What is the role of mountain passes in shaping the future imaginaries of mountain regions: The Marmolada case study.

The Marmolada massif, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2009, sits at the border between the Autonomous Province of Trento and the Province of Belluno, connected across it by Passo Pordoi and Passo Fedaia. This thesis asks how these two passes, understood as devices of both union and separation, shape the way the territory’s actors express and enact their imaginaries of its future. The research draws primarily on the literature on future making, which treats futures as actively produced through distributed practice rather than predicted, and is complemented by concepts of heritage as a construct and topology. A twophase qualitative design combines documentary and ethnographic research with ten semi-structured interviews conducted with actors on both sides of the passes. The documentary phase establishes a consistent asymmetry between the two provinces, in demography, governance, linguistic protection, tourism infrastructure, and even the physical characteristics of the passes. The interviews confirm this asymmetry experientially while complicating it: shared exposure to climate change, housing scarcity, and tourism pressure persists despite institutional fragmentation, and the sharpest disagreements did not emerge between participants matched by role across the two sides, but between others entirely. The concluding chapter argues that the passes are not the origin of the territory’s differences, but the devices through which they are channelled and unevenly experienced. Lastly, it identifies three competing visions of the territory’s future among participants and proposes place marketing as an avenue for future research.