Why the Dolomites are so special: Inside the ski retreat everyone wants a piece of

Michele Barbiero looks like the archetypical Italian alpinist – a wild cloud of blonde curls floating above a chiselled face of indeterminant age with requisite beaded necklace clinging to a sun-weathered neck.

You just know that beneath the faded ski jacket (that he’s likely owned since the ‘90s) are sculpted guns, ready to fire come spring’s melting snow and a hard launch of the new rock-climbing season.

A mountain guide for adventure tour operator Dolomite Mountains, Barbiero holds an infinite love for skiing and limited patience for stupid questions. Example: “What makes the Dolomites so special?” Barbiero looks like he’s about to grab my head and swivel it to face his beloved mountains as he delivers his response: “Look around you! Have you ever seen something like this? Just LOOK!”

The guy has a point. The UNESCO World Heritage-listed mountain range in north-eastern Italy is truly unique.

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The peaks rise cathedral-like in sudden, jagged spires and pinnacles - more like fortresses or rock towers than ridgelines. They shatter the sky in every direction and at dusk the pale limestone glows a supernatural pink - an enchanting effect known as enrosadira.

Sitting at a table at a mountain bistro above the clouds, it’s now Barbiero’s turn to ask a stupid question.“Do you feel like some wine?”

Breaking up a ski day to enjoy fine Italian food and wine is a non-negotiable in the Dolomites. You’re never going to ski the whole thing, anyway, so why rush?

Spanning 1200 kilometres across 12 ski resorts, connected by 450 lifts all accessible with one lift pass, Dolomiti Superski is the largest interconnected ski area in the world. The centrepiece is the Sellaronda, a 40km circuit of the Sella massif, arguably the finest single-day ski journey in the world.

The overload of options completely changes the way you ski. Instead of lapping one mountain all day you could conceivably spend days lapping the whole thing, skiing from village to village, each with a different cultural and culinary flavour, and bedding down somewhere new each night. So, why wouldn’t you?

Well, a few reasons. For first-time visitors with little sense of direction – ROAM, for instance – the sheer size makes it confusing as all hell. We skied for four days straight, taking notes the entire time, but would still struggle to tell you how to make it from, say, Alta Badia to Val Gardena.

It’s not unusual to find yourself cruising down some perfectly groomed run that terminates at a lively après ski bar in some postcard-pretty village, the name and location of which you have absolutely no idea. (From what we gather the entire Dolomites taxi industry is sustained by shuttling home hapless tourists who’ve washed up in the wrong valley.)

Secondly, skiing by definition necessitates faffing around. Bulky bags, unwieldly equipment – you know the drill. The last thing you want to be doing is lugging it all to new lodgings every night.

But on a Dolomite Mountains ski safari, the only thing to lug is yourself. Your luggage? It’s waiting when you arrive at the next hotel. And forget about plotting a route because your guide leads the way. The most mentally taxing thing you’ll be asked to do is choose a wine.

Still, some self-determination is required. Tours are bespoke and span the full spectrum of sleeping arrangements, so there’s flexibility with the budget.

Choose to stay in traditional rifugios (family-operated mountain huts), or indulge in some hushed luxury at somewhere like Aman Rosa Alpina - the first Aman property in the Italian Alps and which opened in the village of San Cassiano (part of the Alta Badia ski resort) in July last year.

Starting in Alta Badia makes a lot of sense. Its wide, benign groomers help ease you into the week, and the valleys are sprinkled with gorgeous villages. Ski infrastructure is exemplary across the Dolomites.

A shiny new gondola whisks us up the base of Sas dla Crusc, a hulking limestone massif that rears above the village of Badia. It’s worth popping your head into La Crusc church, a tiny white chapel pinned improbably to the mountain’s flank.

For centuries it’s been a Ladin pilgrimage site, and it’s such a nice spot that even Jesus spends his summers here - the townsfolk below lugging a statue of the Messiah up each spring, and back down again in autumn.

Descended from the original inhabitants of the Alps, Ladin people have held onto their language and traditions through centuries of shifting borders and empires, and their cuisine is showcased in on-mountain restaurants such as Ütia Bioch.

Here you can replenish your lost carbs with turtres - disc-shaped pastries filled with spinach or sour kraut, ricotta and chives – dumpling soup and homemade tortelli stuffed with speck cream and buffalo ricotta and mashed risina beans.

To wash it down try a calimero, a shot of espresso layered with bombardino (a sort of alpine eggnog) and whipped cream. It’s likely you’ll never go back to flat whites.

Our safari rolls on to ritzy Cortina d’Ampezzo, where we take up residence at Hotel Ancora, the town’s oldest lodging, exquisitely redesigned last year by Italian fashion entrepreneur Renzo Rosso (founder of Diesel and president of OTB Group, which itself oversees the likes of Maison Margiela, Marni and Jil Sandler, among others).

Cortina performs the neat trick of managing to be both moneyed and tasteful, the countless boutiques (take your pick, they’re all there) crouching contentedly under the stately, 175-year-old bell tower that holds court on Corso Italia.

The town’s dining scene is slightly underwhelming, but try to book a table at Baita Fraina, an old country house a couple of kilometres out of town that does delicious regional dishes in a suitably rustic setting.

Cortina, it should be noted, is co-hosting this year’s Winter Olympics (it also hosted the 1956 Games) which tells you something about the quality of the slopes. Split into three areas, it has some of the highest elevation skiing in the Dolomites, and the longest on-piste runs (some over 10km).

We test ourselves on the women’s Olympic downhill course, then glide across the valley on another new gondola to ski beneath the astounding rock towers of Cinque Torri. It’s here that Barbiero wants to show us something – pointing his ski pole back across the valley towards Mount Lagazuoi. “That’s where the Austrians marched over the mountains.”

World War 1 reshaped the cultural map in the Dolomites. The mountains became a brutal front between Italian and Austro-Hungarian troops, and are still littered with trenches, bunkers and tunnels.

It became known as the ‘White War’ with the landscape itself used as a weapon - troops rolling boulders onto enemy positions and sawing through cornices or using explosives to trigger avalanches.

A century on, the mountains are still giving up their secrets. Barbiero has found bullets, shell casings and even rifles lying around. In 2012, the bodies of two soldiers were discovered in the rapidly melting Presena Glacier, shrapnel still lodged inside their skulls.

It’s difficult to reconcile the unquiet slumbers of soldiers with the serene slopes of Alpe Lusia - San Pellegrino resort. This frequently overlooked property has some of the best views in the Dolomites – including of the Marmolada, the highest peak – a modern, panoramic restaurant (Inalto Alfio Ghezzi) and impeccably groomed (and unfathomably empty) ski runs.

Our safari heads in a different direction that afternoon when we’re bundled into the back of a snowcat and carted like crooks in a divvy van up a narrow mountain path to the secluded Rifugio Fuciade.

One of around 1000 family-run rifugios in the Dolomites, its story follows a familiar arc. It was a farm for hundreds of years, Barbiero explains, until the business model changed around the 1960s. “Now they farm tourists.”

That’s fine. I climb the stairs to my bedroom (or barn, coop, pen or stable…) where my luggage is waiting. All that’s required of me tomorrow is to clip into my bindings and ski to the next town. Out my window the Dolomites are blush in shocking pink in the twilight. There’s nothing more to do but just look. dolomitemountains.com