The Alta Via 2 delle Dolomiti is a long-distance high-mountain traverse of roughly 160–185 km that crosses the Dolomites from north to south, beginning at Bressanone (Brixen) in South Tyrol — conventionally above the city on the Plose massif — and ending at Feltre in the Veneto, typically divided into about 13 stages with on the order of 11,000–12,000 m of cumulative ascent. It is one of the network of numbered "Alte Vie" (High Routes) conceived and waymarked through the Dolomites in the 1960s as a collaboration between the Club Alpino Italiano (CAI) and regional tourism boards, who linked pre-existing CAI mountain huts, shepherds' tracks, mountaineering approaches and WWI military paths into continuous numbered itineraries. The full integral traverse was pioneered in July 1969 by Ivano Tisot and Louis Pillon of Feltre, who walked the line south to north.

Its nickname, the "Way of Legends" (Via delle Leggende), comes from the chain of Ladin sagas attached to the massifs it threads — above all the legend of King Laurin (Re Laurino) and his enchanted rose garden, which gives the Rosengarten/Catinaccio group its name. Laurin, the dwarf-king of a crystal palace, tends a garden of roses; after being betrayed by his swaying roses he curses the garden so no human eye shall see it by day or night — but, forgetting the dusk, he leaves it free to glow at twilight. The tale is the folk explanation of the enrosadira, the alpenglow by which the pale dolomite walls flush rose and violet at sunrise and sunset.

The Alta Via 2 is the harder, higher and more committing of the two flagship routes. Where the Alta Via 1 is largely a walking traverse on good paths, AV2 climbs higher, spends more time in austere rock-and-scree terrain, and includes several genuinely exposed attrezzato (cable-equipped) and via ferrata sections where iron rungs and fixed steel cables protect passages that would otherwise demand technical climbing — so a via-ferrata kit (harness, lanyard, helmet) is standard equipment. Signature difficulties include the cable-protected crossings of the Puez-Odle and the bare limestone wilderness of the Altopiano delle Pale di San Martino.

The route also traces, in places, the front line of the First World War's "White War" (Guerra Bianca), fought from 1915 to 1917, when the high Dolomites became a fortified front where cold, avalanche and rockfall killed more men than gunfire. The corridor passes through this militarised landscape — most notably around the Marmolada, where the Austro-Hungarian "Città di Ghiaccio" (Ice City) was a network of galleries carved into the glacier. Many of the ledges and tunnels the route now uses were originally wartime supply lines, and open-air relics survive along the way.

Logistically the route depends entirely on the CAI rifugi system, the staffed Alpine huts that make tent-free traversing possible. Many were founded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the CAI and its sections — including the SAT in Trentino — to support the first wave of Dolomite mountaineering. The entire region the AV2 crosses was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as "The Dolomites" on 26 June 2009, a serial natural property of nine mountain systems — among them Puez-Odle, Marmolada, Pale di San Martino and the Dolomiti Bellunesi — listed for exceptional natural beauty and globally outstanding geology.