60 pieces · NaturePhoto by Alessio Furlan on Unsplash (Unsplash License). Last light on the Tre Cime di Lavaredo in the Sexten Dolomites, northern Italy — the three dolomite towers burning orange above their scree fans while a serrated ridge on the left has already dropped into shadow, with storm cloud breaking up over the saddle between them.
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Sunset on the Tre Cime di Lavaredo
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Sunset on the Tre Cime di Lavaredo
The three towers on the right of this photograph are the Tre Cime di Lavaredo, known on the German-speaking side of the same mountain as the Drei Zinnen — the Three Merlons, because from a distance they look like the battlements of a wall. They stand in the Sexten Dolomites in northern Italy, right on the boundary between South Tyrol and the province of Belluno, and they are the single most recognisable silhouette in a range that UNESCO inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2009. Each tower has its own name: Cima Piccola, the slenderest; Cima Grande in the middle, which is the tallest of the three and stops just short of 3,000 metres; and the broad-shouldered Cima Ovest to the west. The camera has caught them in the last few minutes of direct sun, when the light comes in almost horizontally and the pale rock turns the colour of hot metal while everything below the skyline is already cooling into grey.
The stone itself is dolomite, and it is not mountain rock by origin at all. It began as reefs and lagoon sediment on the floor of a shallow tropical sea in the Triassic, built up layer on layer by corals, algae and shelled things, then buried, chemically altered into the hard magnesium-rich carbonate the range is named for, and finally shoved thousands of metres into the air as Africa pushed north into Europe. That history is why the Dolomites behave so differently from the granite Alps further west: the rock breaks along near-vertical joints rather than wearing into rounded ridges, which is how you end up with sheer walls that drop straight out of the sky and then dissolve, at their feet, into the enormous pale fans of broken scree you can see sloping away from each tower here. Those fans are the mountain taking itself apart, one rockfall at a time. The north faces on the far side of these towers became one of the proving grounds of European big-wall climbing in the 1930s, and the ground all around them was fought over on the Italian–Austro-Hungarian front in the First World War — there are still tunnels and galleries cut into the surrounding peaks.
As a jigsaw, this one rewards you for working with the light rather than against it. The frame divides cleanly into three jobs. The sky is the opening move: it runs from a flat grey-mauve ceiling on the left through a bright gap of cloud in the middle to crisp blue and white cumulus on the right, so pieces sort by brightness along a left-to-right gradient before you commit to any of them. The peaks come second, and the trick is that the two massifs are lit completely differently — the ridge on the left is in cold shadow with blue-grey fluting, the towers on the right are in full orange sidelight, so a piece of rock tells you which half of the picture it belongs to before you have found a single matching edge. Save the foreground for last. That broad apron of bare limestone slabs and rust-coloured scrub across the bottom third is the genuinely hard part: it is busy, it is low-contrast, and it has no horizon to lean on. The pale slab running diagonally up from the lower left is the one landmark worth building out from.
How to play
- Tap Play Sunset on the Tre Cime di Lavaredo puzzle to open the puzzle board, then choose your piece count and difficulty.
- Drag pieces from the tray onto the board and snap them into place until the full image is complete. Works with mouse on desktop and touch on mobile.
- Use the Preview button on the play screen to peek at the full reference image whenever you need a hint.
- When you finish, check your solve time on the completion screen and share it with friends to see who can beat your record.
Frequently asked questions
- Where is this, and why does it have two names?
- It is the Tre Cime di Lavaredo, in the Sexten Dolomites of northern Italy, sitting on the border between South Tyrol and the province of Belluno in Veneto. The two names are a straight consequence of that border. South Tyrol was part of Austria-Hungary until it passed to Italy after the First World War and it remains largely German-speaking, so the peaks are the Drei Zinnen there and the Tre Cime di Lavaredo on the Italian side. Both names mean roughly the same thing — three summits, or three battlements — and both are in official use today.
- Which of the three towers is which?
- Reading across the group, they are Cima Piccola (the Little Peak, the narrowest and most spire-like), Cima Grande (the Great Peak, in the middle, and the highest of the three at just under 3,000 metres) and Cima Ovest (the West Peak, the widest and bulkiest). They are not a coincidence of three separate mountains but one block of rock that vertical jointing and frost have split into three, which is why their summits sit at such similar heights and why the gaps between them are narrow notches rather than valleys.
- What makes Dolomite rock form sheer towers like these?
- Dolomite is a hard carbonate rock, formed here from Triassic reef and lagoon deposits that were later altered chemically and then uplifted by the collision of the African and European plates. Unlike granite, which tends to erode into rounded forms, dolomite is riddled with near-vertical fractures and fails along them: blocks detach cleanly and the face left behind stays close to vertical instead of slumping back to a gentler angle. The result is a wall that retreats backwards through the mountain while staying sheer, with the debris piling up below as the long scree fans visible at the base of each tower in this photograph.
- Why do the two halves of the picture look so differently lit?
- Because of how late in the day it is and which way each face is turned. The sun is very low and coming in from the right, so it is still striking the west and south-west faces of the three towers head-on, which is what produces the intense orange. The ridge on the left has already turned away from that angle and is lit only by indirect light from the sky, which is cool and blue by comparison. That split is temporary and it moves fast — within minutes the shadow line climbs the towers as well, and the whole scene flattens into a single uniform grey.