During the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods, the Austrian tourist industry conquered the Dolomites. New spectacular roads, among the most admired in Europe, changed the cultural panorama of the region. The model was Switzerland, and the target was the high society of Mitteleuropa. The multilingual Dolomite districts, regardless of their ethnic make-up, became part of Tyrol: a politically unified territory granted with some degree of autonomy within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The peaks of the Dolomites could not be called ‘untrodden’ any longer and their valleys ceased being ‘unfrequented’ – Tyrol became a ‘bad Switzerland’ (Elliot, 1870, p. 353).

This chapter deals with the British reaction to this epochal turn that saw the Dolomites ideally disappearing from the background of Venice to become a fashionable holiday destination for the Austro-German elite. British travellers lost their exclusive access to the region. This loss transformed itself into a nostalgic claim over the real ‘soul’ of the Dolomite landscape, threatened by Austrian interlopers. The debatable character of the region became then palpable; and in that debate between competing forms of ‘production of locality’ the British voice played a peripheral role (Appadurai, 1996; Jones, 2010, pp. 218-220, Bainbridge, 2016). The British had lost their last Arcadia – and its beautiful landscape could only be admired in the miniaturized form of a rock garden at home.