The Italian Dolomites are rich in legends dwarves,

witches, ogres and dragons are said to stomp about

the slopes, and lofty peaks conceal hidden passages
to the underworld
WORDS OLIVER SMITH l PHOTOGRAPHS MATT MUNRO
Legends
of the Pale Mountains
TheSassolungo
mountainrange, as
viewedfromtheAlpedi
Siusi cablecar station
abovethetownof Ortisei
Lonely Planet Traveller August 2012 78 August 2012 Lonely Planet Traveller 79
HE CHURCH BELLS
chime noon in the Val
Badia, and Michil
Costa sits outside his
hotel in his home
village of Corvara,
studying a tattered
road map through a
cloud of cigar smoke.
The whirring of cable
cars sounds in the
distance as he leans forward and rings a point on
the map with a blunt blue crayon. This is where
witches were said to gather on summer nights,
he says. Whether youll see them there these days,
I couldnt say...
With a felt ower in his top pocket, a penny-
farthing in his backyard, a penchant for quoting the
Dalai Lama and fondness for hiking long distances
barefoot, Michil Costa certainly isnt your average
Italian hotelkeeper. And yet somehow, amid the
fantastical landscapes of the Dolomites, this eccentric
behaviour seems to have its own curious logic.
The mountains around us might have been
Tolkiens blueprint for Middle Earth this is a land
of soaring rock spires seemingly suspended above
the clouds and ramshackle farmsteads huddled
fearfully on the pastures below. For centuries, these
peaks served as mighty ramparts, shielding valley
dwellers from invaders, protecting ancient customs
and, above all, preserving legends as old as anyone
might dare to guess. Passed down over generations,
the legends of the Dolomites read like fairytale
accident reports. To leave your front door was to risk
getting bludgeoned by an ogre, harassed by a dragon
or transformed into something rather unsavoury by
The mountains
around us might
have been Tolkiens
blueprint for
Middle Earth
The village of Santa
Maddalena inVal di Funes,
withthe Odle range seen
rising above the clouds
a witch. Long before Christianity arrived here, they
were a way of explaining the origins of the
landscape; one famous story tells how the mountains
acquired their pale colour after a visiting princess
from the moon required that they be whitewashed
to ease her homesickness. Another tells of a clumsy
wizard who caused a rainbow to collapse into the
Lago di Carezza, a lake which still glows a luminous
green to this day. These tales offered glimpses of a
hidden life in the mountains above of summits that
were always in sight of humans living in the valleys,
but were forever out of reach.
Im not saying I believe in these stories, says
Michil. But theres always an element of reality to
the myths. Its a connection with the land that most
of us have lost these days.
He grins mischievously, before reaching into
his pocket to produce two small r cones. Ive
borrowed these from the elves. I put them in my hat
for good luck, but if I ever think bad thoughts I must
return them else the elves will play tricks on me.
For most locals, however, the practical
application of these stories has diminished over
time. Since tourism came to the Dolomites in the
19th century, skiers have displaced sorcerers and
elves have lost ground to exclusive resorts.
Grandparents grumble that youngsters today are too
preoccupied with PlayStations to be scared by the
witches who roam the slopes outside their bedroom
windows. Yet the stories are still an indelible part of
the landscape: to walk almost anywhere in the
Dolomites is to trespass on a witches coven, or to
unwittingly scale mountains hollowed out by
communities of dwarves.
Michil swoops down on the map and marks out
a lake at the northern edge of the Parco Naturale
above Michil Costa, anauthorityonthecultureandtraditions
of theDolomites, outsidethe Hotel LaPerlainCorvara
Lonely Planet Traveller August 2012 80 August 2012 Lonely Planet Traveller 81
THE DOLOMI TE S
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di Fanes-Sennes-Braies a windswept plateau rearing
up behind sheer walls of rock, a few miles to the
northeast of Corvara. Legend tells that Lago di Braies
hides a secret gateway into the underworld. They say
if you visit when the moon is full, the mountains shall
open up and a boat will appear carrying a princess...
