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Leigh Bowery Arrives at Tate Modern, Without Labels
“If you label me, you negate me,” the performance artist and fashion designer Leigh Bowery said in 1993, one year before his death at age 33.
Maybe it is this resistance to easy categorization that has meant Bowery never quite became a household name. His cultural influence, though, is beyond question: His provocative performances led him to work with artists including Lucian Freud and Marina Abramovic. His extreme fashions are still referenced on runways, by designers including Rick Owens and John Galliano. And his status as a queer culture icon is cemented by regular invocations at L.G.B.T.Q. club nights and on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
But during his short, colorful and often shocking life, nobody knew what box to put Bowery in. Three decades after his death, they still don’t.
A new exhibition called “Leigh Bowery!” at Tate Modern in London will bring his work to a much broader audience. The show, which opens Feb. 27 and runs through Aug. 31, charts Bowery’s journey from suburban Australia to the heart of London’s alternative gay club scene in the ’80s, and his transformation into a figure that Boy George once described as “modern art on legs.”
George later went on to play Bowery in the 2003 Broadway run of the biographical musical “Taboo,” for which George also wrote the lyrics. The musical is named after an infamous club night that Bowery hosted, which opened in 1985 on a dingy corner of London’s Leicester Square.
Every Thursday, the party attracted artists, models, designers and celebrities including George Michael, Sade and Bryan Ferry — but also drag queens and heroin users. Each week, Bowery arrived with a wild new outfit that challenged conventional notions of taste, gender and decorum. He described his role at the club as “a local cabaret act,” explaining: “If people see me behaving in such an outrageous manner, they won’t feel inhibited themselves.”
Fashion was the chief concern at Taboo, which operated by the mantra: “Dress as if your life depends on it, or don’t bother.” The doorman would flash a mirror in the face of aspiring entrants and ask, “Would you let yourself in?” The exclusivity was not just to generate mystique: It also created a space where people on society’s margins felt like they belonged.
“I remember Leigh in this insane Bart Simpson mask on roller skates, just bumping into everyone and screaming,” Boy George said in an email. “He brought such anarchy and energy to every club or party.”
Taboo closed after just one year when a tabloid newspaper ran an article about drug use in the club — but just like Bowery himself, the short run only served to cement the legend.
Epic Looks
Bowery grew up in Sunshine, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, where he felt stifled by the conventions of his surroundings and would gaze longingly at magazine photos of Britain’s New Wave and punk scenes. When he turned 18, he moved to London, adopted a British accent and set about infiltrating the city’s gay party circuit.
Though he started out making clothes for others, Bowery soon realized that he preferred to design for himself alone.
“Directing his own performance and being the star was a better fit for what he wanted to do,” his sister, Bronwyn Bowery, said recently by phone. While he didn’t consider himself a drag queen, he was inspired by drag, combining high camp with high fashion. His huge figure — heavy set and a towering 6-foot-3 — only accentuated the impact of his outlandish looks.
One of his design collaborators was the sequin expert Nicola Rainbird, who was Bowery’s close friend and eventual wife. Though he was gay and, according to one biography, a lifelong devotee of anonymous public sex, Bowery married Rainbird a year before his death, in a ceremony he called “a little private art performance.”
For Bowery, makeup and clothing were not just cosmetic decoration, but tools for reinvention — and he reinvented himself often.
He made outfits from whatever he could lay his hands on, including bobby pins, tennis balls, tuna tins and even meringues. Some of his best-remembered looks include colored glue dribbled down his bald head like a splattered egg, and giant polka dots covering not only his clothes, but also his face.
Others on display in the Tate Modern show include a pink leather harness that secures flashing lightbulbs over the ears, and a sculptural white jacket that also obscures the wearer’s face with a puffball of orange tulle.
Fashion designers continue to reference Bowery today. In a 2015 show, Rick Owens sent models down the runway carrying other models in harnesses, which Owens admitted was “totally ripped off” from a Bowery concept. A 2009 Alexander McQueen show painted models with Bowery’s signature oversized lips. Gareth Pugh, Charles Jeffrey and Maison Margiela have all nodded to him in collections.
Bowery’s outré style has also influenced the high-concept looks of pop stars like Lady Gaga and a vast swath of contemporary drag queens — though George said something had been lost in the transition to the mainstream. “When you see drag queens referencing Leigh on ‘Drag Race,’ it’s gorgeous, but too polished,” George said. “Leigh was very rough around the edges and he had the build of a rugby player — and was not dainty or fey.”
