Seceda is a tilted hay meadow high in the Italian Dolomites that you can walk straight out across, until the grass stops and a row of saw-toothed limestone spires takes over. The meadow and the spires are the same rock. A coral reef grew here in a warm sea 250 million years ago, and the lifting that turned it into mountains left the grass on the gentle side. A cable car out of Ortisei, in Val Gardena, puts you on the crest at about 2,500 metres. From the top station a broad, easy path runs out onto the slope. Most people stop at the first railing. Five minutes further the crowd thins, the Fermeda towers line up dead ahead, and the ground drops away at your feet. The grass you are standing on is not parkland. It is a working hay field, stitched blue and yellow with flowers in summer and burnt gold by October, cut by about a hundred families, and that is why parts of the ridge are fenced.
Marked trails drop off the crest to the foot of the Odle towers, trading the wide view for the scale of the rock. Close up, the pale walls rise in fractured columns, streaked and pitted where the old reef split. Several mountain huts stand near enough to the edge that lunch comes with the panorama: dumplings, cured speck, barley soup. The valley underneath speaks Ladin, a Rhaeto-Romance language of its own rather than a dialect of Italian or German, with some thirty thousand speakers left. The trail signs carry two names for the same wall: Odle and Geisler. Long winters down there also built a woodcarving trade that sold saints and nativity figures across Europe. The hour to stay for is the last one. As the final cabins go down the spires flush rose and coral for a few minutes, and the valley has its own word for that colour: enrosadira. The Ladin explain it with a dwarf king who cursed his rose garden to be invisible by day and by night, and forgot about dusk.