CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy – As the lights of the old ski jump hill from the 1956 Olympics shine through his kitchen window, Italian mountain climber Mario Dibona pours a beer and gently places his prized possession on the table.

“Gruppo Scoiattoli,” Dibona tells me on a starry winter night, speaking in the reverent tone of a man giving his visitor a peek inside a sacred club founded long ago in a town that worships the Dolomite Mountains.

He rubs his hands over a simple red sweater adorned with a white squirrel on the sleeve. It’s the uniform of local mountaineers dedicated to celebrating and preserving this region’s wild and untamed soul. The Squirrels keep Cortina weird and wonderful.

“The squirrel group was born on July 1, 1939, long before the Olympics came to Cortina,” Dibona says. “Our motto: ‘One for all, all for one.’ Together, we climb mountains.”

For anyone who feels a sense of peace the mountains can bring, there is a mystical feel to this tiny town encircled by jagged peaks as sharp as tiger teeth. But to find the soul of Cortina, you must look past the beautiful people wearing $2,500 ski jackets and drinking $300 bottles of wine.

“There’s a magic curtain around this town,” Dibona says.

I’ve made the trek to a tiny chalet his father and mother lovingly constructed with their own hands to let Dibona pull back the curtain and let me see magic that’s richer and deeper than the trappings of a chic tourist destination the Olympics built.

“As a child, I remember that everything I saw, I wanted to climb. I saw a tree, I wanted to climb it. I saw a house, I wanted to get on the roof. I saw a rock face, I wanted to go up it,” Dibona says. “I remember my mother always telling me: ‘Mario, come on, please come down from there.’ But I had the passion. So I kept going up.”

Dibona summited Mount Everest in 2002.

He conquered K2, then made a perilous descent, helping a fellow climber whose hands had become incapacitated by the cold after he made the mistake of removing his gloves to shoot photographs and video from atop the world’s second-highest peak.

Among the Squirrels of Cortina, which numbers nearly 90 members strong, Dibona is credited with the first ascent of more than one of the sheer rock towers that stand sentry over the spot where Cortina sits next to the Boite River.

“And I’ve done it all without ever hurting myself,” says Dibona, who the Italian government has knighted for his athletic achievements.

What’s the secret of making it to age 64 without ever falling off a mountain?

“You have to know,” Dibona says, “how to give up.”

Yes, there have been dicey, dangerous moments when he wondered if God would sweep him from the mountain straight to heaven. The key is not to let ego get in the way of survival.

“You have to know when to turn around,” Dibona says, “and go home, safe and sound.” 

As Dibona talks, his knee constantly fidgets, every fast-tick fiber inside him itching not to waste a single minute in the paradise where he was born.

From the deck of a house nearly as old as the Olympic heritage of Cortina, however, Dibona worries the same Winter Games that made his hometown famous have started to alter it beyond recognition.

It was here in northern Italy that the Olympics leapt into the television age as the first Games to be telecast around the globe. But as much as there is to adore how the Olympic spirit can foster a sense of community among athletes from every corner of the planet, the excesses of staging the Games can leave permanent scars, as Rio de Janeiro and Sochi can attest.

“The ‘56 Olympics were a big success, because it introduced Cortina to the world,” says Dibona, who operates Dolomiti SkiRock, which creates adventures for outdoor enthusiasts looking to push themselves to new heights of trekking, skiing or climbing achievement.

“But now I worry, because Cortina is full. We no longer have room for new homes, new hotels or new Olympic facilities. I say: Enough! Cortina is beautiful for more than a vista on television. You get the town too big, and you lose the charm of everything that made it beautiful.”

What gives Cortina its splendor is more than topography. It’s the spirit ingrained in men and women like Dibona, who celebrates the awe-inspiring qualities of the Dolomites with every breath he takes.

His hometown is surrounded by a curtain of mountain peaks.

But the magic begins with a gentle tug on the curtain.

“There is only one secret to finding the magic,” Dibona says. “It’s to live every day to the fullest. And fill every day in the best way of how you want to live.”