That legacy also still plays out in many L.G.B.T.Q. clubs, which present the dance floor as not just a space for hedonism, but also for presenting elaborate looks, experimenting with gender and blurring the lines between performance and partying.
It was nightlife impresario Susanne Bartsch who introduced Bowery to New York, inviting him to contribute clothes to a fashion show displaying the latest London fashions in 1983. (She also took him to Tokyo, where she said that he startled the prime minister of Japan by baring his bottom on the runway.)
“When he came in his look, everything stopped,” Bartsch said. “You just wanted to see it again and again. His charisma, even when you couldn’t see his face, oozed through all the pieces that he made.”
Bowery would later return to New York as a performer, hosting Bartsch’s 1991 Love Ball, which raised money for AIDS research, and influencing New York club kids like Michael Alig, Amanda Lepore and James St James.
“Leigh had a very special relationship with New York,” said the choreographer Michael Clark, “he was particularly celebrated there. There was a whole gang of people ready for him there and he was embraced with open arms.”
Clark first met Bowery in 1984, when he was bewitched by one of Bowery’s outfits and followed him into a club bathroom to invite him to collaborate. Before long, Bowery was making provocative costumes, playing piano and dancing for Clark’s contemporary dance company, until he and Clark fell out in 1992.
By this time, Bowery was increasingly turning toward performance. In 1988, he presented himself as a living art installation at Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London for five days, posing behind a two-way mirror on a chaise longue in a series of his best-known looks. He also worked with the performance artist Marina Abramovic on a piece using 400 live rats titled “Delusional,” which she has called “the most insane work I have made to this day.”
The Tate will show a video of Bowery’s notorious “Birthing” act, which he performed many times, including at the 1993 Wigstock drag festival in New York. There, he wore a bulging costume from which Rainbird, his wife, burst out like a newborn, covered in red gunk and with links of sausages as an umbilical cord.
Bowery loved to provoke outrage, commenting after one particularly extreme show involving an onstage enema: “If I have to ask, ‘Is this idea too sick?’ I know I am on the right track.”
Bowery’s sister said that his desire to shock was partly a response to his conservative upbringing in Australia. “My parents encouraged us immensely to conform,” she said, “but at the same time, we were told to stand out, so we were pretty confused. When someone wants you to conform because they don’t accept who you are, you have a choice: You conform and you lose yourself, or you react.”
‘Disco Monster Terrorist’
“Flesh is the most fabulous fabric,” Bowery once said, and the body’s expressive potential is a through line in his work. Even for an artist strongly associated with clothing, some of Bowery’s most enduring images show him completely nude.
He began sitting for a series of portraits with the painter Lucian Freud in 1990, often posing for seven hours a day. When a show of Freud’s work prominently featuring these paintings opened at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1993, it represented the beginnings of a legitimacy in the fine art world that Bowery had long been seeking.
Though Bowery was diagnosed with H.I.V. in 1988, he only told Rainbird and his friend Sue Tilley, instructing them to explain his absence once he was gone with a characteristic quip: “Tell them I’ve gone to Papua New Guinea.” He died on Dec. 31, 1994, of AIDS-related meningitis and pneumonia.
In a biography of Bowery that Tilley published in 1998, she describes his final moments lying in hospital under an oxygen mask, hooked up to a tangle of tubes. “It really was a fantastic look,” she writes, “and if he had seen someone else with it, we were sure that he would have soon been wearing it to nightclubs.”
Freud paid for Bowery’s body to be sent back to Australia, where he was buried next to his mother. At the funeral, the grave had to be widened to fit his plus-size coffin. As in life, there was no conventional space big enough to accommodate Bowery.
In a song about Bowery released the year after his death, Boy George lauded him as a “disco monster terrorist, hanging in the Tate with Turner and van Gogh.” Three decades later, the Tate Modern show is placing Bowery in the artistic canon.
In an interview, Rainbird reflected on how Bowery would feel about this moment: “He’d be absolutely over the moon,” she said. “He wanted to be famous and he knew he was a genius. He’d be very pleased that people were finally taking note.”
Leigh Bowery!
Feb. 27 and through Aug. 31 at Tate Modern, in London; tate.org.uk.
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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