On top of the world

It promised to be a good day. At 8am, the sun shone a pink spotlight on the 3,200m peak of the Tofana ridge, directly across the plateau from my room in the Hotel Cristallo. To the west, silhouetted against the cool-blue sky, the Cinque Torri looked – in the half-light – like the crooked, broken teeth of a medieval peasant. On the Tofana face, bright orange safety nets were clearly visible against the pure white of a racing piste on which Carole Montillet would have a very good day, winning the Super-G World Cup event. And to the north-east, imposing Dolomite rocks reared up like castles in the air guarding the entrance to the Boite valley.

No one can fail to be impressed by the landscape at Cortina d'Ampezzo, about two hours' drive from Venice. The Where to Ski and Snowboard guide describes its scenery as "perhaps the most dramatic of any winter resort", while the Good Skiing Guide singles Cortina out "for the sheer beauty of its setting". Staring out across the town, set on the wide valley floor and dominated by a rocket-like, grey-stone church tower, even the most hard-hearted onlooker could not quibble with those judgements; the more poetic might even go along with the Italian edition of Condé Nast Traveller magazine, which considers the location to have been "kissed by God".

In purely skiing terms, Cortina is open to criticism. It has several ski areas, the nearest served by lifts on opposite sides of the town (big enough to house a resident population of 6,000), the most distant connected by a bus service that does not meet with universal approval. And apart from the highly regarded nursery slopes – notably in the Socrepes area – most of the skiing is intermediate level, dominated by fast, sweeping, red runs. The lift-system is not the most impressive, either.

Last week, the resort was extremely quiet, the long Italian Christmas/New Year break – extended by a national holiday for Epiphany – having just ended; and the exodus of Italians (who make up 70 per cent of Cortina's visitors) gave the slopes a "skiing as it used to be" calm. Queues were non-existent; but the lifts added to the languid atmosphere, many of them merely ambling up the mountains.

And at the top of the ponderous, two-stage Faloria cable-car a piste-board did, fleetingly, give rise to the thought that the "retro" flavour might be the result of a conscious strategy: it implied that an old-fashioned drag-lift nearby was a replacement for a chair-lift. But what would be a major irritant in a modern, purpose-built resort seemed almost a boon here. Why rush up the mountain – or be distracted by difficult terrain on the way down – in surroundings as stunning as those of the Dolomites?

The day of arrival on my short, first skiing trip to Cortina was marked by a superb risotto at the Lago Ghedina restaurant, in a sylvan, lakeside setting that even a late-19th-century oil-painter under the influence of Thoreau's Walden Pond would consider implausibly romantic. The second day, spent on the Faloria slopes, offered a close-up view of the Dolomites, which I had previously only seen at a distance on a summer cycling trip.

Until some 40 million years ago, the Dolomites lay beneath the sea. A mixture of marine sediment and igneous rock, they were subjected to metamorphosis by heat and pressure before being corrugated and thrust upwards by the collision of tectonic plates. Among the variety of materials from which the resulting mountains were formed, the previously unknown calcium magnesium carbonate proved dominant in samples collected in the late 18th century by a French mineralogist called Dolomieu. The mountains' appearance – unlike that of others in the Alps – gave them an unusual appeal to English 19th-century "Grand Tourists". Two of them wrote a book called The Dolomite Mountains, which led to the whole range being named after its dominant mineral.

Although they can look pink at sunrise and sunset (or almost terracotta in full sunlight), the stark rocks are actually a greyish brown leavened with warmer, sandier striations. Deeply riven in softer areas, the faces are so steep that they hold only a dusting of snow in their wrinkles.

Elsewhere in the Alps, a covering of snow will flatten out the relief of the mountainsides; here the snowy detailing catches the light in such a way as to make the Dolomites not so much three-dimensional as like a hyper-realist landscape. Ski down the blue run towards the trees at the bottom of the Pian de Re Bigontina chair-lift and it's impossible not to stop and stare at the astonishing Pomagagnon face. And, in the presence of such beauty, hard to start skiing again.

But the third, pink-tinged morning promised even better things: a clear, sunny day and a descent of the Armentarola Valley, a run that figures in most skiers' lists of the most stunning in the Alps.

A cable-car from the 2,105m Falzarego pass runs up to the Lagazuoi peak. From there, one piste drops back down to the pass; another heads into a narrow valley, with the two-tone brown mountains crowding in on either side. The Fanes range on the right is the more dramatic, oddly reminiscent of Monument Valley, star of many Western films; it rises to a peak of just under 3,000m. The range on the left is lower, but steeper; and halfway along is a waterfall, frozen into a massive set of upside-down, aquamarine, organ pipes.

For some five kilometres, the so-called "hidden valley" consists of nothing but snow and Dolomites. Other skiers? I saw four on the entire descent to where – on the flat part – I hitched up for the horse-drawn drag back to civilisation.

Returning to the other side of the Falzarego pass there were further treats. First, a superb chair-lift ride to a Dolomite-ringed snowfield with the five, stubby Cinque Torri rocks at its centre; then, after a journey by single-seat chair and tow-rope, a remarkable meal on the sunny terrace of the Rifugio Averau. A good day? Much more than that.

Inghams (020-8780 4433; www.inghams.co.uk) offers one-week packages at the five-star Hotel Cristallo from £1,389 per person (half-board, based on two sharing), including flights from Gatwick or – for a supplement – Exeter, Stansted, Manchester and Birmingham. Packages to other hotels (including three-star) are also available, from £498