Before the Chairlift

Cortina remembers otherwise. Within the living memory of the town, reaching the snow could still take longer than the run back down, and the machines built to shorten it were strange, exposed, and worth talking about.

The Baron's Cable Car

The first of them was the work of Baron Carlo Franchetti. Construction began in 1924, and in the summer of 1925 the line opened, running from the square in front of the parish church up to the Belvedere at Pocol. The patriarch of Venice came to bless it.

Nobody in Cortina called it a cableway. It was la teleferica, and what it meant in practice was easy to explain: it saved you an hour of walking. That hour is the whole story of what lifts did to mountain towns.

The cabins were small and close to the air. The machinery was in plain sight and audible while it worked, and the ride was slow enough that a passenger noticed it happening. The line stayed in service until the middle of the 1970s.

A Sledge for Fifteen

On Christmas Eve of 1936, Cortina inaugurated something with no modern equivalent. A slittovia ran from the ski fields at Rumerlo, where the cars stopped, up toward the huts below the Tofane. It was a large sledge carrying fifteen passengers and a driver, hauled uphill by a steel cable, resting the whole way on the snow itself.

Passengers sat together with their skis stacked behind them while the sledge climbed the slope of Ra Pales and then worked its way in among the rocks. The route it took is now the Labirinti run.

The sledge never lifted anyone out of the landscape. It dragged them up through it, in company, at the speed of a cable. Going up was still something you did alongside strangers.

The Years When Nobody Knew the Answer

What followed was a decade of trying everything at once. The Col Drusciè refuge went up in 1937, and the permit for a second sledge lift was granted that December; the line began working the following year, climbing straight up the eastern side of the hill. A ski tow appeared at Pocol. In February 1939 the town inaugurated the Cortina–Mandres–Faloria cable car, called the Principe di Piemonte, an ambitious two-stage line reaching the eastern side of the valley.

Cabins overhead. Sledges on the snow. Ropes dragging skiers uphill on their own feet. Nobody had settled on what a lift ought to be, and Cortina was where several answers were being tested in the same winter.

One Chair, One Skier

The single-seat chairlift reached Col Drusciè in 1949, replacing the sledge that had been running there.

It was not the first chairlift in Italy. What it did in Cortina was change the shape of going up. The slittovia had carried a crowd through the snow with the skis piled behind them. The chairlift took one person at a time and hung them above it, feet off the ground, skis pointing out into the air.

Those early chairs were almost nothing: a steel frame, a narrow wooden seat bolted to it, a cable overhead. From below, a passenger read as one small dark shape against a great deal of white.

The Interval

A chairlift creates a strange few minutes. The climb is over and the descent has not started. The skis hang still, the valley opens underneath, the next stretch of mountain comes slowly closer, and there is nothing at all to do.

Later lifts became faster and enclosed, and that interval shrank until it stopped registering. On an early single chair it was long, cold, and impossible to ignore.

Why It Became an Embroidery

The Seggiovia motif in Capsule Cortina came out of that silhouette. A cable, a narrow chair, a seated figure, two skis in the air. There is almost nothing to it, which is exactly where the difficulty lies. Give the chair too much weight and the figure vanishes. Thicken the cable and the sense of suspension goes. Add detail to the skier and it stops being embroidery and turns into an illustration.

It reproduces no particular installation and follows no technical drawing. It holds one thing: a small human figure carried quietly through a very large landscape.

The motif is small enough to sit in the corner of a cocktail napkin, which is where it belongs. You notice it later, indoors, after the gloves are off and the first drink is poured and the mountain is still there through the window.