Madonna di Campiglio Winter
— — the floodlit slope, the rest of the valley dark.
Not only on a wall.
“A small town held between two of the great Alpine ranges, the Brenta Dolomites to the east and the Adamello-Presanella to the west, in the Italian region of Trentino. In December the Canalone Miramonti is lit for the men's slalom World Cup, and the noise of the town gathers around the one bright slope; the rest of the season is slower. The Habsburgs came here when this was still the empire's edge, and the Carnevale Asburgico in February still puts the costumes back on. The snow takes the colour of the limestone behind it, blue at last light.
Madonna di Campiglio Winter, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Madonna di Campiglio sits at 1,522 metres (4,993 feet) in the Val Rendena of western Trentino, a frazione of the comune of Pinzolo. The settlement is held between two mountain ranges, the limestone spires of the Brenta Dolomites to the east and the granite and glaciers of the Adamello-Presanella massif to the west, and lies entirely within the Adamello-Brenta Nature Park, the largest protected area in Trentino. It is reached by the SS239 road from Tione di Trento, about 75 kilometres west of the city of Trento. The Skiarea Campiglio Dolomiti di Brenta connects its lifts with those of Pinzolo and Folgarida-Marilleva for roughly 156 kilometres of pistes.
The peaks east of Madonna di Campiglio belong to the Brenta Dolomites, the limestone subgroup inscribed in 2009 as part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site The Dolomites. Cima Tosa, the range's highest summit, rises above 3,100 metres, and the silver-grey rock of the Crozzon di Brenta and Cima Brenta forms the backdrop to almost every winter photograph from the town. The Brenta limestone is paler than the rust-toned rock of the more famous eastern Dolomites around Cortina; in winter the contrast between the snow on the slopes and the bare grey stone above the treeline gives the valley its particular monochrome severity, with the deepest colour held back for the alpenglow at last light.
The ski season at Madonna di Campiglio typically runs from early December through mid-April, with cover sustained by snowmaking across most of the 156 kilometres of pistes in the Skiarea Campiglio Dolomiti di Brenta. The Alpine Ski World Cup men's slalom, known locally as the 3Tre, runs each December on the floodlit Canalone Miramonti slope above the town and draws tens of thousands to a single night of racing under the lights. In February the town stages the Carnevale Asburgico, a costumed revival of the late-nineteenth-century visits of Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth, when the village was still on the southern edge of the Habsburg empire.