From Cortina to Treviso: What the 2026 Paralympics Brought to the Veneto (And What Stays)

On the afternoon of March 4, 2026 — two days before the Games opened — the Paralympic Flame passed through the Piazza dei Signori in Treviso. I was there. I stood in the square where the Palazzo dei Trecento has faced the Palazzo del Podestà since the medieval commune, where the people of this city have gathered for public celebrations and civic ceremonies for eight centuries, and I watched the torchbearer carry the flame through a space that, for one afternoon, belonged to the world’s largest sporting event for athletes with disabilities. It was an unexpectedly moving thing. Not because I am given to sentimentality about sporting events, but because the route of that relay told a story about this territory that I have been trying to tell for twenty years. The flame had come from Cortina d’Ampezzo, ninety kilometres to the north. It had passed through Belluno, down through Longarone — where the Vajont disaster killed two thousand people in 1963, a passage that was understood by everyone present as deliberate and significant — and into Treviso, the provincial capital of the Prosecco DOC denomination. From Treviso it went to Venice. From Venice south to Padua. From Padua to Verona and the Arena, where the opening ceremony took place that evening. The entire final relay route was a map of the Veneto region — the Dolomites, the foothills, the plain, the lagoon — condensed into three days of movement. For anyone who has spent time in this territory, who knows what connects Cortina’s slopes to Treviso’s canals to Venice’s waterways, it was recognition of something that has always been true but rarely named so directly: that these places belong to the same landscape, the same culture, the same story. I am Igor Scomparin. I have held an official Tour Guide License for the Veneto region since 2007. This article is my attempt to account for what the 2026 Paralympic Winter Games brought to this territory — what happened here, why it matters, and what, now that the Games are entering their final days, remains. The Games Themselves: What Happened in Cortina The Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games opened on March 6 at the Arena di Verona — the first time in the history of the Paralympic Games that a UNESCO World Heritage Site hosted the opening ceremony — and close on March 15 at the Cortina Olympic Ice Stadium, the same venue that staged the opening of the 1956 Winter Olympics. Seventy years between those two ceremonies, and the same mountain town at the centre of both. The competition programme for these Games — the fourteenth edition of the Winter Paralympics — covers six sports across three clusters: Para alpine skiing and wheelchair curling at Cortina, Para biathlon and Para cross-country skiing in Val di Fiemme, and Para ice hockey in Milan. Around 665 athletes from more than eighty countries competed in seventy-nine medal events. The scale is significant: these are the world’s largest sporting events for athletes with disabilities, and in 2026 they arrived in a part of Italy — the Dolomites, the Veneto, the wider northeast — that has the geographic and cultural infrastructure to host them with a particular kind of integrity. Cortina d’Ampezzo, specifically, is the right venue for Para alpine skiing in ways that go beyond the quality of its slopes. It is a mountain town that knows how to host international competition — it has done so since the 1956 Olympics, through multiple World Cup circuits, through the 2021 Alpine Skiing World Championships — and the Tofane circuit, where the Para alpine events run, is one of the most technically demanding and visually spectacular venues in the world of competitive skiing. The athletes who race there, regardless of classification, are doing something genuinely extraordinary on that terrain. What the Games brought to Cortina was not novelty — Cortina has hosted major events before — but a particular kind of visibility. The Paralympic Games attract a global television audience that is, by most measures, larger and more diverse than the audience for the Olympic Games in many markets. The images of Para athletes at full speed on the Tofane, with the Dolomite peaks behind them and the specific quality of March light on the snow, circulate in ways that no conventional tourism campaign could replicate. The Flame Through Treviso: Why the Route Mattered The torch relay route was not accidental. It was designed — by the organizing committee, in consultation with the Veneto Region — to make a specific argument about geography and identity. The argument is this: Cortina d’Ampezzo, the alpine heart of the Games, is not a mountain enclave separate from the lowland Veneto. It is the same region, the same cultural and economic territory, the same wine denomination. The province of Belluno, in which Cortina sits, is one of the nine provinces of the Prosecco DOC zone. The Piave River, which rises in the mountains above Cortina and flows south through Belluno and Treviso toward the Adriatic, is the hydrological thread that connects the Dolomites to the lagoon. The flame’s route followed that logic: down from the mountains, through the foothills, across the Trevisan plain, to Venice and the sea. When the torchbearers carried the flame through Treviso’s Piazza dei Signori — the administrative and civic centre of the province, the seat of the Prosecco DOC Consortium, the square I have walked through thousands of times over twenty years of guiding — they were making that connection visible. Treviso was not a logistical stop on the relay route. It was a place that the Games claimed as part of their territory. The Prosecco DOC Consortium understood this clearly. The Consortium had signed on as Official Sparkling Wine Sponsor of the Milano Cortina 2026 Games — both Olympics and Paralympics — in what its president described as the most significant investment in the denomination’s history, reflecting a global audience of more than three billion viewers. Throughout the Paralympic period, Prosecco DOC was present at Casa Italia in Cortina, served at the official venues, featured in the hospitality spaces that hosted delegations and media from around the world. The territorial logic — Cortina is within the Prosecco DOC zone, Treviso is the Consortium’s seat, the