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It's not often that Marika Favé, our impish, fast-talking mountain guide, falls silent. It's a spring morning on the packed, sun-streaked gondola to the peak of the Marmolada glacier, the highest point in the Dolomites. A former national skier for Italy whose family has lived in the Fassa Valley for generations, Favé has been telling Jack, the photographer I'm traveling with, and me about the grimly determined Austro-Hungarian soldiers who dug a small city into the ice up here during the Great War. But as the gondola passes another rocky bluff and great blankets of untouched shadow-draped powder come into view, the war stories cease and a grin spreads across her face. We don't know exactly what the plan is when the gondola clanks to a halt at the Punta Rocca, a viewing platform at 10,700 feet that looks out over all of the Dolomites. But the mountain air seems charged with the palpable sense that, on this exact Thursday morning, something very good is about to happen.
It's the fourth morning of a seven-day ski safari across the mountain range, which involves us snowboarding to a new lodging each night—our bags appearing, as if by magic, at a mix of crisp modern hotels with glassy spas and family-run mountain rifugi, or cozy inns, the latter often with a son or a partner overseeing an improbably good locavore kitchen. The trip has been organized by Dolomite Mountains, an innovative and impressive company founded by Argentine Agustina Lagos Marmol and run mainly by a group of warm, no-nonsense women. And I've already fallen hard for the Dolomites, just as everyone who's ever been here promised I would.
I've fallen for the Tolkien-worthy visual drama of its snaggletoothed peaks, crafted over millennia, mostly from the eponymous rock that's lighter in color than the granite and gneiss of so much of the Alps. I have fallen for the mind-boggling spectrum of skiing across the almost 750 miles of slopes in the Dolomiti Superski. But most of all I've fallen for the civilized patchwork of cultures across what is often referred to as the Pale Mountains—from the Italian film stars and glamour of Cortina d'Ampezzo in the east, which is waiting for its Winter Olympic close-up in 2026, to the autonomous western province of South Tyrol, where German is the most spoken language and areas such as Val Gardena, with its woodcarving tradition, feel more Austrian than Italian. It is a region where traditional Italian food and hospitality culture meets Teutonic design and wellness, and agrarian-provenance worship aligns with an increasingly urgent contemporary impulse toward sustainability.
Really, though, the Dolomites are a series of high passes linking beautiful valleys with their own immaculately preserved microcultures, especially at the heart of the mountain range, where 30,000 or so people still speak the ancient Ladin language. This area includes the comfortable Alta Badia valley and Val di Fassa, home to tiny Campitello di Fassa, where Favé's family has lived, mostly as subsistence farmers, for as long as anyone can remember. (Their last name refers to the Ladino word for racks designed to dry fava beans.) Favé's grandmother Carlotta Micheluzzi, who lived to 98, grew up as a Ladina Austrian. But after the region was handed to Italy in the wake of the First World War, she became Italian overnight. Mussolini would later send teachers from the south to Italianize the region as part of a nationalist push. But the locals—including Micheluzzi, who was better educated than most Southern Italians—resisted almost as resolutely as the soldiers of the mountains had during the war. “Mussolini wanted to wipe this culture out, but even his machismo couldn't do it,” says Favé. “In my grandmother's heart, she was always Ladin first and then Austrian.”
Favé, who speaks Ladin and four other languages, is clearly proud of this defiant border-region lineage—as is her teenage daughter, whom we meet on the mountain one day as she prepares for a ski race—not just proud of a once-threatened culture that is stronger than ever, but of being shaped by these mountains. Favé's father, Renzo, was chief of the local mountain rescue, and turbo-charged skiing is in her genes. (“If I want to go slowly, I'll go for a walk,” she says.) When church finished, Favé would run home to watch ski racing on TV. She had her mother knit her a ski hat in the Swedish colors worn by her favorite racer, Ingemar Stenmark. After skiing in European and World Cup races for Italy, she became a mountain guide—as proficient at ascending steep rock faces as finding sly backcountry descents. Despite being a shameless queue jumper who seems to slide through ski lift crowds like water, she's clearly respected and adored by countless people across the valleys. In nearly every mountain restaurant—before the waiter tells us which of his uncle's cows we're about to eat and which Tyrolean vineyard produced this full-bodied Lagrein red—we are unfussily ushered to the best seats.
