Not just nature: the Dolomites also hold true open-air museums, spaces where precious historical evidence and spectacular landscapes coexist.
To visit them you need to climb some of the most beautiful peaks in the Alpine range, on foot or – where possible – using the dedicated shuttle buses. The effort is worth the emotion, though: what is revealed is in fact far more than any history book could tell.
This is explained well by Antonella Fornari in her latest volume, freshly printed by Edizioni DBS: «Guida ai musei a cielo aperto delle Dolomiti Orientali» (Guide to the Open-Air Museums of the Eastern Dolomites).For each of these places, from Bolzano to Belluno, alongside practical information on trails and walking times, Antonella Fornari points out historical landmarks, monuments, and surviving traces of the Great War.
It is not, however, just another trail guide: the author manages to convey to the reader, in a concrete way, the sense and vision of what happened on the Dolomite peaks between 1915 and 1917: the hardships of military life at high altitude, the challenge of everyday needs, the precariousness of lives suspended between life and death.
It is therefore a book to be read, not only used for high-altitude excursions, helped also by its extremely rich photographic apparatus: more than two hundred images, all taken by the author, which are a precious aid for anyone who – even from their own living room – wants to retrace, at least in their imagination, the places where the fighting took place.
(Article by Laura Pontin)