From 2 December 2025, Le Stanze della Fotografia on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice will host the exhibition “Dolomites. Caring for the environment”, which brings together Manuel Cicchetti’s photographs inspired by the iconic mountain landscape that is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The project has its roots in the homonymous volume published by Marsilio Arte and included in the series dedicated to UNESCO sites in the Veneto region. Manuel Cicchetti’s photographs and Antonio G. Bortoluzzi’s words accompany the reader on a journey of discovery through this exceptional territory. Here are the words by Antonio G. Bortoluzzi taken from the volume

The wonder of the Dolomites

THE DEPTH OF TIME

In the middle of a largely flat Europe stands the great discontinuity of the Alps, as if a pair of gigantic hands had kneaded, rolled out and lumped together the surrounding plains over and over again until rocky peaks were raised. In the Alps there is the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Dolomites, material worked over the course of hundreds of millions of years, on a base of porphyry where those gargantuan hands—just like on a workbench—have spread out, blended and compressed the elements of the primordial Earth: limestone, sandstone, gypsum and calcium carbonate; mineral substances amalgamated with the organic ones produced by a warm, saline and not very deep sea—the primordial factory of life made up of bacteria, algae, mollusks, sponges, corals, conches—that has built, stratum upon stratum, the platforms, reefs and islands that today form the profile of the Dolomites. A depth of time that is chasm and elevation, sediment and eruption, fusion and erosion, collapse and continual transformation, an abysmal time that draws us up there, to the beauty, wonder and enchantment that are what they are because they contain and spread out before us what was once at the bottom of the sea and now represents the last bit of solid ground before you reach the sky.
This stratification can be seen clearly in the narrow valley carved out by the Bletterbach torrent, where the mountain is cut through by a gorge up to four hundred meters deep and eight kilometers long, dropping for a thousand meters: the walls display colored strata right from the base, where the reddish shade of the quartzporphyry of Bolzano stands out. From the Seiser Alm, in front of the massif of the Sciliar, with its unmistakable flat summit—part of the Dolomitic Sciliar-Catinaccio, Latemar Group—one has instead the impression of looking at an island from the bottom of a dried-up sea.
But even the earliest forms of life have a Dolomitic heart: the Rinaldo Zardini Paleontological Museum in Cortina d’Ampezzo houses the fossil finds made as a result of the passion and skill of that special autodidact from Ampezzo. The drops of amber, small and ancient portions of the life that has sprung from planet Earth, are the fossilized remains of the resin of conifer trees that look to us like little honey-colored pearls.
They are drops that enclose the secrets of primordial life: bacteria, protozoa, spores, pollen and mites, microorganisms sealed in tiny coffers of amber for two hundred and thirty million years. Rinaldo Zardini made his way step by step through deep valleys, over mountains, across scree slopes and torrents, assembling and giving to the world a collection that is still the subject of keen study and a source of new discoveries.
And it is necessary for us to travel some distance too in these years—the short stretch of time in which we live—because the World Heritage Site extends over three regions: Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Trentino-Alto Adige and Veneto; five provinces: Belluno, Bolzano, Pordenone, Trento and Udine; and echoes with four tongues, Italian, German, Ladin and Friulian, along with a whole range of dialects that make the nine mountain systems of the Dolomites a unique place in the world.

AT A BRISK PACE, LIKE DOLOMIEU

One way to reach one heart of the Dolomites is to start off from Venice, follow the course of the Piave River and then take the highway called Strada Statale 51 di Alemagna to Cortina d’Ampezzo. Venice and Cortina, two places known all over the world: just get in the car and drive from the Adriatic coast across the plains to the hills and then head even farther up, into the Prealps. In just a short time we will have traveled over a hundred kilometers and arrived at the foot of the Dolomites, at the erect and splendid forms like sculptures that soar above the meadows and the expanses of scree with which they are ringed. From there we will see the Pale Mountains—as they were called in ancient times—take on shifting colors in the light of the sun: the dolomitic rock that tinges a fiery red when the rays of the setting sun illuminate those peaks, taking on unexpected tints, a depth of gaze and a fairytale atmosphere.
But the short time that it takes to drive the handful of kilometers which separates the plains from the mountains is not a good way to get there. The Dolomites should be approached by degrees, and we should make ourselves allies of time, of the passing of time that works on the body, on the mind, on what we are, so that we don’t arrive at the World Heritage Site like children methodically dazzled by a century of easy and comfortable access to beauty, with the peaks of the Dolomites as its “backdrop.”
Only as backdrop, and therefore something interchangeable, dispensable, something that could be replaced by something else, with the passing of fashions.
Let is imagine instead setting off from Venice on foot for the Pearl of the Dolomites, as people used to do at the end of the 18th century, in the times of the French naturalist Déodat de Dolomieu: the man whose intuition about the uniqueness of the local limestone led to it being named dolomite after him. Nowadays there are many such ways, and a great desire to have the experience of walking them: there is the famous Camino de Santiago, for example, almost eight hundred kilometers—or even just a fraction of that long march of pilgrimage—to be covered perhaps at an average of twenty kilometers a day. People walk for hours and hours, often in a group, passing through places one step after another, as they have done for millennia, right up to the dawn of modernity, with its fast and then supersonic locomotion.
They are practices that many follow today and that even more dream of being able to. It is not always necessary to go from the provincial capital of Veneto to the Dolomites on foot, but to try to imagine doing so, this one needs to do. And so here we are, early in the morning, at the Zattere in Venice: if we can manage to cover fifteen kilometers a day, in just over a week we’ll be in the heart of the Dolomites.

