I’ve loved the Italian Dolomites for many years, and have been lucky to have travelled, walked and climbed in most of the major centres and on most of the big peaks. I’ve been aware of the importance to the area of the road running from Bolzano to Cortina d’Ampezzo (and vice versa, of course) since one of my earliest visits, when I drove its length over two memorable days. It is in many ways a key and vital artery through the area. It runs for about 140 kilometres (86 miles) and carries the road numbers SS241 (Bolzano to Val di Fassa) and SS48 (Val di Fassa to Cortina d’Ampezzo).
A few years back, a friend gave me as a birthday present a small, hand-made, soft covered booklet of sepia and white photographs put together to show “La Strada delle Dolomiti Bolzano-Cortina”. The booklet contained 36 photographs by A. Zardini of Cortina. We estimated that the booklet dated from the early 1920s and had been produced for the tourist market to commemorate the Great Dolomite Road, the last pieces of which were completed in 1909. My friend had found the booklet in a local second-hand bookshop.
Sadly, I knew that the Zardini camera shop, on the Piazza Roma in Cortina d’Ampezzo, had closed down a few years before I was given this book. However, e-mail being a wonderful thing, I was able to contact a representative of the family, who agreed to me incorporating copies of the original Zardini photographs into a web-site based comparison between the views 90 to 100 years ago, and the same scenes as they are today.
This is that project. It gives me an opportunity to celebrate the excellence of one of the great early photographers of the Dolomites, and to show how much and, at the same time, how little the area has altered.
The book of Zardini photos which I own is amongst my treasured possessions. Despite much further research and enquiry, I have found nothing at all out about the book’s origins, or even its precise date. There is no date in the booklet itself, nor on any of the 36 photos in it. In November 2011, I saw a copy of the exact same booklet listed on the website of a Dutch antiquarian bookseller, and ordered it immediately, in the hope it might contain more information than my own. Sadly it had been sold already, but it is encouraging to think that there are still copes of this treasure in circulation.
Part of the fun of this project has been to try to date the original photographs with any degree of certainty. Finding the viewpoints from which most of them were taken was easier than I had expected, partly because I have good local knowledge of the area, but also because, to my delight, I found many were still great and obvious viewpoints for the views today. Most of my work to celebrate the Zardini originals was carried out in 2011. For it, I was blessed in the most part with some of the best weather the Dolomites can offer. The work is, however, not yet fully completed and I look forward to revisits.
After my visit, I had several pieces of good fortune while searching on the internet for more information, and I have obtained a number of books directly related to the Road. There is a section about these on my Links page.
Why a web site?
This project could have become a book in its own right. However, the Zardini family clearly still have copyright of the original photos, and the potential amount of work needed to create something with split copyright issues etc was not enticing. Importantly too, I want to see this project as the start of a piece of “work in progress”, to which new facts, corrections, better modern views, and so on can easily be added. As a web site, the work is less likely to go out of date in the way that a published book would. Putting the material on a web site also allows an almost infinite amount of linkage to other web-based material. There is not much of this (see my Links page) but some of it is very interesting.
The site includes many links in the text, shown in a blue underlined font. Please do click on those. They will add greatly to your enjoyment of the material. That last one wasn’t a link, by the way!
The photographs on the site are not web thumbnails, but scaled down originals. That may sometimes make them a little slow to load, but if your computer has the ability to zoom in on them, you will be able to see much detail without pixellation.
What else?
I want to regard this web site as an open resource. No one, least of all me, is making any money from it. It is a labour of love. I am more than happy to receive comments, corrections and suggestions. I will add a page specifically for comments and so on, if I get any. Each page of the site contains a link to me by e-mail at the foot of the page.
I also hope that at some point, the text on the site can all be translated into Italian.
Oh, and enjoy the site, but do go and see for yourself, too.
(The site content was last updated 12 January 2012)