The Alps

by Stephen O'Shea

  The most famous resident of Bolzano/Bozen can be considered the great-granddaddy of all these delusional Alpine strivers. He is the Iceman, a.k.a. Ötzi, the mummified Copper Age corpse found in 1991 by a couple of intrepid German hikers in the tall Ötztal Alps between Italy and Austria. He lived somewhere between 3350 and 3150 BCE and died around the age of forty-five, from an arrow wound to his right shoulder loosed by an assailant standing below and behind him. Then he was probably clubbed in the head. The body, along with tools, weapons, and clothing, was stumbled upon 5,300 years later, exposed by a retreating glacier. He is the oldest natural mummy ever found. And his state of preservation and that of his belongings constitute a treasure trove for scientists interested in DNA analysis, paleo diets (his last meal was chamois), blood types, Neolithic toolmaking, gut bacteria, tattoos, prehistoric diseases, and many other aspects of what was going on five millennia ago. Hardly a year has gone by since his discovery without a new revelation provided by analysis of the corpse. Some have likened him to a “snapshot” of our distant past.

  Shortly after the sensational find was announced, a clever Austrian journalist dubbed him Ötzi, mixing Ötztal with yeti. The name stuck, and the murder victim was hustled off to Innsbruck for batteries of tests and X-rays. But the Italians smelled a rat. A new border survey was quickly ordered, and the location of the sensational discovery was determined to have been about 100 meters inside of Italy. After protracted negotiations and some sullen Austrian muttering, Ötzi moved from Innsbruck to Bolzano in 1998, to be housed as the centerpiece of a nineteenth-century bank building converted into the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology.

  The place is fascinating. Ed and I seem to be competing with each other to point out the most interesting artifacts: the Iceman’s longbow, backpack, quiver, arrows, and provisions pouch. Ötzi’s axe is particularly impressive. Its sixty-one-centimeter-long haft is made of polished yew, and the ten-centimeter-long blade, trapezoidal in shape, is made of almost pure copper. Clearly, this was a superior tool, perhaps indicative of the Iceman’s high social standing. Accompanying text informs us that the axe could chop down a yew tree in thirty-five minutes, without needing sharpening during that time.

  “Now, that’s cool!”

  Ed points me to a bearskin cap he is admiring.

  “No, this is better.”

  I point to Ötzi’s goat-hide leggings.

  At last we come to the man himself, who can be seen through a window of his climate-controlled resting place. He is a contorted, recumbent figure, dark brown in color, with the sheen one sees on Peking ducks hanging in any given Chinatown. Ötzi has upwards of sixty charcoal tattoos, mostly lines and crosses. Researchers were stunned to find the tattooed areas corresponded to skin acupuncture lines, a pain-relieving technique that would not be developed for another two thousand years in far-off Asia.

  In separate exhibits, we learn that the fellow was lactose intolerant, suffered from arteriosclerosis and Lyme disease, and exhibited diastema, which the museum’s accompanying text helpfully defines as having a gap between his front teeth, “like the singer Madonna.” We round a corner and come face-to-face with a replica of the Iceman in life, fashioned by two Dutch artists using the latest in scientific findings. He stands at five-foot-five and weighs about 110 pounds. Wearing just a loincloth, leggings, and shoes, he holds a stave in his right hand and stares at us from over his left shoulder. His graying hair and beard are scraggly, but his eyes are clear and piercing. His face is deeply furrowed. I confess to Ed my worry about conveying his appearance in this narrative.

  He thinks for a minute and says, “Just say he looks like Kris Kristofferson.”

  WE LEAVE TOWN and head for the mountains. Within minutes, we are in Val Gardena, a verdant valley whose horizons are dotted with spectacular outcroppings of rock. These then are the Dolomites, what the Swiss architect Le Corbusier called “the most impressive buildings in the world.” Folded, creased, fissured, punctuated by stovepipe towers, the massifs stand higgledy-piggledy on the pastures and woodlands, as though placed there randomly by some gargantuan toddler. As at Grossglockner, the unfathomable scale of geological time comes to mind: 250 million years ago these discrete formations were coral reefs submerged in a great ocean. Composed primarily of the mineral dolomite (named for French geologist Déodat de Dolomieu), which can be white, tan, gray, or pink, the huge outcroppings are famous for their kaleidoscopic nature, changing hues according to the weather or the moment of the day. The Dolomites have long been a landscape of the imagination.

