Places to go in the Dolomites.
We drive to Cortina for a night, basically because we have a car! Without one, it’s difficult here and we are looking around for a second hand one. We drive up into the mountains and the snow begins to fall and we were heading for a lake further up but we see people turning around so we go straight to our hotel instead.
Cortina is a famous ski town but it’s quiet out of season and affordable. We go to look at the church and a man is playing the organ, we think he might be having a breakdown. The music is spooky and dark and possibly driving the Christians to drink.
They have a basket of seeds that you can take to help with your mental health (which we do as our nervous system has been triggered by the weird music) and another basket of Holy Water. We take a couple of those to make sure our health will not turn mental after the music.
Then we lunch at a beer restaurant called Pontejel Forst and I have excellent beetroot casunziei (northern Italian ravioli) with burnt butter and poppy seeds and we order our favourite thinly shredded cabbage with caraway seeds, another regional speciality.
On our journey around town we see a gondola on the roof of a very old building with a very strange elephant ironwork next to it that nobody seems to know the history of and some beautiful frescoes.
Then we go to a new hip bar called Zeldas which is tiny and empty. We order their Tofana negroni with Savoia, Fragolino, gin and bitter chocolate, strangely good and it came with enough goodies to save on our dinner.
We visit another bar (there’s not a great deal to do here if you’re not a skier) Bar Dolomiti which is really old fashioned and serves up a traditional Negroni and more aperitivi.
Then no visit to Cortina is complete without visiting the Cooperativa, an old department store that has a great supermarket and 3 floors of anything you might need. There I become slightly obsessed with the butters, all dressed up and folded uniquely. I end up buying one that’s round. Will try when home.
We decide to go back to our favourite restaurant where I order grilled treviso radicchio with a soft cheese and prosciutto which I have to say is hearty and interesting but wouldn’t order again.
The next day we head home, the mountains dusted with more snow and excitingly, I have ordered some benches for outside the apartments (as the others were decrepit and had been there since I arrived in the late 80’s!) and they had arrived, all boxed up, ready to assemble and paint. Flowers for the planters next.
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