Lavarone

The plateau lies between the Folgaria highlands and the Cimbrian island of Luserna, forming the southern edge of the Alpe Cimbra ski circuit. Its territory is a scatter of twenty hamlets spread across pasture and conifer woods, settled by Bavarian-Cimbrian colonists between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, a history that still binds the plateau to Luserna under the same historic community. At the centre of this scattered geography sits the lake, a sinkhole slowly filled with water, and to the south the ground rises to a limestone spur over the Val d'Astico where the fort was raised to mark the old imperial border with the Kingdom of Italy.

The two landmarks sit at opposite ends of the same plateau, one low and wooded, one high and exposed, and both look out over the same valley that once divided empires. In winter the lifts run from the hamlets above 1,000 metres, closing the loop between a pastoral upland and a line built for war.