Wintering Over in the Dolomites
02 June 2016 | Cortina d'Ampezzo
-gd
Well, this plan certainly worked for us! Debbie and I both thoroughly enjoyed our winter based in Cortina even though it didn’t start to snow until late February. A life-long dream of spending the winter skiing in Europe coupled with a six year drought of virtually no skiing due to multiple injuries combined to overcome the frightening reality of skiing off the edge of the man-made snow and spitting dirt out of your teeth! While the scenery was not living up to the normal spectacular winter setting of Cortina, the on-piste man-made skiing was excellent. The Europeans know how to make artificial snow and they make it top to bottom on almost every run. The unseasonal high-pressure made for sunny days and the crisp nights kept the pistes firm while the impeccable Italian grooming kept them smooth enough for our battered bodies to enjoy.
We love Italy, the food and scenery obviously, but especially the people who uniformly go out of their way to help the often smiling but poor Italian speakers from California. It helps that many have been to California and the ones that haven’t want to go. If a couple of cultural differences are jarring, you can’t get anything done between 1:30 and 4:00 while everything is closed for lunch, others have been easy to adapt to: I like the Italian custom of not hitting the slopes until after ten (and then only if the sun is shining), breaking for lunch at 1:00 (we get in at 12:30 to beat the crowds) and then a couple of more runs in the afternoon after coffee. Aperos start at 4-5:00 and dinner at 8:00. Once again we arrive at 7:30 to beat the crowds during the high season. The Italians are so steeped in tradition that the time to eat dinner is 8:00 and not before.
One of our Italian friends rolled her eyes when we said we wanted to spend the winter in Cortina. It’s far too trendy and jet set for her sensibilities and she can’t understand why we like it so much. The fact that neither Debbie nor I brought fur coats to wear on the nightly stroll on the passagiata did nothing to diminish our delight with the people watching. Our small one bedroom apartment is literally 50 feet from the main pedestrian walkway, one of our two favorite coffee places is next door and the Enoteca Cortina, owned for the past 44 years by the incomparable Jerry, a two minute stroll down our street. The ski bus stop 5 minutes away, the Cooperativa for groceries and literally anything else you might want 2 minutes in the other direction. Our biggest inconvenience (!) was a 15 minute walk to the public parking garage where we kept our car.
The skiing is the absolute best for us at this point in our careers with the aforementioned perfect grooming, 450 lifts connecting a plethora of different villages and all the pistes lined with rifugios, many serving excellent food. The scenery is beyond compare and then there is Sara… Sara is our Italian tutor and new friend whose family has been in the Ampezzano valley for over 300 years. She has introduced us to her family and steeped us in the traditions of the Ladin life in the mountain villages of the di Cadore and Ampezzano valleys. She is 44, full of life and has two wonderful daughters. Anna, her mother is the most generous of hostesses. We can’t stop by without drinks being insisted upon, or if mealtime, an assumption we will stay for a home cooked meal. They even shared old family photos including one of Anna’s father in a group ski school photo with all of the instructors wearing the swastika armband of the Third Reich. (The only way to survive if you wanted to feed your family). It’s interesting to visualize Cortina as an agrarian area only a generation ago…
It’s now the end of June and we’re planning a few days in Cortina in July to see Sara and go hiking and to secure ‘our’ appartemente for next season.