Until a few years ago, I’d never seen the silvery, luminous Dolomites — a subsection of the Alps located in the northernmost region of Italy known as the South Tyrol. I later discovered that the Dolomites were indeed enchanting, but to my surprise, so were the nearby towns in the valleys below.

Bordering Austria and Switzerland, the South Tyrol is the only part of Italy that is officially bilingual, thanks to its cobbled history belonging at different times to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italy.