Dolomites: A Night Under the Tre Cime

In September 1991 two hikers found a man in the ice at 3,210 meters. He had been there about five thousand years, and in 2001 an X-ray found the arrowhead in his left shoulder. Ötzi now lives in a refrigerated room in a Bolzano museum and receives visitors through a window. He has never once complained about the temperature.

Then up the valley to Ortisei, and two cable cars to Seceda, about 2,500 meters up, where a long slope of grass climbs gently for a kilometer and then simply stops. On the far side is a drop. In front of it are the Odle, a row of spires that look built rather than grown.

They were grown, in fact, as reefs in a warm, shallow sea, more than two hundred million years before anyone needed a cable car. You will take the same photograph about forty times. That is the correct number.

This is the easy day, and it would like you to know that. The Alpe di Siusi is the biggest high pasture in Europe, 56 square kilometers of grass, cows and wooden huts at around two thousand meters, and almost none of it goes uphill. You walk on it the way you would walk in a park, if the park had the Sassolungo parked at one end.

On the edge of the Puflatsch, volcanic rock has set into columns that make a double seat facing the whole valley. Legend says the witches of the Schlern held their meetings there. They chose well. Sit in it.

Day 1 promised two names for every street. Ortisei has three, because it is also Urtijëi, in Ladin, a language about 30,000 people speak. It is also the town that carved the jointed wooden doll that went to nurseries all over Europe and America in the 1800s, which the English, for reasons nobody here accepts, called a Dutch doll. Dinner in town tonight.

On 13 August 1869 a climber from Vienna called Paul Grohmann was first to the top of the Sassolungo. Remember him for day 6.

From 1915 the front line between Italy and Austria-Hungary ran across the tops of these mountains, and both armies dug in and stayed. At Cinque Torri the Italian trenches have been put back as they were, about half a kilometer of them, with gun positions still aimed across the valley at the Austrian lines on the Lagazuoi. The hut beside the towers opened in 1904 for climbers and spent the war as a brigade headquarters. You walk the trenches in summer, in a jacket, and do the arithmetic on the winters yourself.

Before that, the drive over the passes, which you will describe badly to everyone at home and show them forty-one blurred photographs of.

Tonight is Cortina, which is mostly a very well-dressed main street. Free evening. Tomorrow you get up early, and it is worth it.

Lago di Braies is the lake from everybody's phone, and early in the morning it is mostly yours: green water, 36 meters at the deepest, mountains straight out of it. The big hotel on the shore has the stranger story. In the last days of April 1945 the SS brought more than 130 prisoners there, among them a former prime minister of France and the last chancellor of Austria before 1938, and on 4 May American soldiers arrived and found every one of them safe.

Then the main event. A road climbs to 2,333 meters under the Tre Cime, and tonight you do not drive back down it. You sleep in a mountain hut: shared rooms, a long dinner, everyone in the same fleece.

Around sunset the rock turns pink. The Ladin word for it is enrosadira, and it is the reef from day 2 showing off. Bed early. Day 6 starts before the sun does.

You set off in the half dark with a headlamp you will need for about twenty minutes. The path round the Tre Cime is broad, it climbs a little, and it takes a few hours. At the saddle on the far side all three peaks come into view at once, three towers of rock close to three thousand meters high, in the first light of the day. This is the picture. You are in it, slightly out of breath.

On 21 August 1869, eight days after the Sassolungo, Paul Grohmann from day 3 stood on top of the tallest of them. Forty-six years later the front line ran past this path, and the mountain guide Sepp Innerkofler was killed near the summit of the Paternkofel, the peak beside it.

Breakfast back at the hut, then down off the mountain and on to Venice, with the farewell dinner by the water. The reef is headed home.

Venetians row standing up, facing the way they are going, one oar each, and the style has its own name, voga alla veneta. This morning you learn it, in a flat-bottomed wooden boat on the canals. Expect to turn a small circle first. It is the traditional way to start.

Fewer than 50,000 people still live in the old city, and from a boat at this hour it feels as if you have waved at most of them. Day 1 promised sea level. The mountains from day 2 began as a reef in a warm, shallow sea, so after seven days you are back where they started, more or less.

Then the hugs, a group chat renamed after a mountain, and a camera roll that is mostly the same three peaks.