Capsule Cortina:
The Northern Soul of Linen
You opened a collection.
You found yourself in a field in northern Europe.
Where it comes from.
Further back than the workshop, further back than the country: the field where the plant grew, in the cold and the rain, before it became a fabric at all.
Follow that thread north, and you arrive in Normandy, Belgium, and the Netherlands. A coastal strip of cool, humid land where the light is low and the seasons are long. Three quarters of the world's flax grows in western Europe, along that strip, with France leading it: no irrigation from sowing to retting, certified GMO-free seed, and a humid oceanic climate the plant has never needed improving on. The flower is blue and lasts a single day.
Flax has never been an Italian crop. What Italy has is the part that happens after the fiber arrives.
Capsule Cortina begins there, in the northern soul of linen, and carries it into the Italian Alps.
Learn more about European flax at the Alliance for European Flax-Linen & Hemp.
Italy Interprets
The linen that arrives in Italian workshops carries its northern origin with it: strong, structured, naturally resistant. What Italy adds is a sensibility, a way of reading the material and understanding what it can become.
In the small workshops where MI RE LA pieces are made, skilled artisans guide every stage: cutting, assembling and embroidering with specialized machines that require constant presence, judgment, and experience. Someone stands at the machine, feeding the linen through one piece at a time and watching what comes out. The tension of the thread, the precision of the cut and the way a motif settles into the weave are all decided by that person.
The result belongs to both worlds: the quiet strength of the north, shaped by the hand and eye of Italy.
The Animals of the High Plateau
North of Cortina, the Natural Park of the Ampezzo Dolomites covers 11,200 hectares of forest, pasture, and rock. The Veneto Region created it on 22 March 1990 and handed the running of it to the Regole d'Ampezzo, the collective property of the valley's original families, on the grounds that they had been managing the same ground by their own rules for centuries already. The park counts 160 vertebrate species: 31 mammals, 113 birds, and 16 between amphibians, reptiles and fish.
Chamois are the animal of these mountains. There are around fifteen hundred inside the park, which makes them the most widespread large mammal in it, and the park notes that herds of several dozen can be watched from under a hundred meters, which it describes as rare in the Dolomites. Marmots hold the high meadows. Golden eagles nest on the sunlit rock faces, and roe deer move through the larch forests at dusk. Lower down, along the wooded edges, there is the red fox.
And on the steep ground of the Croda Rossa d'Ampezzo there are ibex. The species had disappeared from these valleys altogether, and the colony is there because a pair of animals from a 1965 release further south walked north on their own and stopped on that rock. Nobody put them there.
The large predators are a quieter story. Brown bear, lynx and golden jackal are all sometimes sighted, and the park monitors their tracks, but its own position is that none of them has shown it can settle permanently in these valleys.
The fox and the ibex of Capsule Cortina come from this precise landscape, one of them common along the treeline, the other returned to it after an absence. Behind both stands a community that has held these forests and pastures in common since at least 1225, the year of the first Regola on record, and still does.
More on the Natural Park at the official Dolomites portal.
The Secret Garden
From late spring through August, the meadows around Cortina become something extraordinary. Edelweiss clings to rocky faces where almost nothing else survives. Gentians dot the pastures in a blue so deep it seems almost artificial. Alpine rhododendrons turn the lower slopes pink. And then there is flax, in a delicate, almost forgotten blue. Not the cultivated kind from the northern fields, which is an annual and stays in the fields, but its wild mountain relative, Linum alpinum, a perennial that flowers from May to August on rocky limestone ground between fourteen hundred and twenty-five hundred meters.
Most people who have smoothed a linen placemat have never seen either one. The genus is the same, and so is the blue.
In the high meadows of the Dolomites, surrounded by gentians and edelweiss, that connection feels very close.
Explore the botanical world of the Dolomites at Dolomiti.org.
The Table at the End of the Journey
Linen begins in the cold fields of the north. It travels south, through Italian hands, into something refined and considered. And then, in Capsule Cortina, it arrives at a table in the Dolomites, in a landscape that shares the same cool light, the same still air, the same patience from which it came.
At MI RE LA, we believe that a table set with intention carries something of all this: the origin of the material, the skill of the people who made it, the story of the place that inspired it.
Capsule Cortina.
A northern fabric, shaped by Italian hands, brought home to the Alps.
Available now.
The motifs of the high plateau. See the collection, or begin with A Village That Learned to Receive the World and the Capsule Cortina series.
Where does the linen of Capsule Cortina come from?
The fiber is grown in the flax strip of western Europe, which produces three quarters of the world's flax, and the pieces are cut, assembled and embroidered in small Italian workshops. Flax has never been an Italian crop; the work on the cloth is.
Is European flax irrigated or genetically modified?
Neither. The Alliance for European Flax-Linen and Hemp describes the crop as grown with zero irrigation from sowing through dew retting, from certified GMO-free seed, on the humid oceanic climate of the northern coastal strip.
What is the Natural Park of the Ampezzo Dolomites?
An 11,200-hectare park of forest, pasture and rock north of Cortina, created by the Veneto Region on 22 March 1990. Its management was handed to the Regole d'Ampezzo, the collective property of the valley's original families. Together with the neighboring Fanes-Senes-Braies park the protected ground comes to about 37,000 hectares.
What animals live around Cortina d'Ampezzo?
The park counts 160 vertebrate species: 31 mammals, 113 birds and 16 between amphibians, reptiles and fish. Chamois are the most widespread large mammal, at around fifteen hundred animals, and can often be watched at close range. There are marmots in the high meadows, golden eagles on the sunlit faces, roe deer in the larch forest, red fox along the wooded edges, and ibex on the Croda Rossa d'Ampezzo.
Who are the Regole d'Ampezzo?
The families of the Ampezzo valley, who hold its forests and pastures as collective property rather than as private lots. The first Regola on record dates from 1225, and the institution still runs the land today, including the natural park.
Which animals are on the Capsule Cortina linen?
The fox and the ibex, both drawn from this valley rather than from generic alpine imagery. The fox lives along the treeline here; the ibex had vanished from these mountains and came back to the Croda Rossa on its own, from a release made further south in 1965.
Flax: Alliance for European Flax-Linen & Hemp for the three-quarters share, the zero irrigation and the GMO-free seed; University of Wisconsin Extension for the flower that blooms a single day; Linum alpinum for the wild alpine species, its altitude range and its flowering season.
The park: Parks.it and the Museo Regole d'Ampezzo for the 11,200 hectares, the regional law of 22 March 1990 and the management entrusted to the Regole; the park's own fauna pages for the 160 vertebrate species, the close chamois sightings and its position on the large predators; Ampezzo Dolomites Natural Park for the chamois figure.
The Regole: Regole d'Ampezzo, on the first documented Regola of 1225.
The collection the valley was written for.