DOLOMITES-UNESCO: EXPLORERS, ADVENTURERS AND TOURISM
TRENTO - In a little over one hundred years Italy's Dolomite mountain range has been transformed from being the domain of scientists and mountain climbers to an international tourist destination. The Great Dolomites Road, 112 kilometres of spectacular mountain views winding through Italy's Trentino Alto Adige and Veneto regions, is celebrating its 100th anniversary. The route from Bolzano to Cortina d'Ampezzo, including three mountain passes, has become a classic itinerary offering some of the most breathtaking panoramas in the Dolomites. The final section of the road - from the Falzarego Pass to the popular resort town Cortina d'Ampezzo - opened on September 13 1909, heralding the start of the great era of Dolomites tourism. Until then Italy's now famous mountain range had been primarily the discovery of adventurous foreign travellers and mountaineers. Scientists, especially geologists, were the first to understand the difference between the Dolomites and their neighbouring alpine chains.
After French mineralogist Deodat de Dolomieu published studies in 1791 identifying the composition of the mountains' calcareous rock - later named in his honour - scholars from all over Europe arrived to investigate the intriguing new possibilities of explaining the earths' history. The Dolomites were formed when the landmasses that are now the continents of Europe and Africa came together and pushed the Alps up out of the sea. The reefs and coral that once surrounded lagoons, home to thousands of marine organisms, helped create the Dolomites' striking appearance and unusual geological characteristics. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Dolomites allow earth scientists to reconstruct the evolution of a margin between land and sea and successive phases of continental collision and evolution over more than 250 million years.
In the first decade of the nineteenth century so many naturalists and geologists arrived in Predazzo in the Val di Fiemme that the hotel Nave d'Oro became their unofficial headquarters. One of the hotel's most renowned guests was a founder of modern geology, Alexander von Humboldt, described by Charles Darwin as ''the greatest scientific traveller who ever lived''. Today the most important geological museum in the Eastern Alps is in Predazzo. Written observations from the time impart a sense of amazement and awe, but later books and paintings led to the real beginning of the Dolomites' fame. The first book on the mountains was written by Adolph Schaubach whose travel guides, 'Die Deutschen Alpen' (The German Alps), published between 1845 and 1850, included a volume on the mountains between the Brenner Pass and the Veneto plains. Schaubach's paintings conveyed his fascination with sites that were to become an inexhaustible fount of inspiration for many artists. Two English travellers, the painter Josiah Gilbert and the naturalist George Cheetham Churchill were the first to popularize travel to the Dolomites.
From 1856 to 1863 the two men travelled the length and breadth of the region for their book 'The Dolomite Mountains' (1864), extending the name to the entire chain of dolomite rock mountains. The book was an enormous success and the romantic spirit of the time found the perfect embodiment of the 'sublime' in the wild majesty of the Dolomite landscapes. A trip to the Alps became fashionable for upper class English families and Thomas Cook Travel Agents in London quickly added the Dolomites to its catalogues. The completion of the Brenner railway between Innsbruck and Bolzano in 1867 further encouraged Dolomite tourism. Getting around however was still quite an undertaking; roads were few, transport was slow and mostly by foot, horseback or wagon, and lodgings were poor. Amelia Edwards, an adventurous English writer, described her travels illustrated with drawings in her 1872 book 'Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys'.
Travelling on mules and meeting the inhabitants of small villages, Edwards noted that Vigo di Fassa had only one rather poor inn, and that the hotelkeeper in Gosaldo ''didn't know what teacups were''. Two years earlier Elisabeth Tuckett, after accompanying her brother Francis Fox during his ascents on Dolomites peaks, published an album of her drawings and sketches called 'Zigzagging Amongst Dolomites', with accounts of their trips on foot and horseback. The primitive conditions changed rapidly. Improved transport and the increasing number of visitors led to the opening of new inns and hotels. Cortina, connected to the flat areas in the Veneto region by the Alemagna road was the first to develop its hospitality industry. Starting in 1868 Madonna di Campiglio, the pearl of the Dolomites, began competing for alpine tourists and by the end of the century was a preferred vacation spot for European aristocrats and along with San Martino di Castrozza at the foot of the Pale di San Martino had become a well known summer resort.
The photographs and postcards that began to appear publicised the superb beauty of the Dolomites and advertising posters from the beginning of the twentieth century, often with images by famous painters, made the Dolomite mountains a universal attraction. Italy has applied to the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) for the Dolomites to be added to its World Heritage List. The 2008 bid was endorsed this May by the IUCN, the World Heritage Committee's advisory body on natural sites. The committee's final verdict is expected by the end of June. Nine mountain groups have been selected as representative of two UNESCO criteria: superlative natural phenomena and outstanding examples representing major stages of the earth's history.