THE SEVEN WAYS OF THE MOUNTAINS

Leaving the tang and open horizon of the sea behind at once, we walk along canals where saltwater mixes with fresh, and carry on in this way, toward the plains with their fields and sheds, roads, bridges and villages. As we go farther, we find fewer and fewer fields and more and more sheds, often empty, deserted by work and by people: outskirts undergoing a silent transformation, not many people on the road. And the gentle hills covered with vines, so beautiful and yet disquieting, when a single crop takes up all the space. Then at last there are mountains on the horizon, and the broad bed of the Piave. Rivers in Italian have a masculine gender, but this was once referred to as la Piave, as a mother, as a fountainhead of life, resources and trade. A river that today is for the most part a clear trace of gravel to be followed to the Prealps of Veneto, and Belluno. At this point we venture into the same wild valleys that Dino Buzzati knew as a boy, and that today are the Dolomiti Bellunesi National Park: as Buzzati wrote, “there are valleys where we live that I have never seen anywhere else.
Just like the landscapes of some of those old prints of the Romantic era that one used to think on seeing them: but it’s all fake, places like this don’t exist. But they do exist: with the same solitude, the same scarcely believable precipices half hidden by trees and bushes swaying above the abyss, and the waterfalls, and on the path a rather mysterious wayfarer. Less splendid certainly than the triumphal deep valleys of the Dolomites enclosed by spotless white crags. But more enigmatic, intimate, secret.”
We can picture Buzzati as he gazed from the villa of San Pellegrino, just outside the city of Belluno, at Monte Serva, the Schiara Group with Gusèla del Vescovà, the Monti del Sole. These were the early decades of the 20th century and Dino, before becoming a writer, playwright, journalist and painter, looked across the Piave at the beautiful town, the surrounding woods and above all that compact material that rises in the form of peaks, buttresses, spires and pinnacles, closing off the horizon and filling it with magic, adventure and dark omens. And perhaps it was precisely the vertical needle of the Gusèla—a magnet for every inhabitant of Belluno—that lay at the heart of what made the place so different from the city of Milan in which he lived.
Onward then in the direction of Cadore, until we come to the Strada Statale di Alemagna.
Before reaching the mountains, it’s necessary to make a stop at Castellavazzo, where stands the ancient triangular tower of the Castello della Gardona. Gazing out from the latter, high up on the ridge of the mountain, grazed by the stream that runs almost vertically over the smooth surface of the rock, a narrow rift opens up above the shingly bank of the Piave, closed off by mountain on the opposite side, revealing the “Seven Ways of the Mountains.” They are ancient, modern and even postmodern ways, but always a sign of passage, traversal, encounter, humanity at work.
The first way is the path that runs along the thousand-year-old Via Regia, echoing with the light steps of pilgrims, peasants, merchants. The second is the Piave River, the ancient waterway of i zatèr, the raftsmen, the navigators of the river who braved the roar of its waters to bring wood, stone, iron, coal and the produce of the mountains to Venice. The third is the railroad of fast-paced modernity, the precise and predictable one of stations, whistles, steam and steel that on its journey has brought the rhythm of the factory, of the city, of progress even into the heart of the highlands.
The fourth is the Strada Statale di Alemagna, the highway that nowadays is choked with traffic, especially on holidays or Sundays, in winter and summer, when the peaks come under assault by tourists. The fifth way is the pipe-bridge that allows water to flow into one of the hydroelectric power plants of the Vajont. This name, which was once only associated with the thunderous torrent rushing through a narrow gorge and then with the highest double-curvature arch dam in the world, has since October 9, 1963, been forever linked with the man-made—and thus avoidable—disaster that resulted in the total destruction of lives and villages, memories and traditions in the valley of the Piave, with the erasure of the town of Longarone and, in the mountains of Erto-Casso, the annihilation of the hamlets near the reservoir. The Friulian Dolomites Natural Park is the gateway to the Dolomites of Oltrepiave, the “land beyond the Piave” in the provinces of Pordenone and Udine, wild mountains par excellence, where Cima Preti, Monte Duranno, the Croda Montanaia, Monte Cridola and the Crodon di Giaf soar to a height of over 2500 meters; and with them the broad Spalti di Toro and the iconic Campanile di Val Montanaia. Electricity pylons form the sixth way, permitting the passage of power, the invisible force of “Whoever touches dies”—as used to be engraved on the boards of sheet metal at the base of the pylons, warning of the danger of electrocution—and without which hardly anything of what makes our lives so comfortable would function. And finally there is a seventh way of the mountains, the most unthinkable until a few decades ago: the Venice-Munich Cycle Path, a route of the present day that is not antimodern, but on the contrary rediscovers the effort of the body in motion—even when power-assisted by electric bikes—and allows you to pedal for kilometers and kilometers alongside watercourses, through forests and valleys, inebriated with scents and sensations that are new because they’ve been forgotten in the hubbub of urbanized life in which we are immersed.
A stop on the terrace of the tower of the Gardona to look below and back in time, to see another stratification: the tangle of lines of the passage, the history of peoples, of work. A pause, a deep breath, before returning to the way of the Dolomites, to prepare ourselves for the forest, for the Alpine meadows, the viàz, the ledge, the col, the wall. To the summit. Getting there by degrees, climbing slowly, at the right pace, we can try to sense the giddy magnetism that makes us feel part of that world rising before us and coming from far away, from the beginnings of the planet: it has been eroded, modeled, and before us seen, walked over, lived on by prehistoric and historic populations, by people of passage, who then gathered in the Alpine villages that sprang up at their feet.

