Debatable Peaks and Contested Valleys: Englishness and the Dolomite Landscape Scenery

ABSTRACT

The toponym “Dolomites” qualifies a mountainous region in the north-east of Italy, located at the cultural and political frontier with Austria. They represent a unique borderland marked by competing ethnic and cultural divides, which are subtly obscured by their inclusion onto the World Heritage List (2009) and by the role they play within a globalized heritage of natural sites. It is the external voice of the first English travelers to the region during the 19^th century that UNESCO has identified as central in initiating the promotion of the Dolomites’ status as geologically and aesthetically unique. Travelers to the Dolomites first appropriated the “bizarre” shapes of their mountain forms by attaching them to an utterly English gaze reflecting a particular “way of seeing” a landscape. In their “invention” of the Dolomites, Victorians elevated their peaks to a sublime abstraction of aesthetic “space,” while reducing their valleys to a cultural “place” in which life was enacted picturesquely. In charting this history, this paper asks how, why and to what extent this foreign voice contributed to overshadow the historically contested narratives of this region by transforming it into a “neutral” set of aestheticized English landscape symbols.

Notes

1. Berlusconi's spot can be viewed on YouTube and various other online platforms (web search: “Magica Italia”). The original text reads as follows:

Questa che vedi è la tua Italia. Un Paese unico, fatto di cielo, di sole e di mare, ma anche di storia, di cultura e di arte. È un Paese straordinario, che devi ancora scoprire. Impiega le tue vacanze per conoscere meglio l'Italia. La tua magica Italia,

and is published on the Italian Government official website (http://www.governo.it/).

2. I use the term “Silver Age” slightly differently from Ronald Clark, who sees it as “being marked by the development of guideless climbing, by the climbing of old mountains by new routes, by climbing in ranges beyond the Alps, by the development of climbing in Britain, and by the increase of mountaineering among women” (Clark 1953, 61). I concur with this view, but apply the term in a slightly alternative way by referring it instead to a cultural style of “being in” the mountains, pertinent in particular to picturesque sites, such as British upland areas and the Dolomites.

3. Amelia B. Edwards eloquently elucidates the point with reference to the already advanced tourist exploitation of the Swiss Alps:

To say that the arts of extortion are here [in the Dolomite districts] unknown—that the old patriarchal notion of hospitality still survives, miraculously, in the minds of the inn-keepers—that it is as natural to the natives of these hills and valleys to be kind, and helpful, and disinterested, as it is natural to the Swiss to be rapacious—that here one escapes from hackneyed sights, from overcrowded hotels, from the dreary routine of table d'hôtes, from the flood of tourists—is, after all, but to say that life in the South-Eastern Tyrol is yet free from all the discomforts which have of late years made Switzerland unendurable (Edwards 1873, ix).

4. With clear reference to Leslie Stephen's bestseller The Playground of Europe (Stephen 1871), mostly based on the Western and Swiss Alps, Edwards proposes the Dolomites as a new “playground,” along the lines outlined here to define the Silver Age of mountaineering: “for those who love sketching and botany, mountain-climbing and mountain air, and who desire when they travel to leave London and Paris behind them, the Dolomites offer a “playground” far more attractive than the Alps” (Edwards 1873, ix).

5. As an exception, “non-traditional” human activities, such as hiking and climbing, count as compatible practices; traditional ones, such as hunting, are instead excluded or drastically limited (Gianolla 2008, 282).

6. Werner's sequence of rock formation was linked to the periods of geological time—the oldest periods were positioned at the bottom, the most recent ones at the top

7. Here the original in German:

Noch kein Naturforscher hat das Fassathal betreten, ohne von dem Anblick der hohen, weissen, zackigen Felsen, welche dieses merkwürdige und lehrreiche Thal von allen Seiten umgeben, in Erstaunen gesetzt worden zu seyn. Ihre senkrechte Spalten zertheilen sie in so wunderbare Obelisken und Thürme, dass man umsonst sich bemüht sich zu erinnern, in anderen Theilen der Alpen etwas ähnliches gesehn zu haben. Glatte Wände stehen ganz senkrecht mehrere tausend Fuss in die Höhe, dünn und tief abgesondert von anderen Spitzen und Zacken, welche ohne Zahl aus dem Boden heraufzusteigen scheinen. Oft möchte man sie mit gefrornen Wasserfällen vergleichen, deren mannigfaltige Eiszacken umgedreht und in die Höhe gerichtet sind. Nirgends bricht ·eine Zerspaltung in anderer Richtung das Senkrechte dieser Linien; und die meisten erheben sich bis weit in die Region des ewigen Schnees

(for the English translation, see Gianolla 2008, 86); the same passage is also to be found in the letter to Pflaunder (Buch 1877b, 82).

8. The original reads as follows:

La forme des montagnes qui sont composées de cette roche, dans la partie méridionale du Tyrol, est si extraordinaire et si frappante que j'ai engagé M. Schweighofer, habile peintre d'Inspruck, d'en dessiner une de plus remarquables. Le dessin dont je vous offre une copie présente tout ce qui distingue et caractérise particulièrement les montagnes de dolomie.

The artist, active in Innsbruck, is the engineer Franz Xaver Schweighofer (1797–1861), from Brixen/Bressanone in South Tyrol.

9. In 1823b, von Buch was already aware that the description of the unique geomorphodiversity of the Dolomite peaks was difficult to achieve though the verbal medium alone: “they are so different that in each of them one believes to see a complete new world” (“so verschieden sind [sie], daß man in jeder von ihnen eine ganz neue Welt zu sehen glaubt”). To describe them without the visual support had become a challenge, to the point of altering the “scientific” decorum of the geological dissertation and yielding towards a literary prose: “I have tried to distantiate myself, as these wonderful forms of dolomite in the southern Tyrol in their boldness always grew and finally surpassed everything that the most vivid imagination might have imagined” (“Ich habe mich ferner auseinander zu setzen bemüht, wie diese wunderbare Formen des Dolomits im südlichen Tyrol in ihrer Kühnheit stets zunehmen und endlich alles übertreffen, was die lebhafteste Einbildungskraft sich hätte vorstellen mögen”, (Buch 1823b, 33–34).

10. It is possible that here Freshfield caricaturises the alpinist and geographer Ernst Adolf Schaubach (1800–1850), author of a monumental work on the “German Alps” (Die deutschen Alpen: Ein Handbuch für Reisende durch Tyrol, Österreich, Steyermark, Jena: 1846), whose fourth volume is devoted to Central and South Tyrol (Das Gebiet der Etsch und angrenzenden Fluß-Gebiete: Das mittlere und südliche Tyrol, see Schaubach 1867).

11. The Austrian Alpine Club (Österreichische Alpenverein) was founded in Vienna in 1862, five years after the Alpine Club in London; the German equivalent (Deutscher Alpenverein) was created in Munich in 1869; in 1873 they united to form a federation (Deutschen und Oesterreichischen Alpenverein), becoming the largest Alpine Club in the world. They remained in this form until 1938 (Holt 2008, 16–20).

12. The wording recalls Freshfield's description of the same region in his Italian Alps, 40 years earlier (Freshfield 1875, 305):

So far as I know, no great painter has chosen a subject from the basin of the Adige. Yet here, even more than in Titian's country and the Val di Mel, all the breadth and romance of Italian landscape is united to Alpine grandeur and nobleness of form.