9. PICNICS, BUTTERFLIES, AND STORIES

In literature, Cortina is both a setting and an evocation. It acts as a free zone, a cosmopolitan crossroads where, in the mid-20th century, an international elite gathered. The outposts that linked this invisible network were the grand hotels—islands suspended in time and space. The Cristallo and the Miramonti, with their secluded and elevated positions, were the first to embody the local version of these Alpine enclaves. On the lawns of the Cristallo, it was possible in July of 1973 to find Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) hunting butterflies with his wife. The Dolomites are mentioned in Nabokov’s novel Ada or Ardor (1969). And in those same meadows, the protagonists of A Theft (1989), a novella by Saul Bellow (1915–2005), have a picnic. The story describes the love between Clara, a fashion writer, and Ithiel, known as Teddy, an influential foreign affairs analyst. Bellow, author of masterpieces The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog, had been a guest at the hotel, and adored Cortina. The story follows Clara’s complex relationship with a man she continues to love and admire for his intelligence, even after their breakup. “He outclassed everybody, it seemed to her. Once, at the Hotel Cristallo in Cortina d’Ampezzo, they did a document together, to the puncturing rhythm of the tennis court below. He had to read the pages she was typing for him over the transatlantic telephone.” The relationship between Clara and Ithiel is symbolized, almost encapsulated, in an emerald ring he gives her, whose “disappearance” throws her into despair. “In Cortina I thought I was acting from personal emotions, but those emotions were so devouring, fervid, that they may have been suprapersonal — a wholesome young woman in love expressing the tragedy or comedy of the world concluding. A fever using love as its carrier.”