Like Vipiteno, Campo Tures qualifies as a Bandiera Arancione village, Orange Flag sites selected by the Touring Club Italiano as particularly attractive or culturally noteworthy. This place is blessed by the gods. The Aurino (Ahr in German) River, narrow but swift, roars through. A ring of mighty peaks surrounds the valley. At one end of town looms Tures Castle. The little village—only five thousand residents in the greater Campo Tures area—was the field (campo) of the Tures family. Quiet today on our late June visit but as a winter sports and market center, it certainly sees many lively days. Surprisingly, only a few houses are old. They look strangely Ottoman with their stacked wooden mirador windows and plain façades. Instead of marooned and seemingly abandoned in Campo Tures, they’d look at home along the Bosporus. Mountain gear shops cluster in the centro, then we find orderly neighborhoods to wander in. A sign on the park invites you in to “read and relax.” Good idea.
A covered wooden pedestrian bridge crosses the Aurino. Downstream, a red church spire, among lush willows and vines bordering the river, points up to zigzag peaks against gray sky roiling with clouds. Alpenglow, at sunrise and sunset—the play of rose and lavender light across the peaks. I’m mesmerized by the tumbling green and white water—how can it remain contained inside such tight banks?
“Now, why are we here?” William asks as we complete our walk around town in an hour.
“Look up! Those eighty peaks! We should come back in winter. You can sleep in igloos here.”
“No way.”
“Yes, and I read it’s not even that cold. Sledding, cross-country. This is the place.”
AT THE HOTEL Alpinum, our adjoining balconies look into a garden. Rooms are comfortable, albeit modest. There’s an indoor pool but we don’t take the time for a swim. William is catching up with friends on Snapchat. Ed falls into a major nap while I read my old favorite, The Lawrence Durrell Travel Reader. I copy in my notebook: You enter Greece as one might enter a dark crystal; the form of things becomes irregular, refracted. I recognize that strange feeling when the power of a landscape overtakes you. When in the Mani of Greece, I thought I would wear a white linen shift and grow very thin until my bones showed, so elemental did the place feel. Here in the voluptuous valleys and idyllic green hills sloping up to raw and haggard mountains, I close my eyes. The power and spirit of this landscape (Durrell would call it sense of place) must be that you enter it as an explorer. What lies over the next pass? The Dolomiti are in Italy but there’s a bedrock German culture, too; these are mountains but not remotely like any seen before; the air is fresh but I want to gulp it like spring water; we’re slowed by curvy roads but have a feeling of momentum; we hike one foot after another but harbor the desire to soar over the fields of hay, over the isolated wood and stone huts (malghe) of the summer pastures. I write: You enter the Dolomiti as one might enter a dream of flying.
ON OUR WALK, we found the Feldmilla Design Hotel. I should have booked there for its waterside location. It would have been thrilling to hear the torrent in the night. Like the Vigilius Mountain Resort, it is an eco, climate-neutral hotel. We looked at the menu for the hotel’s Ristorante Toccorosso (red glass). All local products, with imaginative recipes and traditional fare as well.
We’re back at eight. They’ve found us the last table. A wedding dinner is starting. “Oh, no,” Ed says, “bad service coming up.” We’re put at the end table on the terrace, which is quiet and so out of the way that the waiter never will notice us. But, we hear the sweet sound of flowing water, not only from the river but from a sudden torrential rain as well. We’re under cover but a fine mist wafts with every breeze. The waiter appears, prompt after all and smiling. We decide on plates of vegetable croquettes, potato dumplings, and grilled fish. There were lighter choices but we’ve gotten into these dumplings. I am pleased to see one of my favorite sauvignons on the wine list. It would be sobering to know how many bottles of Lafóa I have drunk over the years. A wine that sings, that inspires. Our friend Riccardo identifies one of the tastes as pipi di gatto, cat pee. (Others call that particular taste gooseberry.) To me it’s a quality of some of the best whites, the velvet border on a silk dress.
The rain has rinsed the already pristine air. We walk back to our hotel along the river, chuting even faster through the night, a long skein in the moonlight, as though a woman has unfurled her silvery gray hair.
