Taibon Agordino

The north face of Monte Agner rises more than fifteen hundred metres of vertical rock, and disputes with the north face of the Eiger the title of highest vertical rock wall in the Alps. It is cut by the borai, huge gullies that isolate the spiz, the peaks in Ladin, and every winter avalanches come down them and leave snowfields that last into late summer. At the head of the San Lucano valley a rock arch called El Cor draws inside itself a perfect heart.

Three of the comune's glaciers died together in the torrid summer of 2003. And the Fradusta glacier, which Taibon claimed for centuries, had been left without a precise boundary precisely because it was too vast and too awkward to reach, and there was no clear watershed up there: the line was drawn only in the sixties, and the glacier ended up on the other side.