The Great Dolomite Road

Welcome to the Great Dolomite Road. In the next hundred and ten kilometres you will drive across the floor of a tropical sea, over three great mountain passes, and through the strangest battlefields of the last century, and you will do all of it without leaving the car. You are starting in Bolzano, the bilingual capital of South Tyrol, where the signs read in Italian and German and the morning market on Piazza delle Erbe has traded under the old arcades for centuries. Grab a coffee there, and fill the tank before you climb, because fuel stations are scarce once you are high in the passes. This road was a dream before it was a road, pushed through these valleys between 1901 and 1909 by a tourism pioneer named Theodor Christomannos, whose rule was simple: no hotel without roads, and no road without hotels. The empire that ruled here then, Austria-Hungary, paid for much of it, not for armies but for travelers like you. One rule for the day ahead: do not rush it. The locals will overtake you on the bends, and that is exactly as it should be. Let them go, keep your eyes on the peaks, and give the road the whole day.

As you climb away from the vineyards into the Eggental valley, look at the cliffs ahead and know this: they were once the floor of a tropical sea. Around two hundred and fifty million years ago, long before the first dinosaurs, this was warm, shallow ocean, and the pale grey rock is the fossilised remains of ancient reefs and lagoons, much like the Bahamas today. As the seabed slowly sank, the reefs grew upward to stay in the sunlight, which is why these stone platforms stand hundreds of metres thick. Then the continents collided and lifted the old sea floor into the sky. Even the name has a story. The stone was identified in the seventeen-nineties by a French geologist, Déodat de Dolomieu, and named dolomite after him. For a long time only mineral collectors knew the word, and the mountains were simply the Pale Mountains, the Monti Pallidi, until a pair of Victorian travelers wrote a book in 1864 and called them the Dolomites. The name stuck. You are driving through the skeleton of a tropical reef that the world named after a chemist.

In a few minutes, watch closely for the signed car park at Lago di Carezza, because the lake hides behind the trees right beside the road, and at speed you will sail straight past it. Pull into the lakeside lot and take the underpass beneath the road; it brings you out on the shore without ever crossing traffic. It is worth every minute. The Ladins call this the rainbow lake, and the water glows in impossible greens and blues beneath the pale spires of the Latemar. Come early, before the wind ruffles the surface, and walk round to the far boardwalk for the classic view, the whole Latemar mirrored in the still water. There is a legend here. A water nymph once lived in the lake, so lovely that a sorcerer lost his heart to her. On a witch's advice he flung a rainbow across the sky to lure her out, disguised as a jewel-seller, but he bungled the disguise; she saw through it and vanished into the depths, and in his fury he shattered the rainbow into the water, where its colours have shimmered ever since. Just above the lake you will cross the Costalunga Pass, the first of your three. The trees thin, the towers rise, and the Dolomites begin in earnest.

On the way down toward the Val di Fassa, glance back over your shoulder at the great jagged wall of the Rosengarten, the rose garden. Fix it in your memory, because tonight it has a trick to show you. If you catch these peaks in the last half hour before sunset, you will watch the rock turn the colour of a rose, a deep pink that climbs the stone and then fades within minutes. The Ladins call it enrosadira, the turning-pink. It happens because, when the sun drops low, the air scatters away the blue light and leaves only the red, and the pale dolomite throws that fire back at you. But they tell it another way. Long ago this was the rose garden of King Laurin, the king of the dwarves, who guarded it from his crystal palace inside the mountain. When knights carried off his roses and his freedom, he cursed the garden so that no eye would ever see it again, by day or by night. But in his rage he forgot the two hours in between, the dawn and the dusk. And so, twice a day, for just a few minutes, the forbidden roses still bloom across the stone. Be in position before sunset at Cortina tonight, and watch for them.

