The authentic and timeless world of Ralph Lauren
February 2026
RL/Travel

The Insider’s Guide to Cortina

Everything you need to know on how a little town in the Italian Alps became a glamorous getaway for everyone from Ernest Hemingway to George Clooney—and is now the site of the Olympics.
By Matteo Persivale
Blame—or give credit to—the writers. What young Brigitte Bardot did 70 years ago for a sleepy fishing village in the south of France—simply by appearing in the film And God Created Woman, turning the location, Saint-Tropez, into a global icon of luxury and glamour—famous writers did for a tiny Italian town perched on the Italian Alps, Cortina d’Ampezzo. A small army of writers, really: Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, Aldous Huxley, Vladimir Nabokov, Leo Tolstoy, Dino Buzzati, Eugenio Montale, Alberto Moravia—the list could go on; in fact, there are books written specifically about the very topic of Cortina and her writers. And now, almost 70 years to the day after the Winter Olympics took over Cortina in 1956, the Olympians are coming back: The Milano Cortina Winter Olympics will kick off on February 6 and last two weeks. But why does this village that’s still difficult to reach by car and train, almost a century after it became a world-famous vacation spot, keep attracting tens of thousands of mostly repeat visitors (the population of approximately 5,500 easily balloons to 10 times as much during the high season, the dreaded “alta stagione” in both winter and summer)?
FIRE AND ICE
A travel poster from the 1930s and a poster celebrating the 1956 Winter Olympics, which were held in Cortina.
If you’ve been there, you know—you feel the reason why, really. If you’ve never been, it’s harder to articulate. Yes, the local “Ampezzani” can give you the facts and explain that the town sits on a wide, sunny basin that’s for all practical purposes a natural amphitheater, created by nature as the terminal basin of an ancient Quaternary glacier. It’s indeed surrounded—crowned, since it’s called The Queen of the Dolomites—by some of the most dramatic-looking peaks in Europe: the sheer grandeur of an almost perfectly round valley bordered by mountain passes in all four cardinal directions, the towering formations like the Tofane, the Cristallo, the Croda Rossa, Antelao, and Pomagagnon that are all part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site for their unique geology. One of Cortina’s beloved novelists, Dino Buzzati, author of The Stronghold and born in nearby Belluno, despite working in Milan as an editor at the august newspaper Corriere della Sera, spent as much time as possible in Cortina, and wrote a famous passage about the dreamlike vision of those jagged cathedral-like spires. The sheer cliffs that rise for thousands of feet, the impossible fascination of the pale dolomite rock that glows pink at sunset, the famous “enrosadira” optical phenomenon—mirage-like—that can turn the mountains purple, or blood red, at sunset and nightfall depending on the day’s climate, humidity, and probably on chance as well.
Despite all this, Cortina’s power remains greater than the (considerable) sum of its parts. Cortina was still Austro-Hungarian—it became Italian after World War I—when a then-famous Baedeker travel book, Wanderungen in den Dolomiten, was published in 1877 by explorer Paul Grohmann. Part travelogue, part memoir, it became an international bestseller (it’s still in print today). The book introduced Cortina d’Ampezzo to the Central European nobility and thus began the transformation of a small village with an economy based on timber and sheep farming into something else entirely. Something that the natives have clearly been having trouble accepting, for the most part. Before Grohmann’s book, over the entirety of 1870, the town’s three taverns accommodated a whopping 35 guests. Twenty years later, the number shot up to 4,000. By 1911, shortly before World War I began, the number of visitors throughout the whole year had gone up to 70,000. The war was fought nearby, too: The Sacrario militare di Pocol is an astonishing-looking monument, an architectural wonder that remembers the sacrifice of almost 10,000 Italian soldiers.
APRÈS-SKI
Ernest Hemingway in 1949; Faye Dunaway in 1968; and David Niven, Claudia Cardinale, and Peter Sellers on location during the filming of The Pink Panther in 1963.
Cortina’s special grace requires that her visitors treat her with the respect due to a sovereign; the Queen of the Dolomites carries herself lightly but is horrified by the idea of mass tourism and has actively fought against anything that could make her easier to reach. In 1956, a drive from Milan would take half a day; depending on traffic, it’s still hard to get there in less than four hours. The elegantly decorated, wood-paneled train station was closed down in 1964 and is now a rather bizarre bike trail; the nearest station is in Calalzo, about an hour’s drive away. Cortina in the 1960s and 1970s had a small, charming airport that linked her to Venice, Belluno, and Milan via the small 20-seat planes of the now-defunct AerAlpi; it was shut down in 1976. Why? Byzantine regulations aside, the truth is the residents—still somewhat Austro-Hungarian in their reserve—appreciate their peace (which, in Cortina’s case, is rather bizarre since its main industry is tourism). One of the reasons why it’s such a special place is that the Queen refuses to follow the normal rules—noblesse oblige. Nobel Prize laureates and celebrities aside (from Elizabeth Taylor to Michelle Pfeiffer, from Faye Dunaway to Audrey Hepburn, from Sophia Loren to Frank Sinatra and George Clooney), Cortina prides herself on being the natural habitat of invisible geniuses. Take architect and industrial designer Edoardo Gellner (1909–2004): Italy’s disciple of Adolf Loos, the master of Raumplanung  (spatial planning) who designed the town’s Palazzo Telve, Ca’ del Cembro, and Borca’s Villaggio Eni and kept an incredibly low profile even for his day.