wine comes from the same land as the Games — was precisely the argument the Consortium wanted the world to understand. Treviso Airport, renamed after the sculptor Antonio Canova, was dressed in Prosecco DOC signage for the duration of the Games: the glass façade, the baggage carousels, the spaces where arriving visitors from the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany had their first encounter with this part of Italy. The message was deliberate — you have landed in Prosecco country — and it was addressed to exactly the audience that tourism to this province most needs to reach. What the Veneto Showed the World There is a quality that the Veneto possesses and that, until these Games, had not been visible on a truly global stage: the compression of landscape. Within ninety minutes of Treviso — from Treviso Airport, the gateway for much of the international traffic during the Games — you can be on the slopes where Para alpine skiing at Olympic standard takes place, in Dolomite terrain that is among the most dramatic mountain landscapes in Europe. Within thirty minutes you can be in Venice. Within an hour you can be in Asolo, in Bassano del Grappa, in the Prosecco hills above Conegliano. The entire range of Italian landscape — high alpine, pre-alpine foothills, viticultural hills, flat agricultural plain, lagoon — is contained in this single province and its immediate neighbours. This is not something that most visitors to Italy understand before they arrive. Italy’s tourism geography is dominated by a handful of canonical cities — Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast — and the distances and connections between other parts of the country are poorly understood. The Milano Cortina 2026 Games, by spreading competition venues across Lombardy and the northeast, by routing the torch relay through cities and towns that most of the world had never seen, by bringing international media to Cortina and Belluno and Treviso and Venice in the same ten-day sequence, told a different story about Italian geography. A story in which the northeast — the Veneto, Trentino-Alto Adige, Friuli — is not peripheral to Italian culture and landscape but central to it. For those of us who have spent careers trying to explain this to visitors, the Games were the most effective act of communication imaginable. What I say to guests on a walking tour of Treviso or a drive through the Prosecco hills, the Games showed to billions of people through the lens of elite athletic competition at the highest level. What Stays: The Legacy Question Every major sporting event generates a conversation about legacy — what remains after the athletes leave, the cameras go home, and the temporary infrastructure comes down. The legacy question for events like the Olympics and Paralympics is genuinely complex, and I will not pretend otherwise. Large sporting events can leave behind debt, underused facilities, and inflated expectations that take years to deflate. But some legacies are more durable than infrastructure, and I think the most significant legacy of the 2026 Games for the Veneto is one that does not require a new stadium or a renovated road to persist. The first legacy is awareness. The international journalists, travel writers, television producers, and tourism operators who came to Cortina for the Games and who drove through Treviso, stopped in Asolo, ate in Belluno, drank Prosecco in venues from Milan to Cortina to Venice — these people now know that this part of Italy exists. They have been here. They have images and experiences and contacts that will appear, in the coming months and years, in the publications and programmes that shape where their readers and viewers travel. This kind of awareness does not dissipate immediately. It compounds. The second legacy is the accessibility work. The Arena di Verona underwent significant renovation ahead of the Paralympic Opening Ceremony specifically to improve accessibility for people with disabilities — the first time a UNESCO World Heritage Site had hosted a Paralympic opening ceremony required genuine thought about what accessibility means in an ancient Roman amphitheatre. The venues at Cortina, the mountain paths and infrastructure of a town that has been hosting visitors for decades, were assessed and improved with Paralympic requirements in mind. Some of this work is cosmetic. Some of it is structural. All of it reflects a shift in how Italian public and private spaces think about who they are built for. The third legacy is the Prosecco DOC’s global moment. The denomination will not stop being the world’s most consumed Italian sparkling wine because the Games ended. But the three-year campaign that culminated in this fortnight — the educational tours for journalists from the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, and Canada who were brought into the vineyards of the Veneto and Friuli; the visibility on airport screens and ski lift stations across the alpine world; the presence of the Consortium’s wines at every official toast and ceremony — has created an expanded network of informed consumers, writers, and buyers who will carry their knowledge of Prosecco DOC’s territorial identity with them for years. The fourth legacy is the one I care about most personally, and it is the hardest to measure. The Veneto, as a travel destination, has been defined for decades by Venice and nothing else. Venice is extraordinary — I would never argue otherwise — but it is not the Veneto. Treviso is not Venice. Cortina is not Venice. The Prosecco hills, the Sile River, the Piave, the Dolomites visible from the flatlands on a clear March morning — none of these things are Venice, and none of them needed to be. The 2026 Games gave the international audience a reason to look at this larger territory and see it as a coherent place rather than a collection of day-trip options around a famous lagoon city. Whether that shift in perception translates into visitor behaviour is the question that cannot yet be answered. What I can say, from the position of someone who has guided visitors through this territory for nearly twenty years, is that the raw material for a much richer engagement with the Veneto was always here. The Games illuminated it. What happens next depends on whether the people who were watching are curious enough to come and