LAST DAY IN the Dolomiti coming up. We set out to look for a waterfall that William saw in a brochure. At the beginning of the ascending trail, there’s the inevitable Italian touch: a bar. We stoke ourselves with coffee and head up, intending to see only the first of three waterfalls along the trail. The path leads through a forest where some glacial event once occurred: Enormous rocks covered with vivid moss fill the forest floor. Through tall skinny trees the light filters, a pellucid veil. There must be fairy houses everywhere in the ferny undergrowth. We follow a scent of coniferous green, pungent and sharp. A half hour of gentle climbing and we come to the first surging fall. Is there anything in nature more enchanting? The noise of it astounds—a crashing music.
William looks back at us. “Let’s go on. This is fantastic.” I say to myself a true line from Gerard Manley Hopkins: There lives the dearest freshness deep down things…The climb intensifies. In half an hour we hear a distant roar and scramble onward. Magnificent. We agree to continue. How could we not? This is one of the best walks ever. We’re quiet, listening to silence, then silence broken by hurtling water.
Best for last. The long drop of the highest waterfall. The deafening sluice and slide, a violence sending heavenly mist everywhere. We’re happily drenched. (Not happy that the camera is drenched.) Remember this, I think silently to William. This is it.
Going downhill is faster. We’re back at the car, stunned as though we’ve been abducted by aliens. Not that drastic, but truly exhilarated. Such unexpected beauty keeps us smiling.
WE’RE THREADING THROUGH high passes. A geologist’s paradise. “What does dolomite mean?” Ed throws out.
“The kind of rock,” William guesses. He starts scrolling his phone. “Calcium magnesium carbonate.”
“Yes, but why is it called dolomite?” He’s got us. “Named for a French geologist.”
“A geologist named Dolomite? You’re kidding.”
“Déodat de Dolomieu. Don’t you love Déodat? He explored in the late seventeen hundreds. This range is unbelievably old, two hundred and thirty million years. This was a sea when Europe and Africa were still joined. Sea of Tethys.”
“I’ve read that hikers still find marine fossils from the ancient lagoons,” I add. “And there are dinosaur prints.”
“Cool place,” William says. “Good name for a dog, Déodat.”
Indeed. I’ve seen mountains all over the world. These are unique. Inhospitable, formidable, and also sublimely mysterious, a never-never land to birth myth and legend.
BY LUNCHTIME, AFTER traversing many kilometers of oh-pull-over scenery, we arrive at Lago di Braies, another translucent emerald lake. The mountains hovering close to shore reflect in the water. On the Hotel Pragser Wildsee’s terrace we have lunch before taking a walk across the golden beach and along a path by the water. The washed colors look like an old postcard. The rambling hotel seems like a venerable place where people come, year after year, for the hikes and good air. William suggests staying another night. Sunrise would be a prime time to set up his tripod for a time lapse. But we are headed back to Cortona today and all we have left to see is the rest of the Great Dolomite Road.
WE WONDERED HOW the mountain roads would be—precipitous and narrow, with infinite drop-offs? We should have remembered the strong tradition of the old Romans, whose roads endure to this day. The Italians have road engineering in their DNA. Traffic is light to nonexistent; the roads are flawless. Easy to sit back, for William and me, and take in one jaw-dropping view after another. Conversation lapses into “majestic,” “look at that,” “spectacular,” “those are over three thousand meters,” and finally, “pull over, I feel sick.”
I step out and breathe until my equilibrium steadies. I’m doomed to the backseat, since William is approaching six feet and can’t fold enough to slip into the Alfa’s afterthought of a backseat. Sips of water; on we go. Lawrence Durrell in Greece has fallen to the floor. I never found my precise image for what it’s like to enter the Dolomiti. Anyway, even metaphorically, how does one enter a dark crystal?
Finally, we hit flat land. “What music do you want to hear?” William asks.
“k. d. lang, ‘Hallelujah,’ ” I say.
“Never heard of it but okay.”
Ed speeds toward the gentler terrain of Tuscany. Tonight, soul food—pasta al ragù. I write in my notebook: Entering Tuscany is like climbing onto the lap of an immensely kind nonna.