  We pass the town of Urtijëi (Ortisei in Italian, St. Ulrich in Gröden in German). If not Italian or German, then in which language is the town’s name? The answer lies in the surprising fact that the Val Gardena is one of the five valleys in the Dolomites where the inhabitants speak Ladin, a direct descendant of the Latin spoken by the legionaries of old Rome. There are Ladin-speakers in two other Alpine provinces of Italy (Trentino and Belluno), and there is a profusion of distinctly different dialects within the language group—so much so that the inhabitant of one valley might not understand someone from another. Such was the hermetic power of the Alps, to isolate neighbors from one another. A similar situation obtained in Switzerland, where the varieties of Swiss German are remarkable for their dissimilarities. They might yodel across great distances to one another, but it is not clear that all of the message would be understood.

  To take an example, the simple question of “How old are you?” can be rendered in Ladin, depending on the dialect, as “Tan d’ani es’a?” or “Cotenc egn èste pa?” or “Quainch agn asto?” or “Kotanc agn asto?” or “Canti ani gias po?” or “Cuantì ani jas po?” Clearly, we are a long way from Cicero here. (Ladin should not be confused with Ladino, the old Spanish spoken by the Jewish Andalusian diaspora.) As for the sound of the language, we ask an employee at a tourist office to give us a blast of Ladin. He obliges, and we listen—and understand nothing. As far as we know, he may have been reciting the Lord’s Prayer—or insulting us. Back in the car, Ed and I work together to find a way to describe spoken Ladin and finally have to settle for: a Portuguese living in Germany trying to speak Italian. There are “shh” sounds, as in Portuguese, and guttural sounds, as in German, but the musicality and open vowels resemble Italian.

  We stop in the town of Selva di Val Gardena.* As its name indicates, the town is surrounded by forests, which has made it a center of woodworking for centuries. Outside a sculpture workshop belonging to one Helmuth Runggaldier, we pause in front of a large bas-relief pine-wood rendering of Padre Pio, the twentieth-century Italian miracle-worker revered as a saint or rejected as a fraud by millions of Catholics worldwide. I am fearing an Oberammergau-like obsession with devotional art, until I spy a group of nineteenth-century firemen and a Pinocchio whose long nose points directly at a buxom woman in distress. Inside, the showroom houses a convention of devils and demons, exuberantly executed and luridly painted.

  I ask Signor Runggaldier why there are so many devils in his shop.

  “Because there are so many devils in the mountains here,” he replies calmly.

  “How about ogres?” Ed ventures.

  “What is that?”

  “They eat children.”

  The sculptor thinks for a moment, then allows, “Probably.”

  We’re taking our leave when he finds out where I’m from. He takes my hand in both of his and says with conviction, “There is a lot of pine in Canada.”

  The Val Gardena comes to an end. We begin to climb to the first of the passes to clear today. The Dolomites pop up around every turn, sometimes flat and table-topped, sometimes looking like a pipe organ. Conifers stand in great clusters at the feet of the stone giants. The valley we have left behind looks tiny, as if we were looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope.

  We reach the Sella Pass and get out of the car to gape. All around is a deep green lawn of moss and grass. The mountains of the Sella group, really three irregular rocks standing two k
ilometers long and hundreds of meters tall, resemble a symphony in stone. And the panorama at the pass comes close to taking in 360 degrees. Many of the massifs stand independent of each other, so the view varies between unearthly monoliths of rock and green valleys and woodlands far, far below. The play of light and shadow is remarkable. We are treated to a multicolored prospect of pink, gray, and rust, while the occasional white cloud obscures a summit like a celestial toupee. I have never seen anything like it.

  Ed walks closer to the orientation table and squints up at the Sella. He seems to be looking for something.

  “Stevie, come over here.” He has a big grin on his face. As I approach, he points to one of the organ pipes of stone and says, “See that one? I climbed it.”

  “You what?!”

  “I climbed it. See that ridge? That’s where we bivouacked.”

