Giant fortresses of stone rise disparately, separated by deep valleys; they are the remains of an ancient seabed and of islands that had formed in a tropical sea hundreds of millions of years ago. These giants were born due to the slow action of enormous forces over the ages, gradually sinking into the water and then rising up again, lifting the ancient seabed and its islands into the sky.
These islands of stone have navigated the sea, the ice and now ride the clouds, playing with the thousands of colours of the light reflected from their infinitely numerous shapes.
For at least eight thousand years, mankind has been astounded by this spectacle, which we call the Dolomites today. The first explorers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries described these scenarios as the “reign of the Titans or of the pale mountains” Geologists, geographers, artists and writers sought to recount and understand the thousands of colours and shapes of these structures. Still today, despite modern man’s scientific knowledge, we are astounded when we contemplate this reign of rocks, the only one of its kind in the world.
The immense walls, towers, spires and pinnacles are made up of the horizontal lines of the layers of seabed and the vertical lines of the fissures provoked by the endogenous forces that lifted up these spires, due to the collision between the continental plates of Africa and Europe. These criss-crossing lines are the deep secret of the infinite shapes of these mountains. The rocks were born some 230 million years ago due to the slow deposit of sand and mud on the seabed of the Paleo Thetys.
The ancient sea created the horizontal layers and only after 100 million years had gone by, the endogenous forces of the earth began lifting and gradually bending the gigantic pack of sediments, creating vertical, oblique or contorted lines. Then, over the last 50 million years, the Dolomites slowly rose from the sea, reaching over three thousand metres of altitude. Finally the ice and water eroded the summits; gravity and the various degrees of friability of the rocky layers assisted the atmospheric elements, accentuating cracks, creating successions of gaps, towers and canyons.
Over the last ten thousand years, after the glaciations had deepened and rounded out the valleys, the Dolomites took on the final shapes that we observe today.
Erosion, the accomplice of gravity, was then the sculptor that definitively shaped the cliff walls, at whose foot the rubble of its action remains.
Today, woods and valleys separate the islands that formed, as if they were stretches of the ancient Thetys sea. The reefs born due to the activity of the algae, sponges and corals can be found today in the form of mountains, which occupy the same spatial position that they did over 200 million years ago. All of this slow succession of events is written in the rocks and fossils, which tell us what happened at the bottom of that tropical sea, which no man was there to see, when the Dinosaurs left their footprints in the mud and on the beaches.
So the Dolomites are the ancient book of the Triassic period, the petrified story of the events that took place at the bottom of the sea, the story of life itself, which built them and the sudden volcanic activity that stopped their growth momentarily.
Black rocks interspersed with lighter coloured calcareous layers testify to this catastrophic time for life on the reefs, while the fossil remains of the ancient inhabitants of the sea relate to us, with their shapes, the reality of the distant past. This story is complex and fascinating, as intricate as the shapes that make up the individual rocky groups, which give life to the landscape of the Dolomites.
In rare areas of the Dolomites, we feel if we where in other continents, as we observe the oldest and deepest layers of the Paleo-Thetys. The different and fragile consistency of the deposits is particularly subject to the erosion of water, which digs deep canyons, washing out the terrains of various colours and compositions.
The geological uniqueness of the Dolomites is due to the combination of three grandiose natural forces, which have acted in their long process of formation. The marine sedimentation, the endogenous lifting and the erosion. So the Dolomites are born of the combination of these three natural phenomena. The chemical composition of the most important stone, Dolomite, from which the giants take their name, contributes to this alchemy.
This is also a land of legends of Kings, Princesses and Castles, of Fairies and gnomes, who coloured the summits of the Dolomites with fantasies and tormented poems, bespeaking of their indescribable beauty. In these castles and towers, man observes, fights, climbs and lives out his existence, still barely aware of the secrets that are hidden here.