Amid such beauty, the only way is up

In what seems like another life, on what feels like another planet, I took an early morning easyJet flight to Venice. It was only eight months ago, and I could not possibly have imagined then that there would soon come a day where I would miss dawn flights on low-cost airlines – certainly not as I stood in the terminal at Gatwick at 4am, arguing about why we had been bumped off our overbooked journey.

I cannot be the only one who would give anything for such trifling concerns now – who wishes they could go back and shake their pre-coronavirus self and say: “Enjoy the cheap flights and the rubbish customer service and the stifling heat that you will moan about as you arrive in Italy – because in a few months’ time, you won’t be able to experience any of it!” I have come back to this article about our trip to the Dolomites with a sense of shock at the cluelessness I exhibited when writing it, just a couple of months ago, for inclusion in my wellness column. But we can’t have a column that is titled “Bryony Gordon is Unwell”, because that seems crass and insensitive in the current climate, when so many are fighting for their lives. Instead, we have decided to create a space where we can, from the safety of our homes, remember the world as it was and still is – a world we will be able to explore again. Maybe not next month. Maybe not even this year. But soon enough.

I have been thinking about the Dolomites a lot recently, situated as they are in the epicentre of the Italian outbreak. It is hard to imagine anything bad happening in this most beautiful of places – and when we were there, we felt absolutely cocooned from the busy mania of our normal lives.

That’s not to say that the town of Corvara, 1,500 metres above sea level in the region of South Tyrol, isn’t busy – it’s just busy in a more healthy way. Everywhere you look, there is movement:

Bryony Gordon was a guest of the South Tyrol tourist board (suedtirol.info/ en). She stayed at the

Hotel Sassongher (sassongher.it); rooms from €175 (£153) per person per night.