Lunch at Wirtshaus Vögele sets the tone: the South Tyrolean classics, Knödel and Schlutzkrapfen, among people on their lunch break. Then the Laubengasse, six hundred metres of merchant arcades trading since the Middle Ages, and the Obstmarkt beside it — speck, mountain cheese and haggling. If the light holds, cross to the Talvera meadows and look back at the town under its vineyards.

Then north up the Eisack valley in the late afternoon, with the light long on the vineyard terraces. The city gets a longer look on the way home, if the flight allows.

Drive to the head of the valley at Zans and walk the Adolf Munkel trail beneath the towers: two to three hours, none of them steep, all of them under two thousand metres of pale rock. Lunch at the Geisleralm: dumplings, Kaiserschmarrn, a deckchair. Its terrace has a name of its own, the Cinema delle Odle, an amphitheatre of chairs facing Furchetta and Sass Rigais.

Evening back above Brixen at Sunnegg, the Buschenschank in the vines: thin-sliced speck, the farm's own wine, and the town's rooftops below the terrace in the evening light.

Take the road that climbs out of Santa Maddalena and traverses the open flank eastward. It is not a difficult drive and rarely a busy one, and it shows what the valley floor cannot: the whole range at once, meadow below, the towers in a row above. Stop at the Punto Panoramico below Sas de Putia and give it longer than you planned.

Beyond it the road enters deep, mossy forest and comes out at the pastures under the Peitlerkofel, where the walking starts. Come early for a space in the car park. Walk as long as you like — twenty minutes off the pass road, on the Untermoi side, Munt de Fornella has Highland cattle in the meadow and salami cured from them on the board, kitchen until five — then back down for dinner.

Ten minutes north, Novacella has been making wine since 1142. See the rococo library and the frescoed cloister, then finish with a cold glass of Kerner in the courtyard.

Then east into the Pustertal, the long corridor valley. Arrive with enough light for a walk before dinner; from here the remaining days need no further move.

Mid-afternoon, ten minutes back to San Lorenzo, where the Romans planted the road-station of Sebatum and the Sonnenburg hill rises over the valley mouth. Walk its grounds in the late light: for eight hundred years the convent here owned the whole valley below, and in the 1450s its abbess, Verena von Stuben, fought Nicolaus Cusanus for years rather than accept his reforms. This was a centre of power run by women, not a retreat.

MMM Corones first, before the crowds: Zaha Hadid's museum, among her final works, is buried in the summit itself, three tongues of pale concrete cantilevered over a thousand-metre drop. Fifty metres away, Lumen fills the old cable station with a century and a half of mountain photography. Lunch at AlpiNN, Niederkofler's Food Space beside it — Cook the Mountain, served casual at 2,275 metres.

The evening is the week's one splurge: Atelier Moessmer, three stars in the villa of the old wool mill by the river, booked months ahead. Otherwise Oberraut above town, where the game comes from the family's own hunt.

Drive it early to the Staller Sattel, the pass into Austria so narrow that traffic runs one-way in alternating quarter-hour windows, held by a traffic light at 2,050 metres. Just over the crest lies the Obersee, a dark tarn under glacier peaks, its meadows full of flowers in July. Return with the window and give the afternoon to the Antholzer See: turquoise, ringed by forest, and, unusually for a lake this photogenic, never overrun. The loop path takes an hour.

The farewell dinner is at the Ansitz Heufler at Rasun. An hour in the house, aperitivo in the smoke-blackened Rauchkuchl, then the Osteria — dumplings, lake fish and Antholz farm produce, cooked with precision and without ceremony.

So: a final espresso under Bruneck's arcades instead. People have been passing through this valley for two thousand years — Roman legions, wool traders, skiers — and it rewards the few who stop.

East to the Three Peaks. For those with an eighth night and the legs for a full day's walking, the Tre Cime di Lavaredo are worth the crowds they draw: a ten-kilometre circuit at 2,300 metres, three to four unhurried hours, long enough to leave the famous viewpoints behind. Drive east past Toblach and up the toll road to the Rifugio Auronzo; book the slot well ahead. Start at first light or after three; the middle of the day is for the coaches. Dinner is ten minutes back down the road at Tilia, Chris Oberhammer's glass pavilion in the park of Toblach's old Grand Hotel: five tables, twelve seats, a Michelin star.