Top of the World
Belluno is a small town of 35 505 inhabitants in Veneto. The city was founded as a Roman municipium in the first century B.C. and is considered the gateway to the Dolomites, but at the same time it is also a beautiful window open to the Venetian plain. This small Italian city is a small but precious jewel set in a splendid crown of mountains that embrace it all around, to the south with the gentle profiles of the Nevegal Pre-Alps, to the north with the imposing Mount Serva and the rocky walls of the Schiara group, part of the splendid Belluno Dolomites - a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its cosy and welcoming historical centre, lapped by the Piave river and the Ardo torrent, is the visiting card with which this town on a human scale presents itself. It can offer its guests treasures of artistic and natural beauty in a prestigious urban reality, surrounded by a rural territory full of minor centres of considerable landscape interest. In fact, it is no coincidence that it is the only provincial capital to include within its municipal territory the boundaries of a national park: the National Park of the Belluno Dolomites. A place, to use the words of the Bellunese writer, Dino Buzzati, that possesses a special personality that gives it an extraordinary charm but of which few people are actually aware, where the world of Venice (with its serenity, the classic harmony of lines, the ancient refinement, the mark of its unmistakable architecture) and the world of the North (with its mysterious mountains, long winters, fairy tales, the spirits of the spelonges and of the woods, that untranslatable sense of remoteness, solitude and legend) come together. Belluno is a city to live in and to visit, strong in its old town centre, in the crown of mountains, in the river Piave that crosses it, in the palaces characterized by the architecture of the beginning of the 20th century, in the monuments, in the many fountains.
