La VolatA in
the Ski Area San Pellegrino

For a lifetime, Alberto Vendruscolo has built roads where there were none and seen routes where others did not. It was in his DNA, and was his job as a road builder and owner of the company that still bears his surname. This was also the case for the ‘La VolatA’, the black run that he dreamed of completing to connect the Col Margherita to the San Pellegrino Pass. A venture considered by many to be ‘crazy’ and realised by his son Mauro, the current president of Funivia Col Margherita. Those capitals ‘V’ and ‘A’ are a tribute to those who dreamed of this run, without being able to see their dream come true. “Making a piste there is a bit of a crazy idea,” Mauro Vendruscolo was heard to say. It was not just a matter of creating a trail that would start in one region, Veneto, and finish in another, Trentino. What made the idea seem crazy were those gaps in the rock at the end, where even imagining a route seemed impossible. Yet Mauro could clearly make out that line among the Col Margherita’s snowpacks, just as his father Alberto had imagined it.  The dream of both was to complete that first steep section created in the late 1980s by Livio Sommariva, the first president of the Funivia Col Margherita company. In 1982, with the installation of the ski lift of the same name, the first step was taken towards the creation of the Ski Area San Pellegrino, connecting the San Pellegrino Pass, in the province of Trento, to the 2,514 metres of the Col Margherita in the territory of Falcade (BL) in just a few minutes. The completion of ‘La VolatA’ was first set down on paper in 2011 but it was only a few years later that the project became a reality, shortly afterwards hosting a competition at the highest level: the Val di Fassa Junior World Championships. Today what Alberto Vendruscolo envisioned between those rocks is a World Cup run.