For sixteen years, the Ampezzo Valley has hosted an event much loved by international authors: “Una Montagna di Libri” offers readers the opportunity to participate in a busy calendar of events in both winter and summer. The founder and director of the cultural event gives us some more details

The beating heart of the upcoming 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, Cortina has long been a destination for personalities connected to the world of culture, who have found an inexhaustible source of inspiration in the Ampezzo setting. Since 2009, Una Montagna di Libri has been bringing together authors, who take part in meetings organised during the winter and summer months. The edition preceding and accompanying the Olympic Games is just as intense. We talked about it with the founder of the festival, Francesco Chiamulera.

Cortina is one of the protagonists of the 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, but since 2009 it has also been home to Una Montagna di Libri. How does the event interact with the Olympic Games?
Una Montagna di Libri has chosen to accompany the months of waiting for the Milan Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Games with a wonderful journey through sport, but above all through the lives and stories of the athletes. We have avoided “panels” and round tables with too many institutional roles, and focused entirely on the exciting history of bobsleigh (with the Bob Club Cortina), the downhill and giant slalom races of Kristian Ghedina, Deborah Compagnoni, Paolo De Chiesa, René De Silvestro and Luca Palla, with Olympic memories magically collected by Massimo Spampani and Andrea Goldstein. With profiles of the great skiers brought to life by Aldo Cazzullo. With the exciting story of the skaters and timekeepers of Cortina ‘56 ‒ in short, the women of the Olympics at that time ‒ narrated by Antonella Stelitano and Adriana Balzarini with champion Manuela Angeli, who flew across the ice back then. Antonella Palmisano told us about her gold medal in Tokyo 2020. Massimo Zanella and Vittorio Linfante took us on a journey through the beauty and design of winter.

How has Cortina changed over the years, not only as a destination for sports enthusiasts, but above all as a cultural hub? For over a century, it has been a crossroads for personalities linked to the world of culture who have found inspiration here.
This has always been Cortina’s great difference, its strong point, compared to other equally magnificent locations in the Alps. Writers, artists, visionaries and journalists have gathered in the Ampezzo Valley. Taking advantage of the enchanting location, both isolated and connected between several borders, ideas have come together. Publishers have signed publishing agreements with authors such as Ernest Hemingway. Parise, Buzzati and Comisso were regulars, as was the great Cesare De Michelis. Saul Bellow and Edward Morgan Forster set their stories and novellas there. And today, from Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum to Emmanuel Carrère, Javier Cercas, Alessandro Piperno and Giovanni Montanaro, contemporary writers continue to choose it. And to love it. We celebrate them through the first widespread museum of literature in the Alps: accaddeacortina.it.

How has Una Montagna di Libri helped define Cortina’s identity?
Cortina didn’t need us to define its identity, but we wanted to continue to protect and expand the role of the Ampezzo Valley as a cosmopolitan crossroads. Una Montagna di Libri has been here for sixteen years, with tireless enthusiasm, never missing a single season, and year after year, with seventy events between summer and winter, we accompany life in the Dolomites, ensuring that readers and authors continue to meet in the shadow of the Tofane mountains. There are so many of them.

What impact do you hope the Olympic Games will have on Cortina, and on the Ampezzo area in general, from a socio-cultural point of view?
I hope and believe that they will bring more infrastructure to our mountains. Not just roads, which we need anyway, because it’s not right that it takes two hours to get to the nearest hospital: while we wait for the railway network to be upgraded, residents in the mountains still need to be able to get around in their own cars. Not just healthcare facilities themselves, starting with the Codivilla hospital in Cortina d’Ampezzo. But also the very way of life in the mountains. With a contemplation nourished by affection and respect, with the pragmatism of understanding that people’s needs are many and varied. There are those who love skiing and have the right to continue doing so, given that this is a key industry for our mountains, and in the same way there is the varied and beautiful world of new sports, in the silence of a climb, in the pursuit of health, in a different relationship with nature. I believe and hope that these games will write a new page in the eternal imagery that Cortina, a city of holidays and nostalgia, has created around itself.

Interview by Arianna Testino

https://unamontagnadilibri.it/

BIO
Francesco Chiamulera (1985) is the founder and director, since 2009, of Una Montagna di Libri, an international literature festival in Cortina d’Ampezzo. In sixteen years, Una Montagna di Libri has brought hundreds of authors from all over the world to the Dolomites for two annual editions, summer and winter. A graduate in Contemporary History from La Sapienza University in Rome and former scholarship holder at Boston University, he is the author of Candidato Reagan (Nino Aragno, 2013). He writes for Il Foglio, Corriere della Sera, Vogue Italia, Linkiesta and Corriere del Veneto.