Some of the most breathtaking scenery in the Dolomites is accessible to walkers who embark on this superb trip in the Sesto group, not far from the Austrian border. Enclosed in a 116 km nature park, the scenery ranges from meadows thick with wild flowers and picturesque alpine tarns to ever-changing scenes of rock pinnacles, soaring peaks and vast scree slopes brightened by gay alpine blooms.

The Sesto group that encompasses the famous Tre Cime di Lavaredo is practically bisected by the administrative border between Italy’s German – speaking South Tyrol and the predominantly Italian Veneto region, which was the frontier between Hapsburg Austria and Italy until 1918. The entire range was involved in the First world War, and wherever you turn trench systems gouged by hand out of the rough dolomite surface, defensive barricades of stones heaped up by platoons of soldiers and ubiquitous barbed wire.