Belluno Discovery Guide

Belluno is the working capital of the Dolomites rather than a resort, and that is the point of coming. It has a genuine old town -- arcaded, Venetian, built in the pale local stone -- and it sits at the mouth of the Parco Nazionale delle Dolomiti Bellunesi without charging resort prices.

The setting is the argument. The town is on a terrace above the Piave with the Schiara massif immediately north, so the mountains are not a day trip but the view from the square. Piazza dei Martiri opens on its southern side straight onto the valley.

Its own history is worth an afternoon: the Palazzo dei Rettori that governed for Venice, a cathedral campanile designed by Filippo Juvarra, and the sculptor Andrea Brustolon, whose carved furniture is in museums across Europe and whose best work stayed here.

If you travel slowly: Belluno rewards two or three nights as a base. The town is an afternoon; the park, the Vajont and the Nevegàl each need a day, and the train up the Piave valley is worth taking simply as a journey.

If you want the essentials: Piazza dei Martiri, Piazza del Duomo with the cathedral and Palazzo dei Rettori, and the walk down through Porta Rugo to the old bridge over the Ardo. Half a day.

If you're after local character: the mountain cooking of this province is quite unlike the rest of the Veneto -- polenta with cheese and mushrooms, game, cured meats, and the casunziei that came down from the Ladin valleys.

If you want to go past the obvious: take the road up to the Nevegàl for the view back over the Valbelluna, or walk any marked path into the national park from the valley floor -- the transition from farmland to genuine wilderness happens within an hour.

The Dolomites carry more visitors than the terrain comfortably takes, but that pressure is concentrated on a handful of famous places -- Misurina, the Tre Cime, Cortina. Belluno is where the mountains are lived in rather than visited, and using it as a base rather than a resort spreads both money and footfall somewhere that needs them.

The national park, established in 1990, protects the Vette Feltrine and the Schiara. It is a genuinely wild park with limited infrastructure: paths are unsurfaced, refuges are seasonal, and rescue is a mountain operation rather than a phone call.

The Vajont is 25 km up the valley and is not a viewpoint. The 1963 disaster killed close to two thousand people, and Longarone below was erased. It can be visited, and is worth visiting, but as a memorial rather than a curiosity.

Depopulation is the province's real problem -- villages here have been emptying for a century. Money spent in the smaller valleys goes further than money spent in the town.

June to September is the season for the mountains: the paths are clear, the refuges are open, and the valley is warm without the heat of the plain.

September and early October are the best of it -- clear air, the first colour on the slopes, and far fewer people than August.

Winter brings snow and the small Nevegàl ski area above the town. Belluno is not a ski resort and does not price like one, which makes it a cheap base for the bigger areas further north.

Spring is unreliable in the high country -- paths stay under snow into June -- but the valley floor is green and empty, and the town is at its quietest.

What a visitor actually spends in Belluno

Belluno is dramatically cheaper than Cortina an hour north -- often less than half for comparable accommodation, which is the main practical reason to base here.