Folgaria and Lavarone in Italy are places where falling snow covers much more than ski slopes and cross-country tracks. You ski in a land of the black dragon, which remembers the artillery fire of the First World War as well as the tensions of the Cold War era.
On the plateaus of Folgaria and Lavarone, where the border between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italy once ran, lies the Alpe Cimbra ski area, mainly focused on families with children. It offers over one hundred kilometres of red and blue slopes, two cross-country skiing centres, affordable prices and an incredibly fascinating history. Even today, high in the mountains, you can find striking military remains that almost mysteriously intrude into the breathtaking Alpine landscape. While carving turns, you cross old cart tracks, trenches overgrown with dwarf pine, and pass concrete structures rising above the snow like stone ships trapped in ice. Whether you descend towards Ortesina past the Sommo Alto fortress or ski across the meadows of Passo Coe, everywhere you will find something that turns an ordinary winter holiday into a journey through time.
It is a strange contrast. Close to the ski slope that leads from the upper station of the Francolini gondola lift towards Ortesina stands the military fortress Forte Sommo Alto, translated as “Fortress on the High Ridge.”
You take off your skis and, while behind you you hear a ski school instructor teaching children “pizza – spaghetti” (when to snowplough and when to let the skis run straight downhill), you head towards the grey walls that look as if they grow directly out of the mountain.From the outside, the building appears calm. Winter suits it. Snow settles on the shrub-covered rooflines like sugar on a cake. But this romantic image does not change the fact that this place was built for defence and for killing.Sommo Alto dates back to the beginning of the last century, when the entire present-day Trentino and South Tyrol belonged to the Austro-Hungarian emperor and the plateaus of Folgaria and Lavarone played a crucial strategic role. Tensions along the borders were high. While the Empire expected an Italian attack from the south, the Italians feared a possible Austrian invasion of the Po Valley. And so, in hard-to-access mountain massifs, Austrians and Italians built ten fortresses to defend their strategic valley routes. These massive military fortifications were manned by hundreds of soldiers, including Czechs who fought on both sides of the front.Wearing buckled boots, you walk through the multi-storey fortress with collapsed floors. Corridors connect empty yet still recognisable spaces. Rooms with ventilation shafts once served as shared quarters for nearly a hundred men. Cells with reinforced walls were used as storage for howitzer shells and machine-gun ammunition. A labyrinth of tunnels connected observation posts with firing positions and escape routes.You feel relief when you return to the sunlight. While skiing down to Ortesina, you consciously avoid thinking about how soldiers once guarded the front lines in freezing winters, when no mountain huts were lit and no children’s laughter could be heard. And you are glad that today young skiers circle around their parents and instructors, mastering “pizza – spaghetti,” and that life goes on.
The cross-country heart of Alpe Cimbra is Passo Coe. From the Osteria Coe restaurant, which provides facilities for tourists and athletes, 35 kilometres of trails of varying lengths and difficulties stretch across white, gently rolling meadows. The tracks are perfectly groomed. You ski, one step follows another, one view replaces the next. Only occasionally does an icy mountain wind blow, reminding you that here, at an altitude of 1,600 metres, you should pull your hat a little further down over your forehead.For a moment you enter sparse woodland and then… when you emerge again onto the open plain, three strange ochre-coloured umbrellas surprise you. They look folded, yet you feel as if you are approaching a large restaurant. But where are the terrace, the tables and the chairs? Then you notice a green guard tower and realise that those umbrella-shaped cones pointing towards the sky are missiles in protective shelters.On frost-cracked concrete rise three enormous Nike-Hercules guided anti-aircraft missiles, ready—from the 1960s until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989—to defend Europe from an aerial attack from the East. Base Tuono is the only place in Europe where these preserved weapons, once armed with conventional and nuclear warheads, stand as an open-air museum.Skiers pass by the former NATO base without much interest. But if you stop and look at the rusting structures behind the barbed wire, it is not the cold wind but the sight itself that chills you. Beneath the protection of grey tarpaulins, old radars hide near the tall launch silos, as if still waiting for a signal from the last century.
If you feel like an afternoon snowshoe walk, set off from Lavarone along the Dragon Trail across the Tablat plateau. It is not a ski area, but a place meant for winter wandering along the traces of stories. On a mountain rise above the hamlet of Magré stands the dragon Vaia. Local artist Marc Martalar built it over three years from the trunks of trees felled by the devastating Vaia storm in 2018. However, in August 2023, an unknown arsonist set the dragon on fire. Yet Vaia rose again. Its new version is larger and was born from charred, burnt wood—literally from ashes and blackened trunks.“I wanted to give people hope that just as a devastated forest can grow again, the dragon can once more guard our land,” says the creator of the largest wooden dragon sculpture in Europe, measuring seven metres in height and sixteen metres in length. When you look into its eyes, you can see stories that no one is left to tell. Everything here is connected to everything else… perhaps that is why people like to return to Alpe Cimbra. Not only for the snow, but also for the feeling that the landscape itself can remind us of what must not be forgotten.
Author: Dana Emingerová
