Known as the Queen of the Dolomites – the mountain range was declared a United Nations World Heritage Site in 2009 – Cortina d’Ampezzo has a thousand-year history and began welcoming intrepid mountaineers and affluent tourists in the second half of the 19th century.

Already well-known among winter tourists in the first half of the 20th century, the Italian resort benefitted from the fact that the 1956 Olympic Winter Games were broadcast to an international television audience. The staging of the Games also brought media exposure in leading newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Washington Post, while promotional films were made to attract tourists to the town, who began arriving in numbers on bus tours.