How Cortina d'Ampezzo Was Built and Evolved Over Time

The traditional Ampezzan building is a timber-and-stone farmhouse with a masonry ground floor and a wooden upper storey and hayloft, roofed shallow and wide to hold snow rather than shed it. Examples survive in the hamlets around the basin.

The Basilica dei Santi Filippo e Giacomo, rebuilt in the 1770s, is the town's centre, with a free-standing campanile of 1858 that is the tallest thing in Cortina that is not a mountain.

The hotels are their own architectural record -- nineteenth-century alpine grand hotels built for Austrian and British visitors, several still trading under the same names.

The Olympic legacy is the other layer: the 1956 ski jump, now disused and slowly decaying above the town, and the bobsleigh track associated with Eugenio Monti. The 2026 Games added new venues to a valley that already had a complicated relationship with the last set.