Lifestyle
Amber Glenn Is Carving a New Path for Figure Skaters
When Amber Glenn was named the top U.S. women’s figure skater for a second consecutive year in January, she collapsed in tears, releasing mountains of pressure that had been weighing on her chiseled shoulders.
This week, she is aiming to add another gold medal to her pile at the World Figure Skating Championships in Boston. If she pulls it off, Ms. Glenn would finish her season an undefeated champion and become the first American figure skater to claim the women’s World Championship title in almost 20 years.
It would be Ms. Glenn’s biggest win yet, but only the latest in a series of firsts for a woman who has landed the triple axel jump in all of her competitions this season — one that, for Ms. Glenn, has been filled with triumph and tragedy after a plane crash in January killed 11 figure skaters, some of whom she had shared the ice with just days before they died.
If Ms. Glenn wins or even medals at Worlds, she will be the first openly L.G.B.T.Q. woman to do so in a sport whose female athletes largely tend to mold their likenesses to that of a cookie-cutter ice queen.
Ms. Glenn, by contrast, has grown her profile by celebrating what makes her different.
She is a pansexual figure skater who jumps with the power of a pole-vaulter, models her hairstyles off those of brassy pop stars, collects lightsabers — and is primed to be America’s next big skating star at 25, an age when most of her peers have long retired.
A Story of Perseverance
On a Saturday evening in February, Ms. Glenn darted around the corners of the ice rink at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan at double-digit speeds as her short-program music — “This Time” by Janet Jackson — blared from loudspeakers. She was in New York to fine-tune some of her choreography before the World Championships this month.
Ms. Glenn’s girlish freckles were offset by graphic winged eyeliner and blond hair that trailed behind her like a parachute as she skated.
Earlier that day, Ms. Glenn said in an interview that the last eight months had “been a lot.” She began training for the current season last spring and won her first gold medal last September at the Lombardia Trophy competition in Bergamo, Italy.
She has not stopped winning since. Over the course of several weeks last November and December, Ms. Glenn traversed the globe numerous times, earning first place in three major competitions that included the Grand Prix Final in Grenoble, France, where on Dec. 7 she became the first American woman to be crowned champion in 14 years.
Two weeks later, she clinched gold at Nationals in Wichita, Kan., by a slim margin.
But Ms. Glenn’s career, which began more than two decades ago at an ice rink inside a shopping mall, has not been a linear ride to the top.
At 14, she became the U.S. junior women’s champion. About a year later, Ms. Glenn was hospitalized for depression and anxiety, which stopped her from skating for five months. At the time, she was also restricting her eating — consuming one or two Lean Cuisine meals a day. In more recent years, she has suffered multiple severe concussions and has been haunted by mistakes, like missed jumps, that she has attributed to anxiety. It has not helped that many of her injuries and stumbles have played out on live television.
Terry Gannon, an NBC sports commentator who has called nationally televised figure-skating events since the 1990s, attributed Ms. Glenn’s successes this season to perseverance.
“I feel like I have lived this journey with her and watched her through the years knowing she had the ability but coming up short,” said Mr. Gannon, who described Ms. Glenn’s story as emotionally satisfying to viewers. “Now we see her break through at the highest level,” he added.
Her winning season harks back to the time when American skaters like Dorothy Hamill and Michelle Kwan dominated the sport. As a rising star of women’s singles, figure skating’s marquee event, Ms. Glenn has created some fresh buzz in the run-up to next year’s Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. “It’s hugely important to the success of American skating to have a star who has a chance to win” at the Olympics, Mr. Gannon said.
Sasha Cohen was the last American to do so, earning a silver medal at the Turin Winter Olympics in 2006. If Ms. Glenn’s winning streak carries into next year, when Team USA skaters are determined, the country may have its next best chance at an Olympic medal.
Mastering the Triple Axel
On the ice, Ms. Glenn has become known for certain hallmarks: Landing jumps with her arms stretched vertically in a dramatic V-shape, wearing the dark lipstick of a prima ballerina, performing with a mane of multiple ponytails that she says is inspired by the pop star Kesha.
