Milan Cortina Through the Lens of Slim Aarons: 25 Vintage Photos of This Year’s Olympic Locale

Nearly 2,900 athletes have descended on Milan Cortina for the 2026 Olympic and Paralympic games. The famed ski town is hosting 16 official sports, including ice hockey, skiing, curling, luge, and figure skating. Set roughly 250 miles northeast of Milan, Cortina d’Ampezzo—its formal name—is an Italian alpine retreat near the Austrian border, long accustomed to the international spotlight. The village last hosted the Winter Olympics in 1956, and was also slated to do so in 1944, before the Games were canceled due to World War II.

Long before the Olympics, Cortina was already a coveted winter playground for the rich and famous. The town sits nearly 4,000 feet above sea level, in the heart of the Dolomites—a mountain range designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2009.

A village of sport and glamour

With just 6,000 residents, Cortina is hardly a sleepy mountain village. A favored retreat for well-heeled European families since the 19th century, it has long traded in a certain brand of alpine glamour. The town has also made its way onto the silver screen in films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Vittorio De Sica, and Jean-Jacques Annaud. Today, Corso Italia—its main drag—is lined with luxury boutiques.

That aura of 20th-century glamour was immortalized by Slim Aarons. The legendary American photographer, known for chronicling the jet set at play, counted Cortina among his favorite haunts—alongside Santa Barbara and the Bahamas. Over the course of two decades, he returned repeatedly to the Dolomites, capturing artists, actors, and European aristocrats at ease in the town’s luxurious chalets. What follows is a look back at some of his most iconic images, printed in color to evoke Cortina’s chic ski culture of the 1970s.