  As I listen, astounded, he tells me that in our Paris days he was an accomplished rock climber. He would often take off for a week or two—that, I remember—and head to the Pyrenees or the Alps. That, I did not know. He is a muscular, barrel-chested guy, even now in his fifties, so such a hobby does not seem out of the question.

  “Why did you do it?” I ask.

  “I used to run. I got tired of the horizontal.”

  But my surprise runs deep, akin to finding out one’s sister spends her spare time running marathons. Ed tells me of his adventures in the Dolomites and I at last understand the reason he was so eager to join me here this summer. This is his rock nostalgia tour.

  “These mountains are memories for me,” he says.

  I think of this later at our hotel. The Alps, particularly the Dolomites, are unforgettable, so powerful is their effect on the imaginative. Try as we might to put them in perspective, the awe (and fear) they occasion lingers long after leaving them. As for the locals, I suspect that nary a one takes the presence of these behemoths for granted. The Swiss waitress at Vevey, I recall, confessed to loving them.

  The road down from the Sella Pass is a spectacular journey around rocky prominences glowing in the sunlight. The Dolomites are God’s gift to man: Small wonder that UNESCO threw up its collective hands in 2009 and declared the whole region to be a World Heritage Site. We descend into a charming valley town called Alba di Canazei and break for lunch at the Caffè Symphony—apparently I am not the first to find these mountains somehow symphonic. We sit on its terrace nibbling at salads when a truly impressive international procession rumbles past. Ed and I count at least six dozen Mercedes convertibles from the 1950s and 1960s, the automotive showstopper of this summer in the Alps. The elderly male drivers’ faces are set in concentration, while their wives wave gaily at us.

  The Pordoi Pass awaits, the highest of the paved Dolomite passes (2,239 meters). To reach it, one must traverse a serpentine of switchbacks yielding a series of jaw-dropping views. There seems to be a stony goliath in every direction, now standing straight, now leaning over, depending on the gradient of the roadway. The villages in the green valleys at the foot of the mountains grow smaller and small, until they are rosy dots. We pass several groups of iron-legged cyclists, inching their way to the top. At the pass, we take the proffered iPads and snap pictures of the triumphant climbers in front of a large stone bas-relief stela depicting Fausto Coppi, Italy’s premier cyclist of the mid-twentieth century and a national hero whose premature death at forty, from malaria, plunged the country into mourning. The Pordoi is one of the many passes crossed in the Maratona dles Dolomites (Dolomites Marathon), one of bicycle-mad Italy’s most-watched races. A single-day affair in early July involving up to ten thousand riders, amateur and pro, the Maratona is part carnival, part stress test. Thousands of spectators line the road and scream as the great peloton of cyclists lumbers up to the pass, then coasts at great speed downward, like a murmuration of starlings, the many individual riders standing out for a moment then melding into the mass on the hairpin turns. Aside from the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia, this race remains one of the most remarkable of the European cycling season.

  On the way down, we are confronted by a prodigious rock stretching at least three kilometers long and reaching thousands of meters in the air. Its right extremity is a fist of rock and snow, illuminated a brilliant white by an errant sunbeam. Its left side traces an almost feminine curve.

  “Looks like a ship,” Ed remarks. “What’s the kind with a stern like that?”

  “Galley?”

  “No, like the ones Columbus had.”

  “Caravels?”

  “Yes, that’s it. It’s a stone caravel. Do you see it?”

  I nod, impressed. At his insistence, we take a long and sinuous detour to stand at the foot of the Marmolada, the so-called Queen of the Dolomites, a ridge with five very tall peaks. The westernmost, at 3,343 meters in elevation, is the region’s tallest. On a clear day, the imposing outcropping can be seen from the canals of Venice, some one hundred kilometers to the south. There is a certain nobility to its towering menace, but the overall effect is one of brute force. The Marmolada displays a disturbing number of sheer cliffs. Ed points to a pilasterlike feature climbing the main rockface and informs me that this, too, he clawed his way up twenty-­five years ago.

