As Cortina d’Ampezzo prepares to host the 2026 Winter Olympics, we revisit the town’s first Games, seventy years ago.
By Sofia Quintero
In 1956, the world turned its gaze toward the Dolomites. Assouline’s latest volume, Cortina d’Ampezzo, captures that pivotal moment through rare archival photographs, a visual chronicle of the Italian ski town’s Olympic debut and the transformation that followed.
For Cortina, the Games were never merely about sport. This was a centuries-old mountain sanctuary, a discreet haven where European aristocracy and adventurous spirits had long sought refuge among the peaks.
The Olympics represented something more profound: international recognition of what devotees had always known. These meticulously preserved images reveal the town’s careful choreography of that revelation and how Cortina presented itself not as an aspirant, but as an inevitable choice.
The UNESCO-protected Dolomites provided a stage unlike any before. Against their rose-hued limestone faces, winter sport shed its provincial Alpine character and assumed a new cultural dimension.
The photographs capture this elevation: athletes rendered as figures in an Italian composition where mountain grandeur and innate elegance converge. In those two weeks, Cortina established a paradigm; the idea that winter sport could embody sophistication, that competition and beauty were not merely compatible but inseparable.
Seventy years later, as Cortina prepares to host the 2026 Games, these images offer more than nostalgia. They document the genesis of a legacy, the moment when a mountain town became forever synonymous with winter sport at its most refined. The bond forged then endures, as timeless as the peaks themselves.