While she skates with an easy elegance, her approach to the sport has often been described using words like “explosive” and “aggressive.” “That is usually a trademark of men’s skating, they are allowed to be aggressive and muscled,” said Kaitlyn Weaver, 35, a champion ice dancer and two-time Olympian who is now a choreographer for Ms. Glenn.
Ms. Glenn said she had leaned into athleticism rather than “conforming to look smaller.” This approach is embodied by her embrace of the triple axel, a feat in which skaters hurl themselves face-forward into the air and rotate 1,260 degrees before landing backward on a single foot. Ms. Glenn has been the only women’s skater of her level to land a ratified triple axel this season in international competition, according to the International Skating Union.
Ms. Glenn’s free skate program at last year’s World Championships began with a perfect triple axel — and ended in multiple spills onto the ice. She ultimately finished in 10th place, a result that she attributed to her anxiety flaring up during her program. “My brain didn’t know the difference between competing and having to fight a bear,” as she put it.
Last summer, Ms. Glenn began integrating neurotherapy into her two-hour practices as a way to mitigate her performance anxiety. She wires herself to a device that tracks her heart rate and brain waves, which helps visualize when her anxiety spikes.
Caroline Silby, a sport psychology consultant who works with skaters worldwide, suggested neurotherapy to Ms. Glenn. “Throughout her career, she’s always had moments of brilliance, it wasn’t like she wasn’t doing it.” Ms. Silby said. “She just wasn’t doing it consistently.”
She added, “When the whole world talks about how you can’t do the second half of your program, it’s about ‘OK, how can we get the brain to stay quiet?’”
Embracing Her Identity
Ms. Glenn’s mother, Cathlene Glenn, said there had always been hints that her daughter was different from other girls her age when she was growing up in Plano, Texas. Among them: Ms. Glenn, who began skating as a 5-year-old at the rink inside the nearby Stonebriar Centre mall, gravitated toward dinosaur toys over dolls, her mother said.
She added that, by the time Ms. Glenn had turned 8, coaches were remarking that she had exceptional talent. By 11, she had mastered every triple jump except the axel.
But in a sport in which an intermediate pair of skates can cost $800, the money required to keep Ms. Glenn skating at a high level became a source of friction for her parents. To save on lessons and rink fees, her mother worked as a nanny for a former coach of Ms. Glenn’s and at the front desk of the mall ice rink. Her father, Richard Glenn, a law enforcement officer, worked overtime and took outside jobs doing security at movie theaters and hospitals.
Ms. Glenn, for her part, said she did not tell her parents when she was outgrowing her skates. “I still have the bunions and scars to prove it,” she said.
These days, she wears pairs that can cost around $1,500 — and she gets them for free from Jackson Ultima, which uses her image in promotional campaigns.
At Chelsea Piers, her skates’ blades were pushed to the limit as she ripped into the ice with expansive lunges and razor-sharp turns. She typically practices at the Broadmoor World Arena, a U.S. Olympic training site in Colorado Springs, Colo., not far from her home in the city. Above the rink, a flag with Ms. Glenn’s name flies alongside others bearing the names of fellow American champions like Peggy Fleming.
Ms. Glenn’s reputation as a different kind of skater was bolstered in 2019, when she opened up about her pansexual identity in an article for Dallas Voice magazine. Months after it was published, she arrived at Nationals in 2020 to see dozens of fans in the stands holding the Pride flag in her honor.
Ms. Weaver, who at the time had not yet started working as a choreographer with Ms. Glenn, recalled watching the scene on TV and “weeping.” In 2021, Ms. Weaver became the first Olympic female skater to publicly come out as queer. “We work against a stereotype,” she said, likening openly queer female skaters to openly gay N.F.L. players.
Having learned to be more comfortable in her skin, Ms. Glenn now holds a pride flag when she skates a victory lap at competitions. Lately, she had been thinking about the ways she could help people like herself at a time in which Ms. Glenn said “identities are being erased.”
“Sometimes, I’m looking at the world where we are taking so many steps back,” she added. “I want to be part of the people who keep us moving forward.”
