Cinque Torri

Where it sits. The Cinque Torri stand on an open shoulder at about 2,200 metres between Cortina d'Ampezzo and the Passo Falzarego, in the Nuvolau group on the western rim of the Ampezzo basin. They are not a summit but a cluster of free-standing dolomite towers, isolated on a grassy terrace and visible from most of the valley below. Torre Grande, the largest, reaches 2,361 metres and has three distinct tops; around it stand the Torre Seconda, the Torre Terza, the Torre Quarta with its Bassa and Alta sections, the small Torre Inglese, the Torre Latina, the Torre Trephor and the Torre Barancio. The whole group is a detached block that slid off the flank of the Averau and came to rest on softer marl, which is why it sits proud of the slope with nothing behind it. The view across the terrace takes in Tofana di Rozes to the north, the Averau and Nuvolau immediately above, and the Marmolada glacier to the south-west.

A climbers' laboratory. Because the towers are short, sound, roadside and face every direction of the compass, they became the training ground for the Dolomite climbing tradition. Routes here run from straightforward third-grade scrambles to modern eighth-grade test pieces, more than a hundred of them within a fifteen-minute walk, and the Scoiattoli di Cortina, the climbing group founded in 1939 whose members went on to Gasherbrum and Cerro Torre, learned their trade on this rock. The group is also unstable in geological time: rockfall periodically reshapes it, and one of the smaller towers lost a substantial pillar in the mid-2000s, an event recorded in photographs taken from the refuge terrace a few hundred metres away.

The war above the treeline. From 1915 to 1917 the Italian front line ran along this terrace, facing Austro-Hungarian positions on the Lagazuoi across the Falzarego road. The Italians dug trenches, observation posts and shelters into the ground around the towers and used the rock itself as cover for artillery spotting. Those works were excavated and rebuilt as an open-air museum in the early 2000s: several hundred metres of restored trench, timber-revetted dugouts, a command post and signage in three languages, all of it walkable in ordinary shoes. On the far side of the pass the Lagazuoi tunnels — galleries driven through the mountain by both armies in an attempt to mine each other's positions — complete the picture, and a marked route links the two.

On screen. The Cinque Torri are the location of one of the most-replayed opening sequences in 1990s action cinema. Cliffhanger, directed by Renny Harlin and released in 1993, is set in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, but almost all of its climbing footage was shot in the Dolomites around Cortina in the autumn of 1992, and the film's opening — the failed rescue in which Sylvester Stallone's character watches Sarah Cheyenne fall from a Tyrolean traverse — was staged on a rope rigged between these towers. The production's aerial unit worked the same terrace, the Tofana di Rozes wall and the Falzarego area, and the stunt rigging was carried out with the help of local guides. The finished film never names Italy, which is why the location is better known to climbers than to filmgoers.

What you actually see today. A chairlift from Bai de Dones on the Falzarego road lifts you to Rifugio Scoiattoli at 2,255 metres in about ten minutes; a toll track also climbs to Rifugio Cinque Torri at 2,137 metres for those on foot or on a mountain bike. From either hut the towers are five minutes away and the war museum immediately below them. Continuing uphill for forty-five minutes brings you to Rifugio Nuvolau at 2,575 metres, opened in 1883 and the oldest refuge in the Dolomites, a small stone building on an exposed summit with a 360-degree panorama that is worth the climb even without lunch. In winter the same terrace is part of the Cinque Torri ski area and a link on the Grande Guerra ski tour, a full-day circuit that follows the old front line by lift and piste.

Getting there and timing. The Falzarego road, the SR48, runs 17 kilometres from Cortina to Bai de Dones and stays open all year, though winter tyres are compulsory. Summer bus services from Cortina serve the pass. The trails around the towers are snow-free from roughly mid-June, and the refuges open from late June until the end of September. Afternoon thunderstorms are frequent in July and August, and the terrace is exposed, so the morning is both the safer and the better-lit half of the day.