6. ARRIVING IN AMPEZZO

Whether one emerges from the tunnel carved into the rock or arrives from the center of Cortina, hundreds of writers have paused to admire the extraordinary landscape of the Dolomites from this privileged vantage point. It was here, near the “Belvedere”of Ampezzo, in October of 1948 that Ernest Hemingway returned to Cortina. Emerging from the Falzarego Pass aboard his Buick and accompanied by his fourth and final wife, Mary Welsh, they stopped to contemplate the ridges and the valley. At this same spot in 1872, the traveler and writer Amelia Edwards had made a detailed sketch of the Antelao. Early guidebooks to the Dolomites, including Gabriel Faure’s 1914 edition, note: “from this rocky promontory, which juts out over the Ampezzo basin like the prow of a tall ship, one can see the valley in its entirety, without reducing the landscape to a mere relief map”. In the 1973 film Ash Wednesday by Larry Peerce, Elisabeth Taylor passes through this spot after driving through the hairpin turns of the Giau Pass, on her way to the Ampezzo valley. Arriving in Cortina is above all, an emotional experience, which great literature has immortalized. Goffredo Parise in 1974 wrote: “to arrive in Cortina by night in the wintertime, one is lucky if it is snowing. Seeing and not seeing thought the headlights, streetlights raining down snow and hardly anyone in sight. To dine, to feel tired and then wander around through the thick snow, with just a jacket instead of those ridiculous furs as fatigue sets in and your eyelids start to droop and finally leaping under the covers, knowing with immense joy that it’s snowing outside.”