  The shadows lengthen and we make our way to Cortina d’Ampezzo. Our resolve to go there directly falters when we come across a magical expanse of water, the Lago Bai de Dones. A small lake surrounded by a dizzying palisade of stone, including the strange Cinque Torre (Five Towers) formation of tortured rock, Bai de Dones has invited mythmaking since time immemorial. Indeed, as have all the Dolomites, the richest wellspring of fantastical folklore in the Alps, with its mix of Celtic, Roman, Germanic, and Romance traditions. Here, on this lake, lived an anguane, a cloven-footed female water nymph who, according to which legend you prefer, helped infertile women become pregnant or seduced male wayfarers. In truth, hundreds of anguane stories can be found throughout northeastern Italy, and not only in the Dolomites—­testament to the region’s lively pagan past. According to popular tradition, the anguane stopped mixing with humankind after—what else?—the Council of Trent.

  MAGICAL, MUSICAL, MYSTICAL—after just a short time in the Dolomites, all of these descriptive words spring to mind. There is absolutely no mystery to why these mountains fire the imagination. They are unearthly, almost lunar. Violent irruptions of rock glowing pale in the moonlight, they inhabit the narratives told by the Ladin peoples in the past.

  There is the princess of the moon, who came to marry a prince of these mountains. In her trousseau she brought to earth a brilliant moon flower, the edelweiss, to brighten the severity of the brooding peaks. But soon she fell ill, disheartened by the darkness of the mountains at night, so unlike those of the moon. The prince, in despair, took to wandering the forests of the kingdom. There he came across a Salwan, a cave-­dwelling dwarf leader whose scattered people possessed magical powers. On hearing of the prince’s plight, the Salwan summoned his fellow dwarves together, and the next night they set to work. Standing on the jagged peaks, groups of Salwans captured the moonlight and wove it into a magical, glowing cloth, which they then draped over the mountains. This is why the Dolomites are also called the Pale Mountains. The moon princess, on seeing this transformation, was overjoyed, and her homesickness vanished.

  Then there is the alpenglow, the roseate blush that suffuses summits just before sunrise and just after sunset. The phenomenon can be seen throughout the Alps, but in the Dolomites the show is particularly stunning. Ladin legend has a dwarf king, Laurin, inhabiting a hollow mountain surrounded by a profusion of rosebushes. When, after a series of misadventures, King Laurin loses his realm, he angrily turns all the roses into stone, uttering a spell by which they were never to be seen again by night or by day. In his haste, he forgot about dawn and dusk—neither day nor night—which is why the stone roses show their true colors at those two times. The Dolomite massif where Laurin lived is called, in German, Rosengarten.

  There are many other legends h
aunting the Dolomites: maidens turned to stone, witches doing mischief in the woods, sorcerers hurling rainbows into lakes, and a host of other supernatural occurrences. Perhaps the most intriguing concerns the kingdom of the Fanes, a realm unknown to history yet very much alive in multiple folktales. A warrior people led by a Boadicea-like princess named Dolasilla, the Fanes conquered the Dolomites in some distant past, aided at different times by different allies—marmots, eagles, and a cohort of one-armed men. According to tradition, they will return one day in a promised time, and life in the Ladin valleys will return to the way it was lived long ago. Until then, the Fanes remain present in many place names in the region.

  All of which makes for fascinating musing as we walk the streets of Cortina d’Ampezzo. Known more now for its jet-set ski clientele and for its starring role in For Your Eyes Only, a 1981 James Bond movie, the town is magnificently encircled by jagged mountains, a scene that cannot but inspire lingering thoughts of ancient secrets and fabulous creatures. The view must have inflamed the childhood imagination of Dolomites native Dino Buzzati, whose Tartar Steppe brilliantly evokes the menace of the Alps.

  We head into those mountains after a few days of Ed’s rock nostalgia tour, up a road that instantly becomes ridiculously steep. The muscle Mégane handles the slope effortlessly, which elicits a whistle of appreciation from Ed. The trees give way to an open prospect dominated by a dreamlike lake surrounded by mountains. Named for an impish sprite who convinced her giant father to become a mountain so that she could obtain a magic mirror from a fairy, Lake Misurina spreads out in pristine clarity, its necklace of elegant shoreline hotels testament to the locale’s status as a beauty spot of the first order. Misurina, by the way, met her end when she grew frightened and fell to her death from her father-turned-mountain; his tears, in the form of streams and waterfalls, created the lake in which she lies submerged with the magic mirror.