Cinque Torri Hike and Open-Air Museum

A short walk with a lot inside it

The chairlift from Bai de Dones climbs to 2,255 metres in about eight minutes and puts you on open pasture with the towers directly ahead. From there the signed circuit is a gentle hour and a half, plus however long you spend reading panels — which, if you're at all interested in the mountain war, will be longer than you planned.

Effort involved: not much

Under four kilometres and roughly 120 metres of up and down if you ride the lift both ways. Trainers are genuinely fine in dry conditions, which is not something I'd say about many walks in this valley.

The loop, and the order I'd do it in

Go left from the lift and take the Austrian gallery first, positions one through nine. They're dug straight into the rock, and the restoration work done by the local CAI section in the nineties stabilised them without tidying away the atmosphere. Some passages are still rough and low; a headtorch is worth having.

From there the path curls under Torre Grande — good odds of watching a guided party working a pitch above you — and comes round to Rifugio Scoiattoli. If you've got another forty minutes, carry on up to Averau.

Towers, trenches and terrace

Scoiattoli's terrace is the shot everyone knows: five towers stacked with Tofana behind. Less known is the small rise behind the hut, two minutes' walk, where you get the towers with Averau and Nuvolau in the same frame and nobody's rucksack in the corner.

Weather here matters less than usual

This is the walk that survives bad weather. Cloud on the towers makes the trenches feel more like what they were, the paths stay walkable, and the huts are close. Snow can sit here into June, and the lift season runs mid-June to late September.

The galleries are unlit and uneven underfoot. Watch your head at the entrances and don't climb on the emplacement walls — some of the masonry is original and not load-bearing.

Why I keep coming back to a three-hour walk

I've been up here perhaps a dozen times, often with visitors who don't walk much. It never disappoints them, and the reason isn't the view. It's that you can put your hand on a gun position and see, from where the gunner stood, exactly what he was aiming at across the valley. That does something no panorama does.

Rock that photographs itself

The towers face roughly east, so early light hits them cleanly and late afternoon leaves them in their own shadow. If you can only come in the afternoon, shoot the trenches instead — low contrast suits them better anyway.

Extending the day

Skip the return lift and walk down trail 439 through forest to Bai de Dones. It takes about forty minutes and costs you nothing. For a longer day, string Nuvolau and Averau onto the same ticket and you've got a solid five hours with two hut lunches available.

A front line preserved in limestone

Between 1915 and 1917 Cinque Torri sat on the Austro-Hungarian front line facing the Italian positions on Averau; the trenches, ammunition stores and command posts open to visitors today were carved and reinforced during those two years and largely abandoned once the front shifted after Caporetto.

Restoration work by the local CAI section in the 1990s stabilised the galleries without over-tidying them, which is why some sections still feel raw rather than museum-perfect.