She was speaking on a video call in late February from her apartment in Colorado Springs, which Ms. Glenn shares with her dog, Uki, a schipperke who, like Ms. Glenn, has learned to spin on demand.
Tragedies Amid Triumphs
Around Ms. Glenn’s apartment are items that offer glimpses of her personality. There are lightsabers hung on a wall (she is a fan of “Star Wars”) and a cabinet filled with Magic the Gathering and Pokémon cards. Instead of real flowers, she decorates the space with Lego floral arrangements because of her travel schedule. “It’s nice to have ones that stick around,” she said.
She moved to “the Springs” in the summer of 2022, she said, to work with top coaches — and to take advantage of free physical therapy and personal training sessions offered by the area’s Olympic training site, which are subsidized by organizations including the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. It’s also the first time Ms. Glenn has lived on her own.
Her main coach, Damon Allen, said Ms. Glenn’s newly independent lifestyle has helped shift her competitive course. Mr. Allen, 51, will accompany her to the World Championships. “The preparation is the same we have been doing all year,” he said. “We are keeping it simple.”
To earn the women’s singles gold medal, she will need to defeat Kaori Sakamoto, 24, the Japanese skater who has won it the last three years.
Skaters of Ms. Sakamoto’s and Ms. Glenn’s age have historically been rare sights atop the championship podiums in women’s figure skating, a sport in which the last three Olympic gold medalists were between the ages of 15 and 17 when they won. In the wake of a doping scandal involving a 15-year-old Russian skater that rocked the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022, the minimum age for female skaters to compete in the games was raised to 17.
At Ms. Glenn’s training rink, she refers to herself as the “fun aunt,” Mr. Allen said. Her friend Gracie Gold, 29, a retired two-time national champion who has spoken about her own struggles as a skater, jokingly said that late bloomers in the sport like Ms. Glenn were “only weird to people in skating that need to go outside and touch grass.”
“I don’t think hockey or football would be as popular if the general public was watching 14-year-old boys do it,” Ms. Gold added.
She is one of many skaters whom Ms. Glenn has fostered friendships with. Through gestures like bringing flowers to fellow athletes at practices, Ms. Glenn has tried to bolster camaraderie in a sport known for a cutthroat culture, which has been embodied by instances like the Olympian Nancy Kerrigan being clubbed in the knee in a hit ordered by a man who was then married to a rival skater.
Ms. Glenn, who was home-schooled from the second grade through her senior year of high school, said she learned social cues largely by being around other young people at the mall where she started skating.
Her kind overtures to peers were motivated by Ms. Glenn’s experiences at competitions during her early days in the sport. “I remember feeling so scared,” she said. “I thought, I don’t want to feel like this. If one day I’m able to, I want to help everyone to be comfortable.’
When the recent plane crash killed a group of 28 athletes, parents and personnel affiliated with U.S. Figure Skating, “it broke my heart,” Ms. Glenn said — especially because of what she had told some of the young skaters while practicing with them about 72 hours before the crash.
“What hit me so hard is I told them to make friends that they would have for the rest of their life,” she said.
Earlier this month, Ms. Glenn participated in Legacy on Ice, a nationally televised event honoring the victims of the plane crash. Days before, her grandmother Barbara Glenn, a longtime rink-side presence at her competitions, died.
“She loves to skate with emotion,” Ms. Glenn’s mother said. “She wants to feel her feelings out on the ice. I think that skate was very therapeutic for her.” The death of Ms. Glenn’s childhood dog, Ginger, this month was another emotional blow.
In a phone interview on Saturday, Ms. Glenn said that the grief she had lately experienced had given her a new perspective going into the World Championships.
“I get upset about my mistakes,” she said. “But there are so many other things that are more serious.”
Ryan Gosling stars as Ryland Grace, a former science teacher-turned-humanity’s last hope.
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Perhaps the reason Project Hail Mary hits the spot in the spring of 2026 is that novelist Andy Weir, who wrote the 2021 novel and also the book The Martian, is fundamentally an optimist. Both stories concern men who are alone, facing impossible odds, far from Earth. And both stories posit that for anyone stranded under these conditions, the most important assets are accumulated knowledge, patience, curiosity, and the understanding that you need collaborators. Not magic, not muscle, not weapons, not even bravery, really. Just this: Know your stuff. Stay calm. Solve one problem at a time. Get help.
