Tre Cime: Three Battlements

The morning after our walk on Seceda, we left Kranebitterhof, where we’d spent the night in an apartment on a farm, and drove east to the station at Dobbiaco, or Toblach in German. From there the 444 shuttle bus took us up the winding road to Rifugio Auronzo. We arrived shortly before 10am at the foot of the Tre Cime di Lavaredo. The three peaks are probably the most recognisable sight in the Dolomites. Cima Grande, the tallest, stops a single metre short of 3,000. Cima Ovest stands beside it to the west, with the smaller Cima Piccola to the east. In German they’re the Drei Zinnen, the ‘three battlements’, which better describes how they look from the north: a row of sheer, square-cut towers standing on a plinth of scree. They sit on the boundary between South Tyrol and the Veneto. Since 2009 they’ve been part of the Dolomites UNESCO World Heritage Site. Until the end of the First World War, that boundary was the frontier between Austria-Hungary and Italy. When Italy entered the war…