Regional Mountain Conference

The present study begins with a seemingly trivial yet still insufficiently explored fact: the Dolomites were “discovered” by non-Ladin cultures. Even their very name emerged within nineteenth-century scientific circles, while their broader public recognition was promoted by tourist travelers; in this process, German Romanticism made a decisive contribution through the dissemination of the image of the mystical “Bleichen Berge.”

Many accounts of the nationalization of rural space between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries rely heavily on media sources and on the interpretations of the nationalists themselves—sources largely shaped by bourgeois normative discourses. On closer examination, such sources often reveal remarkably little about the rural population itself. While it may be tempting to rely on these accounts in order to reconstruct the historical experiences of individuals or communities, printed media sources frequently tell us more about their authors than about the subjects they claim to describe. A similar pattern can be observed in scholarly descriptions and artistic representations of the Dolomites—a term that initially met with some skepticism in twentieth-century geological circles and was later popularized through European travel literature. These representations reveal more about the perceptions of the mountain world held by Europe’s bourgeois elites than about the mountains themselves.

Drawing on a critical analysis of written sources produced by travelers, geologists, alpinists, and tourists, this study seeks to develop a postcolonial history of the Dolomites and the Dolomite Ladins. It argues that the mountain environment had already shaped the self-perception and worldview of the Dolomite Ladins prior to the emergence of modern alpinism and nationalism, and that the social transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries initiated a process of cultural colonization.