Problems of the natural world can be addressed through, and only through, mastery and cooperation might seem like a truism, but in Weir’s stories, it emerges as an expansively hopeful thesis.
In the new film Project Hail Mary, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, Ryan Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher whose background is in molecular biology. He wakes up in a berth, bedraggled and weak, unable to remember why he is floating through space on a ship in which he is the only living crew member. With time, he’s able to put together that a woman named Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) recruited him to a team she was assembling to solve the gravest of problems: The sun is dying. The rest of the mission details are filled in through flashbacks, but the short version is that Grace was sent into space to figure out how to stop a sort of celestial infection that’s wiping out star after star — not just our sun.
Because there are other suns involved, it’s not surprising that there turns out to be other life involved, too. Other beings are trying to save themselves from the same menace that’s threatening Earth, and eventually, Grace makes contact with one: another scientist in another ship, whom he decides to call “Rocky,” because the guy looks a little rock-like. Also a little dog-like.
It is one of the greatest threats to making a good film out of Project Hail Mary that Rocky is very cute. In fact, he is adorable. He is also a skilled engineer dealing with his own isolation and his own losses. But Grace finds a way to communicate with him and eventually to outfit him with a human voice (provided by James Ortiz, who’s also Rocky’s puppeteer), and at that point, there is a lot of buddy comedy in the mix. It would have been easy to turn this into a nonstop series of gags where Ryan Gosling — who, after all, is also often adorable — cracks jokes with his alien pal. There are parts of the film that are that, and they are terrific.
But Weir is a really thoughtful writer (as is screenplay writer Drew Goddard), and Gosling can be an exceptionally quiet and sympathetic actor (as he was when he played Neil Armstrong in the underappreciated First Man). And in this story, they also find a lot of opportunities to explore questions about how to carry on in almost impossible circumstances.
Grace’s story is a lot of fun, but, like The Martian, which became a movie in 2015, it’s also an examination of how to get by and avoid despair. It’s about what Grace needs in order to persevere: a plan, a sense of purpose, and some company. It posits that people (and maybe beings other than people) need friends. They need allies. Grace needs Rocky, for help with the science but also because for him, alone is bad, and not-alone is better.
This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.
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Animated Australian sensation “Bluey” has arrived in Disneyland, and the titular anthropomorphic pastel-coated canine has come ready to play. And dance. And to race some “barky boats.”
The Walt Disney Co. first teased that the Blue Heeler puppy and her younger sister Bingo would be coming to the Anaheim theme park in 2024. Bluey is now the star of a performance-focused takeover of the park’s Fantasyland Theatre, which officially opened Sunday.
Two shows, games and spontaneous dance parties are hallmarks of the experience, as Disneyland’s live entertainment team sought to translate the show’s particular broadcast-based appeal to the real world.
“Bluey” works because it’s charmed children and grown-ups alike, emphasizing imaginative parenting skills as much as it does Bluey’s playful spirit. Though only about seven minutes, each core “Bluey” episode unfolds patiently, often centered on make-believe, wonder and childlike ingenuity. Subtle life lessons, such as cooperation, understanding one’s self-worth, overcoming a fear of the unknown and much more, dot seemingly simple scenarios.
In many episodes, Bluey’s mom (Chilli) and dad (Bandit) indulge in their daughters’ penchant to play pretend, so much so that a friend of mine with a young girl joked that she needed to watch the show to learn how to be a better mom.
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I arrived at “Bluey’s Best Day Ever!” as a childless columnist, and yet I came away enchanted by what Disneyland’s live entertainment team, led by Susana Tubert, had concocted. It’s a little silly and corny, yes, but manages to vary the tempo and can even tug at one’s heartstrings by showing the bond between siblings.
Theme park fare, especially when aimed at a preschool set, tends to fall back on high-energy, photo-op-based treatments, and while there’s plenty of amped-up goofiness here, “Bluey’s Best Day Ever!” understands that’s not why the series was the most-streamed program in 2025, according to data from research firm Nielsen.
