15. WALKING WITH MONTANELLI

Anyone who passed through these woods between the 1960s and 1990s might have encountered a rather famous Cortina “local”, the renown journalist Indro Montanelli (1909–2011) whose days in Ampezzo followed a methodical routine. Every morning, he took a long walk to soothe his depression, on a path that would later be named after him upon his death. The “Montanelli walk,” which begins from Piè Tofana, continues on a gentle slope through pines, firs, and larches until the turnoff for Lake Ghedina. Montanelli had a strong relationship with Cortina. In 1967, in a series of articles for Corriere della Sera, he harshly criticised a project for the Alemagna highway, which was slated to pass through the Ampezzo valley. For Montanelli, this was an act of vandalism against a territory “that has so far managed to preserve its forests, its peace, and its landscapes”. It is worth mentioning that he wasn’t opposed to the highway itself, as long as it passed through other towns in the Dolomites. It was in Cortina, on September 9, 1974, that Montanelli married his third wife, Colette Rosselli, a painter and illustrator. He carved their names and the wedding date on a small table in their home, which overlooked the Tofana. The Ampezzo landscape, beloved by Montanelli as well as by Giorgio Soavi, Giuseppe Berto, and dozens of other writers, even sung about by Ella Fitzgerald, is the result of a unique geological condition. As Rinaldo Zardini (1902–1988) revealed in the book The Great Landslide on Which Cortina d’Ampezzo Was Built (1986, co-authored with Mario Panizza and Massimo Spampani), the Ampezzo valley owes its gentle, fragile beauty and rolling slopes to a gigantic landslide that filled the valley floor in geologic times.