Marmolada: 3,343 meters, and July 3, 2022

Punta Penia stands 3,343¹ meters above sea level, the highest point of the Dolomites, and the glacier below it is the largest in the range: on July 3, 2022 a serac collapse there killed 11 people.

3,343 meters, and the largest ice in the Dolomites

Punta Penia reaches 3,343¹ meters, making the Marmolada the highest summit of the Dolomites, and the glacier on its northern flank is the largest in the range.

That glacier is in strong retreat. This page does not print a surface figure for it, because the number changes every season and the ones in circulation are pulled from different survey years without saying so.

The measured values come from the Comitato Glaciologico and from ARPAV surveys. If you need a current area, that is where to look, with the year attached.

July 3, 2022

On July 3, 2022 a serac collapsed on the glacier and 11 people died.

It is recorded here because it is the fact the mountain is now read through, and because anyone going onto the ice needs to know it happened rather than to find out afterwards. No further detail is added: the circumstances belong to the investigations and the families, not to a travel page.

What follows from it practically is that glacier conditions in summer are checked before a route, not assumed from a weather forecast, and that a summer high route on the Marmolada is a mountaineering decision rather than a walk.

The boundary follows the watershed, since 2018

The Marmolada sits across the provinces of Trento and Belluno, with the boundary running along the watershed line on a definition settled in 2018.

That sounds like a technicality and it decided a long administrative dispute about who governs the summit. The practical consequence is that the mountain appears in 2 provincial tourism systems at once, with different rules, different signage and different offices behind them.

The Malga Ciapela to Punta Rocca cable car runs on the Belluno side, and the ski run down that flank measures 12 km.

The Apennines have 1 glacial body left

The Calderone lies in a north-facing bowl below the Corno Grande, at 2,912² meters, in the Gran Sasso, and the park authority describes it as the southernmost glacier in Europe after the Spanish Sierra Nevada ice disappeared.

The scientific position has moved on. It is now generally classed as a glacieret or residual body, because it has lost the downhill motion that defines a glacier, and the park factsheet describing it as active is undated.

The 5 hectare surface quoted on that factsheet is probably an overestimate against the current situation, and it is not presented here as a 2026 figure. The honest formulation is the one the caveat itself suggests: the last glacial body of the Apennines.

What the 2 sites have in common

The Marmolada glacier and the Calderone are the 2 ends of the same Italian story: the largest ice in the Dolomites and the last ice in the Apennines, both measured, both shrinking.

Neither is an attraction and neither should be visited as one. The Marmolada has a cable car to Punta Rocca and a 12 km run on the Belluno side; the Calderone sits under a 2,912² meter summit reached on foot by people with alpine experience.

What is worth taking from both is the discipline about numbers. A surface area for either without a survey year on it tells you nothing, and the institutions that publish those years, ARPAV and the Comitato Glaciologico for the north, are the ones to check.

Why the surface figure is missing from this page

0 figures for the surface of the Marmolada glacier appear on this page, and that is deliberate rather than an omission.

A glacier surface is a measurement with a date attached. Quote a figure from a 2015 survey in 2026 and you are publishing a number that the object itself has already contradicted, which is exactly the failure mode this site is built to avoid.

The same discipline applies to the Calderone's 5 hectares. The source is a park factsheet with no date on it, describing an active glacier, and the scientific literature has since reclassified the body. Printing the 5 hectares as a current fact would repeat 2 errors at once.

For the province, see Provincia di Trento.

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