Two core shows are featured in the experience, and some “Bluey” regulars make an appearance. The overbearing, bratty hand-puppet Unicorse, for instance, plays key roles in launching each performance. Set to play continuously throughout the day, with breaks for Bluey and Bingo to appear on stage and dance or play with youngsters, each has a slightly different tone and feel.
One emphasizes an adventure story, its themes encouraging Bluey to flash some bravery and dispel stereotypes. The other takes a lighter touch, with some of the softer, almost ballad-like songs from the show, such as “Rain (Boldly in the Pretend),” highlighted, seeking to emphasize the bond between Bluey and Bingo. Here, I thought of Bluey’s more tender moments — those, for instance, that emphasize becoming comfortable with growing older and letting go.
“Bluey’s Best Day Ever!” features live music, puppets and dance breakouts.
(Mark Potts / Los Angeles Times)
“We try to hit the humor, the play — shared play — and some of the more profound experiences that these characters go through,” Tubert says. “At the end of the second show, you’ll see a moment that is really quite beautiful. It’s a tribute to sisterhood, and how these two characters of Bluey and Bingo connect with one another.”
While one can certainly sit in the Fantasyland Theatre’s stands and simply take in the two shows, there are plenty of moments geared at getting audiences moving. Dances, for instance, may mimic animal behaviors, or reference popular moments from the series, such as getting grannies to floss.
A nod to the attention-seeking fairies — here, less Tinker Bell and more a metaphor for being noticed — inspires a “Riverdance”-like breakout. The five-piece, brass-heavy band gets a workout when Bluey’s impossible-to-control toy Chattermax has a cameo. The squawking plaything can test even Bluey’s patience.
Throughout, performers walk a line between teaching the maneuvers to the crowd and getting lost in the moment themselves. The challenge for Disney choreographer Taylor Worden was to create dance moves that also doubled as audience encouragement.
Spin, for instance, like a flower in the wind, or lightly snap your fingers to recall the sound of rain. Bounce with your hands in front of you as if you’re driving a car down a rocky street, or put your hand above your head and try for an elegant, ballerina-inspired twirl.
“It actually was letting go of all of those technical things that I’ve learned and letting that inner child come out,” Worden says. “As imaginative as Bluey and Bingo are, I wanted to hone in on that. I want everybody to enjoy, have fun and play. Play is at the forefront of everything. It’s so easy to get set in our ways, and even as an adult, it’s so hard to actually play nowadays. This has been such an experience to get to a childlike state.”
“Bluey’s Best Day Ever!” references many show moments from the series, including one with nods to the fairies.
(Mark Potts / Los Angeles Times)
There’s more, however, to “Bluey’s Best Day Ever!” than the two performances. The Fantasyland Theatre has been outfitted with pop-up installations. Some are purely photo ops, such as an opportunity for little ones to take a class photo with Bluey and her pals, while others aim to inspire exploration, such as a mini gnome village or fairy garden.
Taken as a whole, the feel is something of a fair, like hanging out with Bluey and Bingo at a backyard barbecue. The theater’s walk-up food window is serving pizza-inspired baked potatoes, a colored chocolate pretzel meant to mimic an asparagus pretzel wand, and more.
There’s also a place to race some “barky boats.” In the show, barky boats is a game that takes place on a tiny stream with tree bark, but there’s no water here. Instead, look for a track in a nook above the seating area, where one can race wooden blocks affixed with wheels — think Pinewood Derby — down a track painted to mimic a waterway. Throughout the theater, the colors are springlike and muted, pastels that are lightly bright and storybook-inspired. Even the dance costumes adopt this soft, crayon-like color palette.
“Bluey’s Best Day Ever!” at the Disneyland Resort invites audience participation.
(Mark Potts / Los Angeles Times)
“The color palette works perfectly with the set,” says Trevor Rush, a manager with costume design and development. “Lots of pastel colors. ‘Bluey,’ that world, focuses very much in that primary world. You won’t see a lot of black represented.”
