The Dolomiti

The Italian thing to do in the winter is to go skiing. 

Luca has gone snowboarding with his friends for many years over the winter holidays, celebrating New Years up in the mountains. Since we both had a week off from the 30th to the 7th of December/January we decided to hit the slopes.

We started looking in October/November for a place to stay. We used booking.com and the criteria was really the best offer. We ended up finding the perfect lodge near La Marmolada, Hotel La Marianna, which offered both breakfast and dinner as part of the stay. 

 

We left early on January 1st and drove for about 3 hours through Veneto until we reached Rocca Pietore, which is a the tiny village where our Hotel was. It's beautiful driving through the Alps, but also nerve-racking, as the roads are very narrow, windy, and steep. 

I used to go skiing in the winter with my family up at Giants Ridge in Minnesota. My Dad taught me how to ski and after a few years I was able to do pretty much all of the runs at Giants Ridge. Of course Minnesota doesn't have mountains and the skiing I had experienced growing up was quite different.

The first day out on the slopes, we drove to the closest ski point which was Malga Ciapela. We had a nice day out, and we started nice and slow and easy since I hadn't skied in at least 6 years and Luca was very dubious of my skiing ability. 

There weren't a lot of options for skiing there, just one run which blue, the easiest piste, unless you took the cableway up to a much high point. 

The following day we decided to ski/snowboard at Alleghe. Here they had lots more blue runs and so I could some more practice in before trying out the red ones, which is medium difficulty. Attempting any black hills was completely out of the question. I was feeling pretty confident and I was able to do all the runs with Luca. 

However to ski, you need to be in shape. And I'm definitely out of shape. So near the end of day, my legs were dead tired, I was losing form, and was about ready to go home. So, on the last run which brings right down into the parking lot, I had a big fall, lost a ski, and was in tears. Thankfully, people in the mountains are very friendly. There is definitely a type of "helping-one-another-out" culture. As soon as a fell there was a skier behind me who grabbed my ski, brought it to me, stopped and helped me get it back on and stand up. 

Our third day in the Dolomites it snowed and snowed and snowed. All the snow meant that we couldn't go up high with a cableway and try out a different skiing area. The higher you go the more foggy it is and the more difficult it is to see. So we went back to the easy blue run at Malga Ciapela, but this time with a snowboard! 

The most difficult part about learning to snowboard that day was learning how to go up the hill with the T-Bar. Thankfully I wasn't the only one learning and there were other novice snowboarders who were falling over trying to hold on for dear life to the T-Bar as they're dragged up the hill. 

It was beautiful to be up in the mountains this time of year. In Bologna there isn't any snow, I was missing it. It fell so wintery and cozy with the snowfall and being out on the slopes. 

The North of Italy has a completely different feel. The architecture is different, the cuisine, and of course they have their own dialect too.