As the Olympics return, Cortina hopes for a new golden age
The 1956 Games sealed the Italian resort’s reputation as the world’s most glamorous place to ski — but it gradually lost its lustre. Can Milano-Cortina 2026 kick-start a resurgence?
At a corner table in the bar of the Hotel de la Poste, Antonio di Franco places his most famous cocktail on the starched linen. The Puccini blends champagne and mandarin juice. “In the 1960s the ladies didn’t want only champagne,” says di Franco, who, having retired only a few weeks earlier, has swapped his white bartender’s jacket for a navy blazer and striped tie. “With the mandarin, they ordered more, because it was like orangeade.”
Di Franco, who is 84, is as much an institution in the Italian mountain town of Cortina d’Ampezzo as the Poste itself, which was established by 1835. He started serving here in 1965, when the resort’s reputation as a glamorous bolt-hole for the international jet set neared its peak. Not long into his six-decade position behind the bar (he never skied: “If you break the legs, you cannot work”), he remembers serving a couple whose drinks required no dilution.
“They ordered langoustine and Chateaubriand,” says di Franco, gesturing across the same table. “It was all here, but they didn’t touch it! They only drank vodka.”
The couple were Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, who were Cortina regulars. The dolce vita was in full swing in the town, which sits in a valley in the Dolomites, about 90 miles north of Venice. Already a magnet for Milanese industrialists and Rome’s political elite — as well as Ernest Hemingway, who stayed at the Poste — the resort was thrust on to the international stage when it hosted the 1956 Winter Olympics. They were the first Games to be televised live, and Cortina sparkled as Sophia Loren watched the events in chic knitwear. Taylor and Burton followed, along with Audrey Hepburn, Brigitte Bardot and Roger Moore, helping put grand hotels such as the Miramonti Majestic and the Cristallo on the map. Cortina became “il salotto dei famosi”, or “the celebrities’ living room”.
“In the ’70s it was impossible to enter here,” di Franco says, his glinty eyes scanning the wood-panelled bar, which has barely changed. At 6pm, after a sunny day on the mountains, there are several empty tables and no one is dressed up. “Now it can be busy sometimes, but it’s not the same. And it’s not the same people.”
Di Franco thinks complacency and competition from other grand resorts dimmed Cortina’s lustre. It never completely lost it, and the rich second homeowners never left. But the 1956 ski jump, the Trampolino Olimpico, that rises above a pasture on the way into town, perhaps symbolises a resort that has traded on past glories; when I arrive in March, the elegant concrete structure, once hailed as a modernist masterpiece and used in a chase scene in the Bond classic For Your Eyes Only, has been left to crumble. Its Olympic rings have almost faded away.
Visitors coming to Cortina this winter can expect a different sight. While the ski jump is no longer viable for competition, it is being restored as a kind of emblem of a new Olympic era for the Queen of the Dolomites, as Cortina is also known. In February and March, the town will co-host the 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games alongside Milan, reprising the role after 70 years with ambitious plans to leap into a new golden age.
During my visit there are already signs of change further into town, where a big clock counts down to the Games in the Piazza Roma, just outside the Poste on Cortina’s pedestrianised Corso Italia. The cobbled road, which offers tantalising glimpses of the towering Dolomites either side of the Ampezzo valley, is one of Italy’s most famous thoroughfares. In high season, well-heeled shoppers throng its boutiques, but Cortina has always combined the glitz with a laid-back air. You can still get a very fine mortadella focaccia sandwich for €6 at the Bar Sport.
Just past the 18th century white spire of Cortina’s church, The Ancora now stands as another, plusher symbol of Cortina’s hoped-for revival. The hotel just predates the Poste and reopened this summer, having been bought and lavishly refurbished by Italian fashion tycoon Renzo Rosso, who owns Diesel as well as Maison Margiela, Marni and Jil Sander.
I check in at Hotel de Len, previously the Impero, which sits just off the Corso Italia. Now managed by the Egnazia hospitality group (and a sister to Borgo Egnazia in Puglia), it opened as a 22-room boutique in 2022, three years after the decision to award hosting rights to Cortina and Milan triggered big investment in the town. It is decidedly forward facing and not at all showy, eschewing Alpine kitsch and baubles for minimalist velvets, pines and fir (“Len” means wood in the regional Ladin dialect).
Anxious to get up the mountain the next morning, I take the hotel’s shuttle to the Tofane lift, which rises above the west side of town to the ski area of the same name. Cortina’s 120km of pistes are fairly spread out. The Faloria-Cristallo area to the east feels like its own resort, and doesn’t connect to the others. It makes sense, then, to start at the Tofane, where the more modern gondola rises above the new sliding centre, where all the bobsleigh, skeleton and luge events will take place. (The €118mn venue became an object of national pride after Italy’s populist government agreed to bankroll it, when it looked as if the Games would use an existing course in Switzerland or Austria.)