I dont know if thats true, he says with a shrug,
pocketing the r cones. Ive never tried to nd out.
RICA CLEMENT
drops a stful of dough
onto her kitchen table
with a satisfying
thwack. Nonsense,
she says. We dont
believe in fairytales
we are sensible folk
up here.
A half-timbered
farmhouse standing
on an outcrop further up the valley from Corvara,
Sotciastel does indeed look like a sensible place:
piles of logs are stacked neatly by the porch, while
tidy lawns sparkle with the morning dew. Inside,
little has changed since Ericas ancestors built their
home in these mountains more than two centuries
ago. Pious sentiments are inscribed on creaking
doors and wooden oorboards groan wearily
underfoot. For the past two decades, Erica has
opened the doors of her home to staying guests.
Wednesday mornings see visiting cookery students
joining them, shufing into a small kitchen to take
notes as Erica prepares stews, dumplings and
doughnuts on an old wood-burning stove.
It doesnt matter what sort of cheese you use for
dumplings, Erica sagely tells her students, reaching
A legend tells of a wizard who caused a rainbow to collapse
into the Lago di Carezza, which still glows a luminous green
Fed by underground springs, Lago di Carezza is known inthe Ladin language as The RainbowLake
for a cheese grater. Just as long as the cheese stinks.
Food here is intended as fuel for long days slogging
up steep inclines protein-rich staples served in
mountain-like portions. It represents a culture distinct
from Mediterranean Italy. Despite living in a largely
German-speaking corner of the country, Erica counts
herself as Ladin a community whose mother tongue
descends from the Latin spoken by Roman legionaries
who marched through these valleys millennia ago.
Europe was once a jigsaw puzzle of smaller
languages like Ladin. As others disappeared, Ladin
clung on a tiny Romance language that evolved in
parallel to French and Italian, wedged between the
Italian- and German-speaking worlds. Ladin history
celebrates deant heroes, such as a 16th-century
nobleman who rescued villagers from a marauding
dragon, and a 19th-century housewife who
defended her village against Napoleons armies,
wielding a pitchfork. Bolstered by a ve-minute
Ladin daily slot on TV and a page in the regional
newspaper, native speakers today number more
than 30,000. A peculiar mix of Italian-sounding
cadences and glottal Germanic stops, it is the
language in which many of the Dolomites most
famous legends are preserved.
Were not like the Italians were much more
practical, says Erica, heaping splinters of wood onto
a raging re beneath the stove. For instance, whats
the point in wasting time eating lots of different
courses for dinner? You may as well eat everything
all in one go!
Ladin legends also seem sternly pragmatic. One
tale tells of a amboyant peasant who drank too
much grappa and marched up a mountain to
vanquish an ogre. The disgruntled monster
catapulted him across a mountain for his cheek.
fromleft EricaClement making afresh batchof doughnuts in her kitchen inSotciastel; Erikas home, perched onthe slopes
above Val Badia a Ladin-speakingvalley that serves as the settingfor many legends
August 2012 Lonely Planet Traveller 83 Lonely Planet Traveller August 2012 82
THE DOLOMI TE S
The peasant learned never to try anything so daft
again. I step out of Sotciastel farmhouse and into the
morning sunshine. Cows watch eecy clouds pass
along the valley below, and old tractors wheeze their
way up the hillsides. Erica dusts her hands on her
apron as she bids me farewell. If you really are
looking for witches and the like, she says, Im afraid
youll have to go much higher up.
HE LANDSCAPE
turns crueller as I climb
into the Fanes National
Park and towards Lago
di Braies. Meadows
rise to barren
precipices, and pine
trees begin to lose their
foothold in the scree.
Traces of civilisation
become scarcer: I pass
a wooden crucix clinging to a wind-battered
outcrop, and ruined cottages where wildowers
sprout among the stones. Black clouds hover grimly
around the summits, periodically sending
thunderclaps booming down the valleys below.