You have come down into the Val di Fassa, into one of the oldest cultural islands in Europe. The people here are Ladin, and they speak a language all their own, one that clung closer to the Latin of Rome than Italian ever did, carried up here by Roman soldiers who conquered the province of Raetia fifteen years before the birth of Christ. Two thousand years later, around thirty thousand people still speak it in these hidden valleys, and their children still learn it at school. They have their own epic too, the Kingdom of the Fanes, the saga of a mountain people allied with the marmots, and of a warrior princess named Dolasilla in her silver armour, told around the fire for centuries before anyone wrote it down. Canazei is the lively heart of the valley, and a smart place to stop: fill the tank here, because this is your last easy fuel before the high passes, and find a plate of canederli, the bread dumplings of these mountains. Then look up. Ahead stands the Sella, the great flat-topped fortress of stone you are about to drive around, and over your shoulder, the sawtooth crown of the Sassolungo. From here, the road begins to climb in earnest.

This climb to the Pordoi is a cathedral of switchbacks, so ease off the speed and take the bends gently. The wall of rock rising beside you is the Sella, and the loop of four passes around it is one of the most famous circuits in the Alps. They call it the Sella Ronda, and on a summer day you will share these hairpins with cyclists by the hundred, grinding up in the heat, freewheels ticking as they pass. Give them a wide, patient berth, and only overtake where you can see clear road ahead, because the other regular of these passes is the motorbike, and some of them cut the blind bends at speed. One piece of local wisdom: this loop chokes with buses and bikes through the middle of a summer day. If you can, drive it early, or save it for the soft light of late afternoon when the passes empty out. Keep your eyes up between the bends. The view over your shoulder is already extraordinary, and it only gets better.

Pull in at the top, because you have reached the roof of this road: the Passo Pordoi, just over twenty-two hundred metres, the highest pass on the whole Dolomite Road. Step out into the thin, cold air, between the sheer walls of the Sella on one side and the white crown of the Marmolada to the south. The big car park fills fast by late morning in summer, so the earlier you reach it the better. From here a cable car lifts you in four minutes to the Sass Pordoi, a flat terrace at nearly three thousand metres that locals simply call the Terrace of the Dolomites, with the whole range wheeling around you and the Rifugio Maria to warm up in. It is worth the ride, and going at opening time spares you the queue. This pass is holy ground to cyclists. It is often the Cima Coppi, the highest point of the entire Giro d'Italia, and a bronze statue of the great champion Fausto Coppi stands by the cable-car station, leaning into the climb forever. Catch your breath, have a hot chocolate, and look back down at the road you have driven. From here, it is downhill into the past.

Now comes the road's most famous stretch: the long descent to Arabba, thirty-three hairpin bends stacked down the mountainside one after another. Take them slowly and drop into a low gear, letting the engine hold you back rather than riding the brakes all the way down and cooking them. This is the climb every cyclist dreams of, and you get it for free, going down, so enjoy it, but watch for motorbikes cutting up the inside of the blind corners. As you drop, keep glancing to the south. The great glaciered peak that keeps appearing and vanishing behind the ridges is the Marmolada, the highest mountain in the Dolomites and the one they call the Queen. We are about to meet her properly, and her story is the darkest on this whole road.

Look south to the Marmolada, more than three thousand three hundred metres of it, the highest peak in the Dolomites and keeper of the only great glacier in the range. That white slope hides two stories worth knowing. In the First World War the front line ran straight across it, and rather than fight in the open, Austrian soldiers did something almost beyond belief: they dug a city inside the glacier. An engineer named Leo Handl led the carving of some twelve kilometres of tunnels and rooms into the living ice, with dormitories, kitchens, a chapel, even a telephone exchange, where hundreds of men lived hidden from the guns. They called it the City of Ice. The second story is unfolding now. That glacier is melting fast, and on a blazing afternoon in July 2022, after the summit touched ten degrees, a great block of ice broke loose and swept down the slope, killing eleven climbers. The Queen keeps the memory of one war, and has become a warning of another fight. Take the next few kilometres slowly.

