from my grand father (who fought in The Great War) who was raised in Cortina. “we were the only town in the Dolomites that never spoke German.” From Wikipedia..(for what it is worth): In 1874 the Ampezzo forest became the property of the Carnic Woods Consortium. Although remaining a Habsburg possession until 1920, aside from being home for an ethnic German-speaking minority, Ampezzo never became a German-speaking territory and conserved its original language, Ladin, a Rhaeto-Romance language.