The Tre Cime di Lavaredo are three towers of pale rock standing alone above alpine meadow in the Dolomites of northern Italy, on the border of South Tyrol and Veneto, and they can be walked right around in a day. The rock is dolomite, the fossilised remains of a coral reef that grew in a warm sea 250 million years ago, later lifted thousands of metres and carved into these blades; the middle tower, Cima Grande, reaches 2,999 metres, and its overhanging north wall is counted among the six great north faces of the Alps, alongside the Eiger and the Matterhorn. The loop around the three is about ten kilometres on a wide, easy path from the Auronzo hut, and it packs in the whole mountain: the south side in sun, the pass at the Lavaredo hut, then the north faces rising sheer above a grey field of scree, with the Locatelli hut standing across the valley in the spot every photograph is taken from.
For a few minutes at first light the north walls flush from grey to deep amber while the valleys below stay dark, and people sleep at the huts to see it. The rock around the towers is still scarred by a war. From 1915 to 1917 the front between Italy and Austria ran through these mountains, and troops holding the line above 2,000 metres blasted trenches, gun positions and tunnels straight into the cliffs; the galleries on Monte Paterno, across from the towers, are still open, and you walk through them with a torch, coming out onto ledges facing the Tre Cime. In July, once the snow is off, wildflowers come up from the rock crevices under the north walls and around the Malga Langalm dairy on the loop; in the second half of October the larch forest along the toll road up from Misurina turns gold. The towers were a battlefield for two years and a reef for far longer, and from the loop path they look like neither, just three shapes that nothing else in the Alps resembles.