Lifestyle
Curtis Sittenfeld Goes Home Again
There really was a woman who photocopied her butt at a workplace in the 1980s.
Curtis Sittenfeld, 49, heard about the incident when she was a girl and filed it away. Four decades later, the Great Butt Xeroxing makes an appearance in her new short story collection, “Show Don’t Tell.”
She mentioned it one day last week when she met up with her oldest childhood friend, Anne Morriss, in Cincinnati, where they had both grown up. Ms. Sittenfeld, who lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two daughters, was back in town while on tour for her latest book. Ms. Morriss, a leadership coach in Boston, was there to celebrate her mother’s 83rd birthday.
“It happened in my mother’s real estate office,” Ms. Morriss said. “I remember processing it with you. And you had questions!”
“It’s all I think about,” Ms. Sittenfeld replied.
Why did she do it? The mysteries of human behavior, along with the mortification that often follows an ill-considered act or remark, are of special interest to Ms. Sittenfeld, who made her name 20 years ago with her debut novel, “Prep.” She’s the patron saint of women who wish the floor would open and swallow them whole.
“People will have very different reactions to my writing,” she said. “People will be like, ‘I felt so frustrated by this character — they were so neurotic or cringey, and I wanted to reach into the story and shake their shoulders.’ Or people will be like, ‘I felt like you were inside my brain.’”
The two friends lined up behind a gaggle of schoolgirls at Graeter’s Ice Cream, a local favorite. They ordered cups of mocha chip (for Ms. Sittenfeld) and chocolate chip (for Ms. Morriss) and strolled to a park, taking advantage of the unseasonably warm day.
They sat on a bench and watched a group of middle-school-age girls in Uggs and leggings who were making a video of themselves doing a TikTok dance. The girls ran to their phones to watch the recording, deleted it, and did the dance again.
Ms. Sittenfeld, who was wearing New Balance sneakers and a blue heathered sweater, and Ms. Morriss, with her Hillary Clinton bob and silk scarf, didn’t look like they had inspired the haughty queen-bee characters in “Prep.” But Ms. Morriss insisted they had been “mean girls” back in middle school.
“Were we mean girls?” Ms. Sittenfeld said. “Obviously, I am a little defensive, but in middle school I would say that we were popular more than mean.”
Then she pondered her statement, as though cross-examining her own recollections.
“Actually,” she continued, “I’m sure we were mean. I unearthed some diaries recently. I read them to my own children, and one of my kids was like, ‘You should write an essay called ‘Diary of a Bitchy Kid.’”
Cracking open another childhood trauma, Ms. Sittenfeld recalled a time in eighth grade when she and Ms. Morriss had stopped being friends for a while. The split occurred during what Ms. Sittenfeld described as her own “social downfall.”
It came about because she had committed the faux pas of skipping a friend’s slumber party. After that, she found herself exiled from her usual peer group and sitting with the student council boys at lunch. She eventually felt so isolated that she ended up leaving the Midwest for the Groton School, an elite boarding academy in Massachusetts that provided her with material for “Prep.”
“You were curious about the world in a way that the rest of us weren’t,” Ms. Morriss said.
Ms. Sittenfeld took a moment to consider this.
“Let’s be honest,” she said. “I do not think that I seemed brilliant as a child — and frankly, it’s not like I think I seem brilliant now. Sometimes I’ll encounter writers and they’re so smart, and they’ve read everything there is, and it’s almost like they have an inaccessible intelligence. I would not say that I have an inaccessible intelligence.”
‘The Messiness of Life’
In “Prep,” Ms. Sittenfeld focused on a girl who pinballs between a hunger to be noticed and a desire to disappear. In the eight books she has published since, she has mined the terrain of female self-consciousness and status anxiety across all life stages.
In “Show Don’t Tell,” the story that opens her new collection, she examines the unspoken rivalry between a pair of students, a woman and a man, at a top graduate writing program. When they meet up at a hotel bar nearly 20 years later, the woman is the author of five best-sellers and the man is the winner of prestigious literary prizes.
“He’s the kind of writer, I trust, about whom current students in the program have heated opinions,” Ms. Sittenfeld writes. “I’m the kind of writer their mothers read while recovering from knee surgery.”
But here’s the thing about American women recovering from knee surgery: They are shaping the country’s political, social and cultural debates. Pundits want to know why a majority of white women voted for Donald J. Trump. Documentaries tell cautionary tales of affluent women who fall down social media rabbit holes leading to wellness influencers promoting dubious health regimens. Ms. Sittenfeld chronicles this demographic from within, not as an impartial observer.
“I’m not an ornithologist — I’m a bird,” she said, quoting Saul Bellow. And she isn’t bothered by fancy male critics who might be inclined to dismiss the people and subject matter at the heart of her work. “If I have an opinion, I should write a 1,000-word essay,” she said. “If I want to explore the messiness of life, I should write fiction.”