“Bluey’s Best Day Ever!” does not currently have an end date, but is expected to be a Disneyland staple throughout the spring and summer seasons, with showtimes currently set for the late morning and early afternoons. For Tubert, who has an extensive background in theater, “Bluey’s Best Day Ever!” is meant to highlight the theme park as a place of play, where one can be a bit silly, and maybe even a little vulnerable.
“There’s a nonjudgmental safe space that we’ve created in ‘Bluey’s Best Day Ever!’ that invites everyone to feel uninhibited and the joy of playfulness,” Tubert says.
The illuminated bell tower of the Basilica Minore dei Santi Filippo e Giacomo stands at the heart of Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, as evening settles over the valley. Once a small village of farmers and shepherds, this storied town has evolved into the “Pearl of the Dolomites,” a renowned luxury destination. Surrounded by the limestone peaks of the UNESCO World Heritage Dolomites, the town’s historic center remains a “living room” for celebrities and high society.
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CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — Walking the main thoroughfare of Cortina D’Ampezzo is a glamorous experience. It is as if every designer brand has decided it needs to be represented in this small town more than 4,000 feet up in the Italian Alps. In a few short steps, you pass shops for Dior, Fendi, Gucci, Prada and more. Among passers-by, fur coats are in fashion.
Cortina has been in the international spotlight in recent weeks as a host to many of the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. But this storied town has a much longer history of fame and fortune that has led to various nicknames like Pearl or Queen of the Dolomites.
A window display for the luxury fashion brand Fendi illuminates a central street in Cortina d’Ampezzo, adjacent to a large outdoor sculpture of a skier. The town’s main thoroughfare is a glamorous hub where premier designer brands like Dior, Gucci and Prada are represented.
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On the mountain slopes nearby, skiers stop for hot chocolate or an alcoholic spritz at an Alpine lodge where they are served by Riccardo Fiore, the grandson of the region’s winter sport champions. His grandmother, Yvonne Rüegg, is an Olympic gold medalist in giant slalom. His grandfather was the trainer of Alberto Tomba — one of history’s greatest Alpine skiers, who learned on these very slopes. “Tomba still stops by here all the time,” he says.
Riccardo Fiore, grandson of Olympic gold medalist Yvonne Rüegg, poses inside his family’s Alpine lodge in the Dolomites.
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American actor Sylvester Stallone (right) and director Renny Harlin on the set of Harlin’s film Cliffhanger.
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A large-scale photograph of Italian skiing legend Alberto Tomba, wearing a traditional fur hat and reading a sports newspaper with the headline “Immenso Alberto,” is displayed in a wood-paneled interior in Cortina d’Ampezzo. Tomba, one of history’s greatest Alpine skiers, learned to race on these slopes under the guidance of local trainers, further cementing the town’s status as a historical cradle of international winter sports.
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For Fiore, there’s nothing unusual about serving drinks to famous individuals. He names well-known Italian politicians, actors and singers he has spotted in the lodge. And there are international names who visit Cortina, too — Sylvester Stallone, who filmed scenes from the 1993 action movie Cliffhanger here, Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake and Ridley Scott, to name a few.
“Many celebrities you barely recognize,” he says. “They try to disguise themselves, as they don’t want to attract too much attention.”
Nonetheless, Cortina has earned another nickname — the “celebrities’ living room.” The Hotel de la Poste bar, with its wood-paneled ceiling and walls, was a favorite haunt of American writer Ernest Hemingway. A small plaque honors him on a wall by the corner table he occupied for countless hours in the 1940s. And the hotel has preserved the room he stayed in — visitors can look in to see his typewriter.
“His room is a time capsule,” says Servane Giol, author of The Queen of the Dolomites, a book about the history of Cortina.
“I found some amazing letters from Hemingway explaining how he was a bit against ski lifts, because he believed it was better for the legs to be warmed up by climbing the mountains and skiing down,” Giol says. “This really made me laugh; to think that somebody could be against ski lifts.”
Servane Giol, renowned expert in Venetian art and lifestyle, poses in the historic wood-paneled Stube of the Hotel de la Poste. Giol, who has dedicated her work to preserving the cultural and aesthetic heritage of the region, sits beside an old painted pendulum clock, a symbol of the hospitality and Ampezzo tradition that the hotel has represented since 1804.