For the next few kilometres, as you pass through Pieve di Livinallongo toward the Falzarego, hold on to where you are. For nearly three years, every pass and peak around you was a battlefield, fought at altitude in rock and snow, in what they called the White War. And here is the cruelty at the heart of it: the mountains killed more men than the enemy did. Of the roughly hundred and fifty thousand who died on this Alpine front, historians reckon some two in three were taken not by bullets, but by avalanche, frostbite, and cold. On a single morning, the thirteenth of December 1916, an avalanche tore away an Austrian barracks on the Marmolada and buried around two hundred and seventy men in moments. They remembered it as White Friday. Carry that with you up to the next pass, because what waits there is the strangest battlefield of them all.

You are at the Passo Falzarego, just over two thousand one hundred metres, and the pale tower rising to the north is the Lagazuoi. A century ago this was one of the strangest battlefields in the history of war. The two armies could not blast each other off the cliffs, so they went inside the mountain instead, digging tunnels through solid rock, each side racing to burrow beneath the other and pack the dark with explosives first. On the twentieth of June 1917 the Italians fired a mine of thirty-three tonnes into the Austrian summit above you. There is a large car park here at the pass, with toilets, and a cable car that climbs to over two and a half thousand metres. At the top wait two things: the Rifugio Lagazuoi, whose terrace is one of the great sunset tables in the Alps, and an open-air museum of trenches and caves from that war. The bold can even descend on foot through the original mine tunnel, more than a kilometre of darkness bored straight through the mountain. But it is no stroll; you will want a headlamp, a helmet, and decent shoes, all of which you can rent down here at the pass. Even from this car park, you can feel it. This beauty was once a charnel house. Sit with that a moment before you drive on.

Look to your right and you will see five great fingers of rock standing free of the cliffs behind them: the Cinque Torri, the Five Towers. After the dark of the last few passes, let this be where you come up for air. You cannot drive to them; turn off at Bai de Dones and ride the little chairlift up to the Rifugio Scoiattoli, with its front-row terrace facing the towers, or walk it in about forty minutes. These towers were an Italian gun position in the war, and the trenches are still here, restored exactly as they were, an open-air museum you can walk for free on a flat, easy loop, with one of the finest panoramas in the Dolomites all around you. Across the valley stands the Castelletto, a spur the Italians blew apart in 1916 with thirty-five tonnes of explosive while their king watched from a peak nearby. But let the war rest now. Have lunch up here, the nearby Rifugio Averau is famous for it, watch the climbers haul themselves up the towers, and remember that all of this was made for days exactly like the one you are having. The hardest history is behind you.

As the road makes its last descent and the Cortina basin opens ahead, one final thought about the people of these mountains. The man many call the greatest mountaineer who ever lived, Reinhold Messner, was born elsewhere in these same Dolomites, in a quiet valley beneath the peaks, in 1944. He was the first to climb all fourteen of the world's eight-thousand-metre giants, and, with Peter Habeler, the first to stand on the summit of Everest breathing nothing but the thin air itself. He learned his craft on pale stone like this, on towers just like the Cinque Torri behind you. There is something about being raised beneath these walls that makes a person want to measure themselves against the biggest mountains on earth. Ease off the throttle now. What is coming is the perfect place to end a day like this.

And here she is: Cortina d'Ampezzo, the grande dame of the Dolomites, cradled in a perfect ring of pale peaks, the Tofane, the Cristallo, the Sorapis, the Pomagagnon. Cortina hosted the Winter Olympics in 1956, and the Games come back here in 2026. As the afternoon softens, the whole town comes out to walk the Corso Italia, the famous passeggiata, to see and be seen and stop for an aperitivo beneath the mountains. Join them, but keep one eye on the peaks, because if you have timed it right you are about to be paid back. In the last half hour of light the stone begins to blush, faint pink, then deep rose, the enrosadira, King Laurin's forbidden roses opening for a few stolen minutes before the dark. And if you have another day to give these mountains, they are right here: the mirror of Lago di Misurina, the three great towers of the Tre Cime up their toll road, the turquoise hike in to Lago di Sorapis, all a short drive from this square. But that is tomorrow. Today you have driven a hundred and ten kilometres, and far more than that. You have crossed a sea two hundred and fifty million years old, the strangest battlefields of the last century, and a kingdom of dwarves and warrior princesses. Not bad for a day at the wheel. Welcome to Cortina.