When one of Italy's much-loved Five Towers toppled, it seemed a rare, exceptional event. In fact, throughout this stunning mountain range, peaks are crumbling.

True to its name, the Five Towers – a small, iconic mountain range in the Dolomites (Eastern Italian Alps) – resembled five stone fingers spreading up towards the sky. One night between 4 and 7 June 2004, one of them, the Trephor Tower, came down. The Rifugio Scoiattoli – a chalet so close by that patrons can easily stroll to touch the rocks even after eating too much polenta – hadn't opened for the summer season yet, so no one heard a thing. One morning, they saw the Trephor, a monolith of more than 10,000 cubic metres – the size of the leaning Tower of Pisa without the bells and the tourists – lying down horizontally.

Today, Antonio Galgaro, an associate professor of geosciences at the University of Padua, believes he can predict which tower will be next. "It's like a panettone divided in four slices. This one," says Galgaro, indicating one of the peaks on an aerial picture, "will start to detach from the main block and rotate, until it comes down". The English Tower already shows an evident diagonal crack where the rock is likely to break and slide down, like a child on a banister.

Through the summer of 2025, news of landslides interrupting the main road in the region that will host the next Winter Olympics has dropped nearly every week. On 15 June, Francesco Accardo, a local resident who lives about 20m [65ft] from the gully of Mount Antelao, saw "rocks as big as cars flying down the ravine, bouncing and rebounding".

About two hours out of Venice, the Unesco Natural Heritage Site of the Dolomites is widely regarded as the most stunning mountain range in Italy and one of the most attractive in the world. As an Italian who spent most of my childhood holidays in the area, over the past few months I've found myself wondering whether the entire Dolomites are coming down. If they are, can we do anything about it?