Higher up, the women’s downhill and paralympic Alpine skiing events will follow the historic Olympia delle Tofane course, which was used for the 1956 men’s downhill and includes the notoriously steep, rock-flanked Tofanaschuss section. I encounter it myself while enjoying Cortina’s miles of mostly more cruisey pistes. As I gaze up at the bright spring sunshine bouncing off the high rocks of the Dolomites, which glow a reddish-pink at dawn and dusk in an event known as “enrosadira” (“turning pink”), I suddenly find myself descending a 33-degree frozen piste.
Anyone in need of a nerve settler can stop right at the bottom of that pitch at the Rifugio Duca d’Aosta, one of the dozens of reasonably priced mountain restaurants dotted around Cortina’s slopes that do delightful things with polenta and casunziei, the region’s renowned beetroot ravioli.
It’s slightly fiddly to get there, but it pays to venture to the edge of the Tofane to take the Skyline gondola (which opened in December 2021, replacing a shuttle bus) over into the Torri-Lagazuoi ski area. It’s here that the mountains are at their most spectacular. Not far from the Rifugio Scoiattoli (also excellent), the Cinque Torri, or five towers, rise in a crown of jumbled rocks, the largest of which resembles a giant’s cracked molar. Sliding beneath them and their shadows is a captivating experience.
I stay a night at the Rifugio Averau, a mountain restaurant with comfortable rooms and bunks, owned by the Siorpaes family. Santo Siorpaes was a pioneering 19th century mountain guide, whose grandson Sergio became an Olympic bobsledder after the 1956 Games. The refuge sits on a shoulder beneath the peak of the Averau, right at the top of the Averau and Fedare chairlifts, offering even piste-dedicated guests, as well as more intrepid ski tourers, the chance to descend after breakfast before the hordes assemble way down in the valley.
Elisabetta Caserini, my mountain guide, says she welcomes any lasting effect the Games might have on Cortina. But, like many of the locals she knows, she plans to skip town before the circus rolls in. “Of course, we will also rent out our homes if we can,” she says, smiling. Cortina locals are buzzing with gossip about the impact of the Games on traffic and parking, and there has been much hand-wringing about construction delays.
Meanwhile, a string of hotel developments and refurbishments that won’t be ready on time includes The First Hotel Cortina, part of the Pavilions Hotels chain, which is replacing the old Splendide Venezia. Most prominently, Cortina’s grand dame, the old Cristallo, which opened in 1901, had been due to open as a Mandarin Oriental after it was sold to a London private equity firm in 2021. It still has no opening date.
But you don’t have to look far to find an irresistible optimism in town. A clutch of new restaurants joining Cortina’s already generous dining options include 1224 inside the Grand Hotel Savoia, a belle époque landmark now owned by Radisson. International twists on Italian classics include Wagyu bresaola. At the southern end of Corso Italia, the informal Roof Cortina, a new all-day bistro and bar, offers panoramic views from the top of La Cooperativa di Cortina, a department store with roots in the 19th century.
Over a drink in Hotel de Len’s low-lit upstairs bar, I talk to Kristian Ghedina, a Cortina native who won 13 World Cup downhill skiing titles, mostly in the 1990s. He’s buzzing with enthusiasm for the town’s second Olympic opportunity, and frustrated by the conservative attitudes of many of his fellow townsfolk — and the way they feed Cortina’s reputation, after the boom years, for lacking drive and ambition.
“Cortina is a brand, and this is a big chance for us,” the 55-year-old says, gesticulating in his red ski gear, which features his own branding (his logo is a silhouette of the 80mph spreadeagle he pulled, for a bet with a friend, in 2004, on the last jump of the notorious Hahnenkamm race in Kitzbuhel). “I travel a lot and it’s like a knife in my heart when people say, ‘Cortina is nice, a beautiful place, but you have a problem with this or that.’”
That evening at the Poste’s bar, Antonio di Franco hasn’t decided what he’ll do during the Games, or whether Cortina can recapture its glory years. But he’s already devised a new cocktail that he may be tempted to come out of retirement to mix behind the bar that he made his own. He says he wanted the drink to honour Milan’s and Cortina’s liquid heritage — perhaps a twist on a Campari spritz with a local prosecco.
“I already know the recipe but I want to keep it as a surprise for the Games,” he says at Liz Taylor’s corner table. “I hope that they can still be serving it here in another 60 years.”