LIVING IN THE DOLOMITES

But there is another way to be in the mountains, that of the men and women of the highlands, the people who have never lived anywhere else, and have no knowledge, except through fleeting visits, of other places and other latitudes. People who have always been surrounded by the peaks, and whose horizon has been and continues to be that of the Dolomites. This part of humanity is no different from the one that comes to the peaks from the flat lands: it is able to wonder, to marvel; it can grasp the gradations of beauty—and is lucky enough to see the same places every day, savoring the changes—but it has a different relationship with the highlands, one that centers on “doing for living.” This “doing” is work. The ancient effort of the body laboring in the woods, on steeply sloping farmland, a body that has always inhabited the mountains, even in bad weather, and has developed an aptitude for it: it’s a knowhow that has been handed down for centuries and through generations, bringing all the way down to us the echo of days and lives spent extracting some produce from the forest, from the fields, from raising stock, from small-scale trade.
The ancient implements of iron and wood—scythe, pitchfork, rake, ax, saw, hoe—have come down to us as exhibits in museums, or hanging on the walls of bars and restaurants or people’s homes, along with other more mysterious instruments that speak to us of the cultivation of barley, hemp, wheat or corn: each of these crops had a few but precious “tools of the trade,” which had reached a kind of perfection over centuries and centuries of manual labor. And the raising of sheep, cattle and pigs is also attested by objects that reflect preindustrial but ingenious and efficient techniques.
It suffices to think of how milk is turned into cheese through the special alchemy that occurs with the addition of rennet to milk brought to the right temperature. In the dairy produce of the past we see the science of a poor world that was able to make and preserve it on the meadows surrounded by woods and even farther up, all the way to the base of the peaks. The summits, so inaccessible, were the abode of the sacred and the divine, as well as the wild animal, born out of the rock like a god, flushed out and hunted and brought down the mountain to feed the village. This happened thousands of years ago, when with fine weather the early hunter-gatherers headed up to the passes of the Dolomites, like Mondeval de Sora where, at the base of a large erratic boulder, a prehistoric man was buried by his clan. Revealing to us—along with the mummy of Similaun, known as Ötzi, and the hunter of the Val Rosna—another mountain: an extreme place but one that was traversed, explored and eventually inhabited even at considerable altitudes. These primitive men had tools made of wood, stone, horn, bone and copper, and knew how to obtain food, clothing and shelter.
Mondeval and Val Rosna teach us that those ancestors of ours practiced the ceremony of burial, representing themselves in this world but also beyond it, through ritual.
Work in the mountains tells us of a life at altitude, a way of living that must be the
fruit of what was done thousands of years ago, and one that is still possible in the Dolomites. The environment is the same as in prehistoric times, something that cannot be said of the city, built on layers and layers of rubble, and where extraordinary finds from a distant era are visible in an urban setting made up of roads, buildings and endless other constructions, amongst which gleams the odd pearl dating from the ancient past. At Mondeval de Sora, on the other hand, in the vicinity of the great boulder that served as refuge and grave, you can see, breathe, smell and tread on the same world as the one the hunter lived in.