find it. What This Means If You Are Visiting Now If you are reading this during the Paralympic Games — which run until March 15 — the most practical thing I can tell you is that the Veneto is, right now, at its most internationally accessible and its most locally alive simultaneously. The Games have brought infrastructure, signage, transport improvements, and heightened hospitality attention throughout the region. The towns along the torch relay route — including Treviso — have been prepared for international visitors in a way that does not normally characterise late winter in this part of Italy. At the same time, the cities themselves remain exactly what they are. Treviso has not been transformed by the Games into something it is not. The canal district, the Pescheria fish market, the medieval centre with San Nicolò and the Loggia dei Cavalieri and the Piazza dei Signori — these things are here in March exactly as they are in September or June. The aperitivo hour still begins at six. The osterie are still serving what the kitchen has decided to cook today. The Prosecco is still poured by people who live within view of the hills where it was made. If you are visiting in the weeks after the Games — from late March onward — the legacy described above will be working quietly in the background: an expanded international awareness of this territory, new direct contacts between producers and international buyers, a small but real improvement in how accessible the region is to visitors with mobility needs. And Cortina d’Ampezzo, which hosted the alpine events and will close the Games on March 15, will return to being what it has always been: one of the most beautiful mountain towns in Europe, with skiing that continues through April in a good snow year, accessible from Treviso in under ninety minutes on a road that passes through some of the most remarkable landscape in Italy. The day trip from Treviso to Cortina that I described in an earlier article does not require the Games to justify it. The mountains will be there long after the cauldron is extinguished. 📩 I have been bringing guests through this territory for nearly twenty years, and I can tell you honestly: March 2026 is an exceptional moment to be here. Get in touch to arrange a private tour that takes in Treviso, the Prosecco hills, the Piave plain, and the Dolomite foothills — the full landscape that the Games brought to the world’s attention, seen from the ground. Frequently Asked Questions Did the Paralympic Flame actually pass through Treviso, and what happened there? Yes. On March 4, 2026, the second day of the final torch relay phase following the Flame Unification Ceremony in Cortina d’Ampezzo, the Paralympic Flame passed through Treviso’s historic centre with a particular stop in the Piazza dei Signori. The relay that day began in Auronzo di Cadore, in the Dolomites, and descended through Pieve di Cadore, Longarone — where the torchbearers passed through the town rebuilt after the 1963 Vajont disaster, a deeply significant moment — and Belluno before reaching Treviso in the afternoon. From Treviso the convoy continued to Mestre and then Venice, where the first major city celebration of the relay took place in Piazza San Marco. The Treviso passage was noted by the Prosecco DOC Consortium specifically, since Treviso is the seat of the Consortium and the capital of one of the denomination’s nine provinces — the flame passing through the Piazza dei Signori was understood as the Games acknowledging the territorial identity of the wine that served as their official toast. Why was Prosecco DOC the official wine of the Paralympics, and what does that have to do with Treviso? The Prosecco DOC Consortium signed on as the Official Sparkling Wine Sponsor of the entire Milano Cortina 2026 Games — Olympics and Paralympics together — in 2023, in what the Consortium’s president described as the largest promotional investment in the denomination’s history. The territorial logic is precise and genuine: Cortina d’Ampezzo, where the alpine events take place, is in the province of Belluno, which is one of the nine provinces of the Prosecco DOC denomination. The wine produced throughout this zone — from the Veneto and Friuli Venezia Giulia provinces where the Glera grape grows — is the same wine that was served at every official ceremony, in Casa Italia in Cortina, and in the hospitality venues throughout the Games. Treviso’s specific role is as the seat of the Prosecco DOC Consortium — the organisation that governs and protects the denomination — which means that the Games’ recognition of Prosecco DOC was also, in an institutional sense, a recognition of Treviso’s central place in Italian wine culture. Treviso Airport was branded with Prosecco DOC signage throughout the Games period, making the wine the first thing most arriving international visitors encountered in this part of Italy. Now that the Games are ending, is the Veneto still worth visiting — or was this a once-in-a-generation moment? The Veneto was worth visiting before the Games, is worth visiting during them, and will be worth visiting long after the closing ceremony on March 15. What the Games brought was awareness and accessibility, not the underlying qualities of the territory itself. The Dolomites above Cortina will continue to be among the most dramatic mountain landscapes in Europe. The Prosecco hills between Conegliano and Valdobbiadene will continue to be a UNESCO World Heritage Site producing one of the world’s great sparkling wines. Treviso will continue to have its canals and its radicchio and its fish market and its Tomaso da Modena frescoes in San Nicolò and its aperitivo hour and its particular quality of being a city that still belongs to the people who live in it. What the Games accelerated is international recognition of these things — the understanding, now embedded in the experience of journalists and tourism operators and visitors from dozens of countries, that the Veneto is not simply the hinterland of Venice but a complete and extraordinary landscape in its own right. That understanding does not expire on March 15. Igor Scomparin is a licensed Tour Guide and Tour Leader for the Veneto Region, certified Travel Agency Director, and founder of tourleadertreviso.com. He has been featured in Rick Steves’ travel guides to Italy and Europe since 2008.