Off the Vette Feltrine, a beer at Pedavena, and a Renaissance hill-town to celebrate in.
The trail comes down to Croce d'Aune and Pedavena, where the customary finish-line beer waits at the 1896 Birreria — Italy's most storied brewery, now a monument. Four kilometres on lies Feltre.
Feltre's centro storico is one of the best-preserved Renaissance towns in the Veneto: Piazza Maggiore ringed by frescoed palazzi, the Castello di Alboino above, panoramas back over the peaks you just walked. A night at L'Antico Piol, a Feltrino dinner, legs finally still.
Via Monte Tomatico 15 — a quiet base a short walk below the old town. Check out Fri 10 Jul.
Hotel site →Reddit-sourced, local-leaning — on the map below, each pin links to the place.
Feltre, the historic terminus of the Alta Via 2, is one of the most graceful small Renaissance towns of the Veneto, set on a hill at the foot of the southern Dolomites. Its origins are Roman: known as Feltria, described by Pliny the Elder, it gained the status of municipium in 49 BC. Through the Middle Ages it passed from Lombard rule to the Da Camino and the Scaligers of Verona before being absorbed by the Republic of Venice in 1404, whose Lion of Saint Mark still presides over the upper town.
Feltre's appearance is the product of a catastrophe. In 1509–1510, during the War of the League of Cambrai, the town — loyal to Venice — was sacked and largely burned by Imperial forces. The rebuilding gave Feltre its harmonious 16th-century core: the cobbled spine of Via Mezzaterra and the Piazza Maggiore, ringed by Renaissance palaces once richly frescoed, the Palazzo della Ragione with its Palladian portico, the castle and clock-tower, and a fountain attributed to Tullio Lombardo — one of Italy's most coherent surviving Renaissance hill-towns.
Rising directly above the town are the Vette Feltrine, the southernmost rampart of the Dolomites and the botanical heart of the Dolomiti Bellunesi National Park. These limestone ridges and high cirques — reached on the AV2 via the Rifugio Dal Piaz — are renowned for an exceptional flora, including glacial-relict and endemic species, owing to their position as an unglaciated refuge at the edge of the range. They belong to the system inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2009.
On the mountain road above Feltre lies the Croce d'Aune pass (about 1,015 m), a site of unexpected significance. On 11 November 1927 the amateur racer Tullio Campagnolo, leading a climb in freezing conditions, could not loosen the frozen wing-nuts to flip his rear wheel and change gear, and lost the race. His reported words in dialect — roughly "something at the back has to change" — became cycling legend: the mishap led him to invent the quick-release skewer and found the Campagnolo company in 1933, the world's most celebrated maker of bicycle components.
Feltre's industrial heritage is crowned by the Birreria Pedavena, at the foot of the Croce d'Aune road. Begun by the Luciani brothers in 1896 and opened in 1897, it grew into one of the largest breweries in Italy and a defining local institution. Its monumental Liberty-era buildings, vast beer-garden and continuing production — independently revived in 2006 after a threatened closure — make Pedavena a fitting final waypoint, pairing the route's alpine grandeur with the conviviality of one of Italy's historic brewing towns.