THE HANDS OF SOME OLD PEOPLE

Mario Rigoni Stern once said: “I cultivate my vegetable garden and sometimes when I see the beds with the manure well dug in, the soil smoothly leveled, I experience the same satisfaction as when I’ve finished a good story. So I have this to say as well: a stack of wood that is well made, well aligned, neatly squared off, which doesn’t fall down, is beautiful.”5 What is the man who has written about the retreat from Russia, nature and the mountains trying to tell us? He is talking about a beauty that is made, constructed, of a work that is a way of taking care. Even today the hands of some old people at work in the valleys and mountains of the Dolomites—even if they speak a different language or dialect—show the same signs of wear: the calluses, scars, dry skin, gnarled knuckles and black and broken nails that are the mark of a mode of being in the world, of a habit of gripping, manipulating, twisting. The hands of certain old men and women speak to us of a mountain that unites the hand with the haft of a scythe, the scythe with the grass, the grass with the earth; and the same thing can be said of the field, the pasture, the woods, the peak: the experience of the hand can also be seen in the modern climber who grips, lifts himself, seeks a balance so that the fissure, the step, the spur of rock become extensions of his or her body. And so long as they are, so long as there is unity between human body and mountain, no one will fall. The life of those who are born and live in the mountains has been marked, for generations, by a labor that verges on sacrifice, and all the beauty we see around us, even in the little places we pass through on our way to the magnificent peaks, bears witness to an extraordinary human and historical depth.
Passing through the villages of the Dolomites we ought to try knocking at a door to meet one of those who have resisted the depopulation, the decline in the birth rate, the abandonment of the community, and ask the old woman who opens it with a puzzled and vaguely suspicious look on her face why she is still there, why she is taking care of the house, the farm. Why she clings so tenaciously to her little strip of land, always ready to quarrel with a neighbor who encroaches on it. Where does she get that stubbornness when everything around her is changing or even collapsing?
This person will say: “Parché l’é mè” (Bellunese), “Dèc al é mi” (Ladin), “Parcè al è gno” (Friulian), because it’s mine, a non-transferable asset that has to be cared for, looked after, defended as if it were a child; because it’s my duty, out of respect for the vèci, the “old ones,” for those who have spent their lives taking care of the chalet, the spring, the path, the ditch, the pasture, the meadow. For these people born and raised in the mountains there no longer seems to be any boundary between the world and themselves, and even their meadows become extensions of the body or, vice versa, they feel themselves to be an extension of the landscape.
The highlands need to be worked: in some provinces this is already happening, and the great tragedy of depopulation and a falling birthrate has taken a step back. In others, however, this appears more difficult, almost impossible, and the abandoned houses, tumbledown huts and cowsheds, neglected vegetable gardens and fields overgrown with scrub can only hint at what the Alpine landscape once was.
Today no one seems willing to make the effort of cultivating steep slopes; machinery and technology have drawn people way from places of physical labor to ones that offer comfort and relaxation, but are we sure that this “repose” is our salvation?
Think of the bicycle, a means of locomotion invented in the 19th century that over the decades has become many things, even a sport that attracts millions of spectators with the Giro d’Italia or the Tour de France. But today the bicycle is not just the one used by athletes at the highest levels of the sport. It is a way of exploring the world: who would have imagined, just forty years ago, that people would be willing to tire themselves out riding up through the valleys on a bicycle? Making that kind of effort without being driven by the necessity of work, commerce or meeting other people, but simply by an impulse to get their muscles moving in the open air, to have a new—and at the same time ancient—experience of the world? People ready to spend money to build up a sweat: a passion that has become a trend, sometimes even a fashion.
In short, to feel good and have a “better” relationship with the world and in particular with the mountains—which are one of the last frontiers of wilderness—it is necessary to make an effort: it’s still too early to tell, but if there is hope it lies in the alliance between those who cling on in the mountains and those who decide to pedal their way up to the high villages, with the energy of youth and the desire for a workout, devoting themselves to a place so that it becomes beautiful, cultivated, looked after, alive.

Antonio G. Bortoluzzi

The text is taken from the volume Dolomites. Caring for the environment, Marsilio Arte, Venice 2025

BIO
Antonio G. Bortoluzzi, writer, was born in 1965 in Alpago, Belluno, where he lives. In 2017, he won the Gambrinus-Giuseppe Mazzotti Mountain Culture and Civilisation Award with Paesi alti (Biblioteca dell’Immagine). With Marsilio, he published Come si fanno le cose (2019), from which the play of the same name was adapted, and Il saldatore del Vajont (2023), with which he won the Coop Alleanza 3.0 Award. He is a member of the Italian Mountain Writers Group (GISM) and writes for numerous newspapers and magazines.

INFO
Dolomites. Caring for the environment
2 December 2025 ‒ 6 January 2026
LE STANZE DELLA FOTOGRAFIA
Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
https://www.lestanzedellafotografia.it