Condé Nast Traveller - Making Tracks

It's the fourth morning of a seven-day ski safari across the Dolomites, which involves us snowboarding to a new lodging each night – our bags appearing, as if by magic, at a mix of crisp modern hotels with glassy spas and family-run mountain refuges, the latter often with a son or partner in an improbably good locavore kitchen. The trip has been organized by Dolomite Mountains, an innovative and impressive company founded by Argentine Agustina Lagos Marmol and run mainly by a group of warmly no-nonsense women. And I've already fallen hard for the Dolomites, just as everyone who's ever been has promised I would.

I've fallen for the Tolkien-worthy visual drama of its snaggletooth peaks, crafted over millennia, mostly from the eponymous dolomite rock that's lighter in color and form than the granite and gneiss of so much of the Alps; and for the mind-boggling breadth of the skiing across the almost 750 miles of slopes in the Dolomiti Superski, one of the world's largest ski areas. But most of all I've fallen for the civilized patchwork of cultures across the Pale Mountains, from the Italian film stars and glamor of  Cortina d'Ampezzo  in the east, which is waiting for its Olympic close-up in 2026, to the west's South Tyrol, the autonomous province where German is the most-spoken language and areas such as the woodcarving Gardena valley feel more Austrian than Italian. It is a region where traditional Italian food and hospitality culture meets Teutonic design and wellness, and agrarian provenance worship overlaps with an increasingly urgent contemporary impulse towards sustainability.

By Toby Skinner  Nov. 07,2024