I don’t know what the weather is doing where you are, but here in northern Italy, it’s been raining for a month. Not nonstop, Biblical-type rain, but dull gray skies and drizzle or showers the majority of every day. It rained on us in Como, Florence, Cortona, Arezzo, Siena, Vicenze, Trento, two different valleys in the Dolomite mountains, and now in Trieste.
We’re hoping that when we cross into Slovenia on June 16 (Melissa’s birthday), a new country will bring new weather. If not, we’re going to spend all of our money on umbrellas. Thanks to our propensity to leave them on trains or in hotel rooms, we’re on our third umbrella this month.
Rain and clouds couldn’t diminish the beauty of the Dolomites, where we spent a week in two little towns (Santa Cristina and Fiera di Primiero). The gray, spiky peaks of the Dolomites are dramatically different from the surrounding Alps. Apparently, they’re former coral reefs, pushed up over the millennia from some ancient sea floor and then eroded into pinnacles and sharp-angled crags. (If you’ve ever dived or snorkeled on the walls or boulders of a coral reef, you’ve seen the same thing up close, albeit with more fish.)
This part of Italy feels very different from the rest of the country. It’s near the Austrian border, and at various points in history it was part of the Tyrol or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In some places, you hear as much German spoken as Italian. The valleys consist of bright green meadows, which contrast with the dark green of the impossibly tall, straight spruce and larch trees on the hillsides.
The architecture, too, is different here: big square three- or four-storey white houses with wooden balconies(usually decked in flowers), steeply pitched roofs, and huge woodpiles outside. The areas that are ski resorts, especially, look like Swiss villages transplanted to Italy—which, given how much we both love Switzerland, is a good thing.
We arrived in the Dolomites a few weeks before the summer season really got under way. On the upside, that meant things were nice and quiet. On the downside, it meant that some shops and most of the cable cars that take you higher into the mountains for hiking (or skiing in winter) were still closed. A few of the cable cars were running, though, and in between rain showers we took them to and from a high woodland meadow called Alpe di Suise that is laced with hiking trails. As in Switzerland, it’s great to be able to hike well-marked trails for a few miles and then catch buses or cable cars back to where you started. American parks need more of that.
Other hikes took us past a former castle-house (still inhabited), to the base of cascading waterfalls, and through woods and meadows full of flowers. We counted at least two dozen varieties of wildflowers, and it was interesting to see how at every little change of elevation or sunlight or moisture, different flowers appeared.
