emilio Comici, with the Cortina brothers Angelo and Giuseppe Dimai, forced a direct line up the overhanging north face of Cima Grande over three days, using pegs and stirrups on ground that could not be free-climbed. Comici argued that the ideal route was the line a drop of water would take falling from the summit, and the direttissima idea he introduced there governed European big-wall climbing for the next forty years. Riccardo Cassin and Vittorio Ratti answered in 1935 on the still more overhanging north face of Cima Ovest. Both faces remain serious undertakings, and on a summer afternoon you can pick out parties on them from the trail with the naked eye.

On screen and in the record books. The three peaks are more often an establishing aerial than a set. Their profile is the visual shorthand for the Dolomites in Italian television drama, most persistently in RAI's long-running series Un passo dal cielo, which is set in the Alta Pusteria immediately north of here and uses the Sexten Dolomites as its permanent backdrop. The more consistently filmed event is athletic rather than dramatic: the toll road up from Misurina has been a summit finish of the Giro d'Italia since 1967, and the stages won here by Eddy Merckx in a 1968 snowstorm and by Vincenzo Nibali in an equally miserable 2013 are among the race's most replayed footage.

What you actually see today. A private toll road climbs seven kilometres from Lake Misurina to Rifugio Auronzo at 2,320 metres, built in 1954 and now the busiest trailhead in the eastern Alps; the toll has climbed past thirty euros a car in high season and the barrier closes when the car park fills, often before nine in the morning. From there the circuit is roughly ten kilometres with about 350 metres of ascent, taking three to four hours at a walking pace. It passes Rifugio Lavaredo, crosses the Forcella Lavaredo, and reaches Rifugio Locatelli, the Dreizinnenhütte, opened in 1883 and positioned squarely in front of the north faces. The return leg traverses beneath the west face and the Forcella Col di Mezzo. Nothing on the loop requires scrambling, but the ground is stony throughout and exposed to weather with no shelter between huts.

Getting there and timing. The road opens when the snow clears, usually in late May or June, and closes again by early November; outside those months the approach is a long ski tour or snowshoe from Misurina. Buses run in July and August from Cortina and Dobbiaco to Rifugio Auronzo, and using them avoids the parking lottery entirely. The north faces are lit in the first hour of daylight and again at sunset; between eleven and four in high summer the light is flat and the loop is crowded end to end.