By Laura Rysman: Laura lives in Italy and has been writing about the country for The New York Times for more than a decade.
A tiny dot of an Alpine town turned snow playground for the conspicuously wealthy, Cortina d’Ampezzo will co-host the 2026 Winter Olympics with Milan, after first hosting the Games in 1956. Ampezzani, as Cortina’s locals are known, have long coexisted with tourists, but the new Olympics represent a different scale: Construction sites blanket the town, nearly a million tickets have been sold, and many in Cortina worry about preserving local life, with its distinctive Ladin language, centuries-old Tyrolean traditions, and the Regole d’Ampezzo — the town’s collective stewardship of pastures and forests, dating to medieval times. Cortina is attracting ever-larger crowds in both summer and winter — some drawn by the surrounding Dolomite Mountains, which tower like spiky tidal waves of pale stone, and the Alpine sports; many by its glamorous see-and-be-seen cachet.