For years her books have captured the concerns of a group that has lately become a cultural fixation, middle-aged women who wake up one day and realize their lives aren’t exactly what they’d planned. After reading “All Fours” by Miranda July or watching Halina Reijn’s “Babygirl,” some are having frank conversations about sex and marriage; others are simply spiraling.
Ms. Sittenfeld’s heroines seem to want more than they should while bumping up against the limiting forces of age or wilted ambition. She has explored such women in best-sellers and two works selected for Reese Witherspoon’s book club. Hollywood executives who optioned her books have suggested casting stars like Anne Hathaway and Naomi Watts.
Her two teenage daughters have made it clear that they’re not particularly impressed by her career. “They see me as kind of ridiculous,” Ms. Sittenfeld said. “My 15-year-old will sometimes be like, ‘I can’t believe you write books, you seem so apart from the world.”
It helps that she lives in Minneapolis, where her husband teaches media studies, and which feels so distant from the hothouse worlds of Brooklyn and Hollywood. “Sometimes in interviews people will say to me, ‘Do you feel a lot of pressure in writing your next book?’ And I’ll think, Who would I feel pressure from?” Ms. Sittenfeld said. “Nobody cares what I’m doing.”
Still, the older Ms. Sittenfeld gets, the clearer she feels about what she wants to do in her work.
“Are you watching ‘Somebody Somewhere’?” she asked Ms. Morriss, referring to the HBO show starring Bridget Everett as a woman who returns to her hometown in Kansas. There’s a moment in the show, Ms. Sittenfeld recalled, in which the main character and her petite sister are talking about “the pencil test.”
“You put a pencil under your breast, and if it falls out it means you have perky breasts,” Ms. Sittenfeld said. “Then Bridget Everett’s character takes a big salad dressing bottle and wedges it under her enormous boobs. That is the tone of the storytelling I want to do. It’s not the person with the pencil falling out, but the person with the salad dressing bottle staying under her boobs.”
She added, “Isn’t it so weird and undignified to be a person?”
‘So Authentic’
Shortly before 6 p.m., Ms. Sittenfeld stepped into the Mercantile Library, where she was scheduled to give a talk. The library’s executive director, John Faherty, greeted her with some praise for her new book, while noting that its depictions of marriage were a bit dark.
“I was going to call you up and say, ‘Are you OK?’” he said.
“That’s not a blurb for the paperback,” Ms. Sittenfeld replied.
She and Mr. Faherty had become close through various book talks at her hometown library over the years. “I did an event here in 2016 for ‘Eligible,’” she said, referring to her modern-day retelling of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” which she set in Cincinnati. “John got everyone Skyline chili.”
“I was told you can do gender reveal parties at Skyline now,” she added, referring to the restaurant chain.
“Do they say ‘boy’ with a hot dog?” Mr. Faherty asked. “I’m afraid to ask what’s for a girl.”
“The absence of a hot dog?” Ms. Sittenfeld said with a laugh.
She grabbed her phone and opened a text from her 15-year-old daughter. “We watch ‘Severance’ as a family and she was like, ‘Can I watch it by myself?’” Ms. Sittenfeld said.
“Say no and she’ll watch it anyway,” Mr. Faherty suggested.
The thrum of voices was getting louder as the crowd assembled. Ms. Sittenfeld swapped her normal New Balance sneakers for what she called her “fancy sneakers,” which were almost identical but with blue floral decals. She went to the bathroom to apply makeup — “just a little foundation,” she said.
In the main room, Ms. Sittenfeld and Mr. Faherty sat perched in front of some 225 people, an audience that included Ms. Sittenfeld’s 77-year-old mother. Ms. Sittenfeld described the sorts of questions that come up in her new book: If you eat a cup of sauerkraut with a dollop of Thousand Island dressing for lunch every day and your spouse finds that disgusting, is it his fault or yours?
The audience tittered. An older woman in a lilac sweater buried her face in her hands, giggling. When Mr. Faherty seemed on the verge of giving away a plot point, a spoiler-averse audience member shouted, “We haven’t read the book yet!” In the front row, someone knocked over a cup of wine and then got on her hands and knees to mop it up.
When Ms. Sittenfeld wrapped up her talk, readers rushed forward to ask for selfies and autographs. In Ms. Sittenfeld’s books, her characters realize over and over again that there is no escaping the embarrassment of being alive; there’s only finding somebody who will respond tenderly or, at least, with a good-natured laugh. The ache of that recognition filled the room.
Readers toted copies of “Prep” and “American Wife” that looked as if they’d been through the washing machine. One declared she had driven three hours to get there; another boasted of a book club made up of Ms. Sittenfeld’s devoted fans.
Ms. Sittenfeld’s third grade teacher, Bobbie Kuhn, sitting in the second row, said of her former student: “She’s just as authentic as she was.”
It’s the type of compliment Ms. Sittenfeld is used to receiving.
“People will be like, ‘You’re so authentic,’ which probably means you’re saying something wrong,” she said, laughing. “It’s like somebody saying you’re brave. You’re kind of like — oh no!”
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.
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