Dolomite Alps

The Dolomite Alps toward Belluno belong to the eastern portion of a range that spreads across Veneto, Trentino-Alto Adige and Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Toward the Piave country, the mountains divide into compact groups of steep rock separated by long valleys. The conventional line between the Western and Eastern Dolomites follows Val Badia, Campolongo Pass and the Cordevole valley. Valley routes therefore organize the mountain country as strongly as its separate summits do.

For millennia hunters and gatherers pushed up into the highest rock country, and the Puster Valley along the Drava forms the broad northern edge of the range. In the valley at Innichen, Duke Tassilo III of Bavaria founded an abbey in 769 that the bishops of Freising held until 1803. Higher paths, cliffs and enclosed basins made travel in the mountains depend on local knowledge. In the 1790s the Jesuit Franz von Wulfen of Klagenfurt climbed the Lungkofel and the Dürrenstein.

The eastern landscape is not only a chain of obstacles. It is a densely connected upland whose valley corridors link communities across several later provinces. Pale carbonate walls create strong visual boundaries, and the older local name of the range, Monti Pallidi, meant the Pale Mountains. The name Dolomites came from the French mineralogist Déodat de Dolomieu, who described the rock in the eighteenth century. The Dolomite Alps here form a working geography of landforms and routes, crossed beneath and between the walls for centuries.