Hard though it may be to believe, these mountains
were once coral reefs, prised up from the seabed
when the European and African tectonic plates
collided more than 50 million years ago. Today,
fossilised sea creatures are sometimes found at
altitudes where humans rarely venture. It was only
in the mid-19th century that climbers rst began to
explore the Dolomites in earnest. Early mountaineers
encountered what they described as petried castles
and Gothic cathedrals built of rock buttress-like
ridges, and towers of biblical proportions. The Swiss
fromleftAwoodencrucix standingon a hilltopclose to the townof Selva inVal Gardena; woodcarver Siegfried Meyr
whittles away at atree trunk by the side of a mountain road
architect Le Corbusier even went so far as to call them
the nest natural architecture in the world.
Yet for generations of valley dwellers, going for a
walk in these mountains was asking for trouble to
risk man-guzzling crevices and falling rocks that
could bowl humans off the mountainside like
skittles. It was against this backdrop of fear that
legends of the Dolomites took root.
My ears pop as the trail wriggles its way up the
mountainside and into the clouds. I pass upturned
trees whose roots claw ominously towards the sky,
and spy a bird of prey gliding about the crags below.
In this landscape, it takes little imagination to trace
wrinkled faces in the rock or to hear the rustle of
a chamois in the undergrowth and mistake it for
something decidedly more sinister.
The plateau up ahead was the setting for one of the
oldest and strangest of all the Ladin legends.
The story goes that long ago the Fanes inhabited this
region a people besieged by enemies from all sides,
but loyally defended by a warrior princess with a
quiver of unstoppable arrows. After many battles,
the princess lost her arrows, and the king
of the Fanes betrayed his people to their enemies
in exchange for a hoard of treasure. Their castles
captured and their kingdom lost, a small band of the
Fanes were rescued by marmots animals said to be
the guardians of the underworld and taken down
into the bowels of the Earth.
Experts date this tale as far back as the Bronze Age,
when warmer climates meant people could survive
high up on the Alpine plateau. Until little more than
a century ago, hunters from these valleys would
make a point of refusing to kill marmots,
and shepherds were said to shelter these creatures
beneath their huts.
For valley dwellers,
going for a walk
in the mountains was
asking for trouble
Asummer storm gathering above the
forested slopes of Val Badia
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THE DOLOMI TE S
IGHT SETS IN AS I
approach Lago di
Braies a cauldron-
like body of water
with the mountain
of Sass dla Porta
hunched at its
southern edge. The
Fanes legend has it
that once every
hundred years, a
princess emerges from the Sass dla Porta to row
around the lake beneath the full moon. She awaits
the day when someone will return the unstoppable
arrows to the Fanes people when trumpets will
sound across the Dolomites and the glory of her
kingdom will be restored for eternity. Sass dla Porta
translates from Ladin as Gate Mountain. Some say a
cavern once stood at its foot before landslides buried
the passage presumably grounding the princess,
and postponing forever the return of her kingdom.
The torches of departing shermen fade on the
lakes far side, and all is still. Except for the distant
clunking of cowbells sounding from the darkness,
nothing stirs. Seeing the phantom-like outline of the
Dolomites against the night sky, it feels harder to
sneer at stories of witches, sorcerers and secret gates
to the underworld. Perhaps these legends are the
last reminders of a time when we didnt need to
believe in heaven and hell the landscape was
mysterious enough in itself. I swim out into the lake,
and only the plop of leaping sh and the murmur of
a faraway waterfall break the silence.
Once every hundred years, a princess emerges to row
around the lake beneath the full moon
Lago di Braies at midnight, withthe Sass dla Porta mountain rising into the skies
OliverSmithis staff writer at LonelyPlanetTraveller. After
swimming in Lagodi Braies for two minutes, he got into his car,
put onthe heating and spent two hours tryingtowarmup.
aboveAsculpture mounted on a house inVal Gardena, a Ladin
valley renowned for its wood-carving artisans
Andrew Graham-Dixon and Giorgio Locatelli look at
art, culinary culture and landscapes in NorthernItaly
Unpacked, coming soon to BBCTwo.
August 2012 Lonely Planet Traveller 87 Lonely Planet Traveller August 2012 86
THE DOLOMI TE S