The only dolomites west of the river

The ridge came up first — a grey rock crest barely wide enough to walk, with a small iron summit marker bolted into the stone. West of it the ground fell away into the Adamello-Presanella group, still holding glacier ice in August. East, on the far skyline, stood the Brenta: pale vertical towers, unmistakably dolomitic, rising out of dark forest like something that had drifted in from another range. In a sense it had. The Brenta is the only dolomite massif west of the Adige River, cut off from the main Dolomites by an hour of valley, and part of the same UNESCO World Heritage listing.

Below the crest, the land steps down through scree into a chain of small tarns — laghi held in rock basins, meltwater-fed, dead still in the morning air. The drone read them as flat dark discs against grey stone. This is the core of the Adamello-Brenta Nature Park, Trentino’s largest protected area and the province’s widest stretch of glacier ice, and the contrast is the whole point of the place: glacier and granite on one side of the valley, sheer limestone towers on the other.

Then the wide reveal. The camera pulled back and Madonna di Campiglio dropped into frame far below, a compact town on the valley floor at around 1,550 metres in the upper Val Rendena. From up here you can trace the lines the climbers use — the Via delle Bocchette, the network of ledges and fixed cables threaded across the Brenta walls, one of the oldest via ferrata systems in the Alps.

The town has been a mountain resort since the Habsburg era. Empress Elisabeth of Austria — Sisi — came here to rest, in 1889 and again in 1894, when this was still Austrian ground. What she came for hasn’t moved: the towers on the skyline are exactly where she left them.