Cortina was truly Hemingway’s happy place.
Cortina was also the home of Rachele Padovan (1916–1999), the greatest chef who wasn’t a chef and who never had a restaurant. She only invited people she liked to her enormous kitchen—painters, writers, publishers. She liked, she used to say, “intelligent people” to eat her extraordinary meals and famously turned away some of the country’s most powerful men (Tarka Edizioni has republished her 1981 book, which is more about the culture of food than the actual recipes). Same is true for Lina Melon (1940–2012), who never trained formally or worked in fancy restaurants but who made El Camineto (now radically changed after the family sold the mountaintop property) a jewel much envied—and studied—in Italy and abroad. The general store, the Cooperativa, has only recently (2023) been remodeled, with the interior redesigned to celebrate its 130th anniversary. It now looks more like a luxury boutique than a small-town general store, carrying fashion brands together with the classic locally made products. Lovat, the beloved pastry shop only steps from the church, soon to celebrate its centennial, kept the classic wood paneling and outdoor seating (in the summer, obviously) and remains happily old school.
THE HIGH LIFE
The Cooperativa, back in the day, and the restaurant at the Rifugio Faloria.
The new school? It’s all about the hotels. The fully renovated Lajadira (one of the city’s oldest) added a hi-tech addendum and spa, the brand new de LEN, a study in minimalist luxury, built with reclaimed local timber. The classic Cristallo—Saul Bellow, a regular, loved it so much he used it as a location for his novel A Theft—won’t be ready for the Olympics because the Herzog & de Meuron renovation (it’s a Mandarin Oriental now) took a bit too long to happen, in pure “Cortinese” style—you really can’t rush things there, can you? Bellow, a somewhat difficult man, happily spent hours chatting—in French—with the owner of the local bookstore, Sovilla, a two-story wonder with a choice of carefully curated new books and, upstairs, an impressive section of first editions (the always-busy children’s section carries a handwritten sign by a discerning 9-year-old habitué: “Here are the books that smart people are interested in”). Cortina is the home of incredible stories, too. That bearskin rug that since time immemorial decorates a wall of the reading room at Hotel de la Poste? There are obviously no bears around Cortina; it’s a Yugoslav bear. Marshal Josip Tito used to visit, in secret, and stay at the hotel. He befriended the owner and eventually invited him to his famous hunting lodge (where he entertained world leaders, among them Kim Il Sung and Nikita Khrushchev). They shot, among other animals, a bear—a large box was delivered to the hotel mailroom, months later, as a gift from the Marshal and has been hanging on the wall since.
WHERE TO BE
It might be called Hotel de la Poste, but those in the know say “il Posta.”
The now world-famous bar at Hotel de la Poste (just call it “il Posta” unless you want to be immediately recognized as a newbie) was turned into what it is today by Renato Hausammann and Mirko Stocchetto in the 1950s and 1960s; they then moved to Milan to take over Bar Basso from the founder, and it’s there that Stocchetto invented the Negroni Sbagliato cocktail. They left their deputy, Antonio Di Franco, in charge. When he suddenly retired more than 10 years ago and Filippo Borghi took over, clients forced management to ask “Antonio” to please come back, at least for the weekends in December and January, because they missed him. Whether you sit at Hemingway’s table or not, just order (in the summer) a Bellini made with freshly blended white peaches and champagne (the Posta barmen have never been fans of prosecco). In winter, the classic drink is the Puccini, created at the Posta: fresh mandarin juice and champagne. Then there’s the Kremlin: vodka and mandarin juice. Di Franco created it decades ago for a Russian nobleman who ended up drinking 36 of them, eventually collapsing on the floor, and promptly removed to his room to cool off.
Do you know who never ever flinched at the bar despite drinking impressive amounts of his beloved martinis and having a room that was always stocked with a crate of Valpolicella? Hemingway. He first visited in 1923—one of many happy returns—and his first kid was conceived there. The first short story where we can see the full-blown writer he’d become, “Out of Season,” was written there too, on a borrowed typewriter. In 1948, his probably platonic, heartbreaking love story with 18-year-old Italian countess Adriana Ivancich happened in Cortina (she is Renata in Across the River and Into the Trees; she later travelled to Cuba to join him as he wrote The Old Man and the Sea; in 1983, she committed suicide, just like Hemingway had done 22 years earlier). And to this day, the classic Hotel de la Poste, in the heart of town where he often stayed, keeps the typewriter he used in what’s now the Hemingway Room. The hotel’s bar keeps a small, tasteful sign to mark Papa’s favorite corner table.
Cortina was truly Hemingway’s happy place. On his last night on earth, in Idaho, Hemingway asked his wife Mary to please sing him a song. He requested “Tutti Mi Chiamano Bionda” (“Everyone Calls Me Blondie”), which they had learned in Cortina many years earlier with their friend—and Hemingway translator—Fernanda Pivano. It’s a happy, silly folk song about dreaming of pasta and polenta and sausage while toiling in the fields. An earworm and a love song with a bittersweet final couple of lines: “E quando vien novembre / La mando a riposar” (“And when November comes / I send her to rest”).
Matteo Persivale is a Milan-based writer and third-generation Cortina habitué. He figured everything would be alright when his then-6-year-old son strutted into the Posta bar and the barman, with whom he’s on a first-name basis, quietly made his “solito”—freshly squeezed peach juice—no questions asked.
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