Hard skiing and history lessons in the German bit of Italy

We had watched enough downhill racing from Val Gardena on Ski Sunday for the colossal fists of limestone punching skywards out of giant snowy pillows to appear familiar. What my teenage sons and I were not expecting in the Dolomites was a history lesson on skis. However, over a few days on these slopes in the S?dtirol - the largely German-speaking part of northern Italy bordering Austria - we kept stumbling across snippets of the past. First, we learned that this region was ceded to Italy in 1919 as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s price for being on the losing side of the First World War. We flew to Verona, which is as Italian as mozzarella. But on the two-hour drive north we began to notice that towns have names in both Italian and German: Bolzano/Bozen, for instance, or Merano/Meran. We reached our destination at the head of the Gardena valley, slithering into snowbound Selva/Wolkenstein, a village of glockenspiels, Gothic lettering and Tirolean kitsch. On our first morning, the boys made a beeline for the ‘Saslong’ World Cup run, tearing down the tree-lined main sweep and leaping the legendary ‘camel humps’. This is one of several black-graded pistes which allow the Val Gardena ski area its claim to having some of the best expert-orientated terrain in the vast ‘Dolomiti Superski’ area. The run is accessible via the Sella Ronda, an extraordinary network of lifts and runs which form a circuit around the Sella mountain range, and link together a string of S?dtirolean villages and their own local ski areas. In all you have access to over 1,000 kilometres of pistes – more even that France’s celebrated Three Valleys – on a single lift pass. The Sella Ronda route itself can be completed in an easy day, which we did in the steely January sunshine with Irene Delazzer of the local tourist board. Most of the runs are relatively easy (reds and blues), with options here and there to escape the crowds and deviate into more testing terrain - such as the Serrai gulley, a forbidding cleft between crumpled curtains of purple-tinged ice. Behind the icefalls are caves hewn out of the rockface by soldiers over the bitter winter of 1916 and used to store weapons. Irene proved to be a fount of knowledge about the fighting which raged between Austrian and Italian forces, in the very valleys we were skiing. War and piste, if you like. I was still finding the notion of German-speaking Italians  bizarre, when Irene mentioned casually that neither language was her native one. It turns out that Tirolean Teutons are not the only minority lurking in these mountains. There are also the Ladins, an ancient people now confined to Selva and a scattering of other Dolomite villages. They have their own culture, and a language claimed as their mother tongue by about 18,000 people. Not that Ladins have ever have referred to their homeland as the ‘Dolomites’. This staggeringly scenic and geologically-unique chunk of the Alps was, according to a leaflet I picked up, named after the aristocratic 18th-century French geologist Dieudonne Sylvain Guy Tancrede de Dolomieu. A Ladin lunch, we discovered, is as distinctive as the scenery. Stopping at wooden mountain refuges hung with icicles, we enjoyed staples such as panicia (barley soup) and turtres (crispy pancakes filled with spinach), with carafes of lightish red wine made from the indigenous S?dtirolean lagrein grape. Back down in Selva, we did find dashes of Italy in the fashion boutiques, fragrant cafés frothing with cappuccinos, and more bars and restaurants than you would believe. Between skiing and dinner, Prada-clad Romans and Florentines paraded past the ice sculptures of the main square, in a nightly passeggiata. The Italians bring glitz to the S?dtirol. However, we had opted for a cosy little three-star, Hotel Serena, mainly because it is bang next to a piste, and as ski in/ski out as you can get. The Serena is run by Marios, an ebullient Greek with a rasping voice, and his wife Assunta - who prepared nightly themed dinners that included local Tirolean delicacies served by waiters in felt hats and Lederhosen. There was even a ‘Notte Italiana’ of operatic arias and prosecco, not to mention exotica such as polenta and tiramisu. Yes an ‘Italian Night’ in Italy. Unsurprisingly, the teenagers were soon out looking for edgier nightlife at the showier end of town. Overall, the skiing in Val Gardena is up there with any in the Alps; the Dolomites provide a fantastic backdrop; and the region’s history has created a captivating hotchpotch of cultures. In fact, the bit I enjoyed most was skiing through First World War battle sites with a German-and-Italian-speaking Ladin.