Cortina d'Ampezzo

Where it sits. Cortina d'Ampezzo occupies a wide, sunlit basin at 1,224 metres in the upper Boite valley, in the northernmost corner of the Veneto region and a short drive from the South Tyrolean border. The bowl is almost perfectly ringed by rock. The Tofane wall closes the west, topped by Tofana di Mezzo at 3,244 metres; the serrated crest of the Pomagagnon runs along the north; Cristallo (3,221 m) and Sorapiss (3,205 m) stand north-east and east; and Antelao, at 3,264 metres the second-highest summit in the Dolomites, blocks the southern skyline. Because the valley floor is unusually broad and the walls stand well back from it, Cortina receives far more direct sun than most Alpine towns at its altitude, and in the last twenty minutes of daylight the pale Triassic dolomite around it turns copper, then rose, then grey — the effect Ladin speakers call enrosadira.

A Tyrolean town that woke up Italian. For most of its recorded history Ampezzo belonged to the County of Tyrol and, after 1511, to the Habsburgs. The front line of the First World War ran directly through these mountains from 1915 to 1917, and the Treaty of Saint-Germain transferred the valley to Italy in 1920. The older population still speaks Ampezzan, a dialect of Ladin, and the valley is still administered in part by the Regole d'Ampezzo, a communal landholding institution documented since the Middle Ages, which owns the surrounding forests and pastures collectively and cannot sell them. That constitutional quirk explains something visitors notice immediately: the meadows on the valley floor are largely unbuilt, and the resort has not sprawled the way comparable Alpine towns have.

The town the Olympics built twice. Cortina hosted the VII Olympic Winter Games from 26 January to 5 February 1956, the first Winter Olympics carried live on television across Europe, and the venues built for them still shape the town: the Stadio Olimpico del Ghiaccio in the centre, the Trampolino Italia ski jump at Zuel, and the bobsleigh track at Ronco. Seventy years later the town co-hosted Milano-Cortina 2026 in February of that year, taking the women's alpine races on the Olympia delle Tofane piste, the curling tournament in the ice stadium, and the sliding sports on a rebuilt track at Ronco, the same slope where the 1956 bob run had been abandoned in 2008.

On screen. Cortina has been a film location for six decades, almost always cast as somewhere else, and three productions account for most of its screen identity.

• The Pink Panther (1963, Blake Edwards) opened its story here, with location work in the winter of 1962-63 around the Faloria slopes and the grand hotels, and interiors built at Cinecittà in Rome.
• For Your Eyes Only (1981, John Glen) shot its entire winter act in Cortina in early 1981: Bibi Dahl training in the Olympic ice stadium, the biathlon assassins pursuing Roger Moore down the Tofane piste and over the Zuel ski jump, and the motorcycle chase that ends on the bobsleigh run at Ronco.
• Cliffhanger (1993, Renny Harlin) is set in the Colorado Rockies but was shot almost wholly in the Ampezzo basin, on the Cinque Torri, the south face of Tofana di Rozes and around the Passo Falzarego, with local alpinists working as climbing doubles and riggers.

What you actually see today. The centre is compact and walkable: the pedestrianised Corso Italia, the parish church of Santi Filippo e Giacomo, and beside it a free-standing campanile of roughly 65 metres completed in 1858 to a design by Silvestro Franceschi, the tallest landmark for miles. The Ciasa de ra Regoles holds three museums run by the communal institution, including the Mario Rimoldi collection of twentieth-century Italian painting. Cable cars leave from opposite ends of town — the Freccia nel Cielo climbs in stages to Tofana di Mezzo, the Faloria line rises east to a sun terrace facing the Tofane — and the war is everywhere above 2,000 metres, in the restored trench systems on the Cinque Torri and the tunnels bored through the Lagazuoi.

Getting there and timing. Cortina has no railway. The Calalzo-Cortina-Dobbiaco line closed in 1964 and its trackbed is now the Lunga Via delle Dolomiti cycle route, which is the pleasantest way to arrive under your own power. The nearest stations are Calalzo-Pieve di Cadore, 35 kilometres south, and Dobbiaco-Toblach, 32 kilometres north, both with connecting buses; scheduled coaches from Venice Mestre and Marco Polo airport take about two hours. Drivers use the SS51 Alemagna. Prices in the resort are among the highest in the Italian Alps in February and August, and noticeably softer in late June and late September, when the refuges are open and the trails are empty.