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American writer Ernest Hemingway, wearing a hunter waistcoat, stands behind a bar counter and pours gin in Cortina d’Ampezzo in 1948.
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Members of the U.S. Olympic teams walk during the procession into Cortina’s huge ice stadium for opening ceremonies launching 11 days of competition in the 1956 Winter Olympics.
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Giol says Cortina, once a small village of farmers and shepherds, became famous in the 1920s, when it was visited by the then king of Belgium, who loved to climb the jagged limestone Dolomite peaks that surround it. His daughter then married an Italian crown prince. “Between the 1920s and the 1940s, Cortina was actually the chicest place to be. You’ve got very glamorous royal families,” she says.
It became a destination for Italy’s wealthy. And then in 1956, Cortina hosted the first-ever Winter Olympics to be televised. Archive footage shows grainy black-and-white images of the opening ceremony, described by the news anchor as the “spectacle of peace.” Olympic participants from 32 countries took part in the Games that saw athletes speeding down the mountain slopes or shooting down the bobsled track built at the edge of the town.
The television broadcasts internationalized Cortina’s fame. Hollywood films were shot here — including the first Pink Panther movie, as well as the 1981 film For Your Eyes Only, with actor Roger Moore as James Bond. It includes a high-octane chase, as Bond skis down the mountainside pursued by assassins on motorbikes who shoot at him, the bullets zinging past as he slaloms and performs a somersault on skis.
English actor Roger Moore poses as 007, with a Lotus Esprit Turbo, on the set of the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, in March 1981.
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Today, the Dolomites are a UNESCO heritage site and their beauty attracts celebrities and huge numbers of other tourists — many lured by images shared on social media of the turquoise Alpine lakes and stunning peaks.
And more crowds came in February and March to watch the Olympics and Paralympics. This time, the Games relied almost entirely on artificial snow. As winters become shorter and warmer because of climate change, there are also questions about the future of this ski resort town.
Ludovica Rubbini, co-founder of the Michelin-starred restaurant SanBrite, inspects a wheel of artisanal cheese inside the establishment’s aging cellar. The “agricucina” project emphasizes the traditional preservation and maturation of local dairy products, showcasing the deep connection between the restaurant’s kitchen and its own farm production in the Dolomites.
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A table setting awaits customers at SanBrite restaurant.
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A waiter provides tableside service for guests in the dining room of the Michelin-starred restaurant SanBrite. The establishment, known for its “agricucina” philosophy, combines a refined mountain atmosphere with traditional Cortinese architectural elements, emphasizing a direct connection between local ingredients and high-end hospitality in the heart of the Dolomites.
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But Cortina is changing, too. More people come for summer hiking and for unique fine dining, like that offered by Ludovica Rubbini and her husband, Riccardo Gaspari, whose restaurant SanBrite has earned a Michelin star, as well as the guide’s “green star” for the sustainable agricultural and locally grown ingredients the couple uses on its farm.
In the cozy restaurant, where dried flowers hang from the walls and lights include lamps used during the 1956 Olympics, waiters tell guests at this fine-dining restaurant about the cows that provided the home-churned butter that is served in large pots for sourdough bread.
The dishes are inspired by the mountains and woodland of the area. They include a Jerusalem artichoke cigar served on a bed of moss and filled with the cream of the artichoke, mushrooms and marinated shallots. And a dessert made to look like a frozen lake, with a panna cotta base and layer of frozen water and elderflower, and yogurt powder as a dusting of snow.
“We were out for a walk, and Riccardo crouched by the frozen lake tapping it and examining it,” Rubbini says, remembering the day her husband was inspired to develop this perfect winter dessert.
The snow-capped peaks of the Tofane massif are framed through a window of a rifugio, a kind of traditional mountain hut, decorated with typical heart-patterned Ampezzo textiles. These high-altitude lodgings serve as essential rest areas for skiers and hikers, offering a blend of rustic hospitality and panoramic views that define the winter experience in the Dolomites.
Valerio Muscella for NPR
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Valerio Muscella for NPR
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