In the safe hands of our adoptive ski mother, who rolls her eyes as Jack and I take time to do up our snowboard bindings, we explore this Alpine wonderland while musing on geology, food, life, and love. One day we cruise from Alta Badia to Alpe di Siusi via the arcing red runs of the famous Sellaronda circuit and the Val Gardena, stopping at the storybook town of Ortisei, with its delicately painted façades. We snowboard in Arabba, Civetta, and San Pellegrino, and crouch as we pass through the old wartime tunnels and machine gun outlooks at the snow-covered peak of Lagazuoi. We end up in the chic resort town of Cortina d'Ampezzo, overlooked by the dramatic Cinque Torri (Five Towers) rock formation. After so much time around rustic hay barns, it's a bit of a culture shock to suddenly be surrounded by chatty Italian friends, women who change from one-piece ski suits to cowboy hats and ponchos like creatures airlifted from Coachella for an aperitivo.
The hotels and rifugi also change pace. At Alpe di Siusi we almost snowboard right into Como Alpina Dolomites, which looks like a glassy architectural spaceship that has landed in a snow-lashed sequel to The Sound of Music. I spend the morning alone in the indoor-outdoor pool before joining Jack again that evening, where we find ourselves in the no-frills wood barrel sauna of Baita Dovich as thick snow falls silently upon the deep valley. A few days later we arrive by snowcat at Rifugio Fuciade. It is a collection of wood cabins, a little church, and a series of curious art installations on a high plateau. The installations and the rifugio are the life work of Emanuela and Sergio Rossi, who have collected every accordion, wood mask, and traditional butter stamp and put them on display in the labyrinthine main building where Mirò, the Labrador, wanders freely. Emanuela and Sergio's son Martino is in the kitchen, and his menu is remarkable, running from juniper-smoked venison to ciajoncie pasta with wild pears and figs. It's accompanied by a wine list of more than 500 labels (many of them local) from the cellar, near another room where dried meats from the family's pigs are curing. This sort of setup is typical of an area that is, even by Italian standards, one of the great foodie regions. Zero-mile provenance, the protection of produce, and the minimization of waste aren't marketing gimmicks but long-held shibboleths in a place where the farmer-supplier is often a family member.
Yet for all the earthy hyperlocality, the Dolomites also feel intrinsically forward-looking. At the imposing stone Hotel Pordoi, a former church school on the onetime Austrian border, at more than 7,000 feet, the xx plays on the stereo. Gloria Finazzer tells me that seeing the slow effects of climate change spurred her family to turn the restaurant into an airy vegetarian spot called Aidin, where an intense focus on the supply chain lies behind every spaetzle and spinach-and-ricotta pie, equalled only by an obsession with eradicating food waste. Many of the rifugi are overseen by matriarchs such as the cheerful Claudia Valleferro at the Berghotel Passo Giau, an old-school hut dwarfed by a great hunk of dolomite that resembles a gargantuan middle finger. At the new Hotel de Len in Cortina—all glass and geometric recycled wood, from the same management company as Puglia's iconic Borgo Egnazia—the general manager isn't some suited Swiss-educated stiff, but the 30-something Carla Medri, who has imbued the deft team here with casual professionalism. Her progressive hospitality ideas cover including more Braille and clean electricity, along with a nuanced take on the Olympics and the resulting hotel boom. As with a lot of people I meet in the Dolomites, she is extremely easy to get along with.
But it's that Thursday on the Marmolada glacier that lingers most. It feels like a blue-sky cleanse after days of intermittent snow that has left the little mountain huts laden with thick piles of the white stuff. At the panoramic terrace at the summit, after the expectant scrum of the gondola, there are selfie sticks and boom box strains of the Black Eyed Peas as we survey an epic panorama: the whole Dolomites laid out before us like an indescribably beautiful white diorama, as if art-directed for an irascible god. We are clearly not the only people who have waited most of the winter for this morning. But we are the only people who are with Favé, and she has a plan.
With snowboards on, we traverse sharply left and keep going, as the ant-like figures on the wide piste thin out behind us. Beneath us is a shimmering expanse of untouched snow like powdered sugar, winking in the spring sun; the odd shadow; the frozen Fedaia Lake far below. In the exquisite silence Favé can't quite bring herself to do the whole guiding thing. Every fiber of her being is itching to go. So we ride: swooshing, gliding, carving, and hollering in the weightless happiness of it all, unable to make a false turn, each powdery stack inducing a subtly different shade of joy. At the bottom, more than six miles of floating ends at a little car park; the three of us hug without hesitation. The endorphins still tingling, we walk across a little bridge to the lakeside Rifugio Castiglioni Marmolada for a restorative radler. When we're done, Aurelio Soraruf is waiting: a mountain old-timer with a snowmobile and a rope, ready to drag us, wakeboard-style, across the frozen Fedaia. And as we whiz across the flat whiteness and pass walking skiers who have also taken backcountry routes down the glacier, we encounter admiration rather than resentment. “Bella vita!” calls out one man. At the other side, as we strap on our boards to do it all again, Favé looks us up and down with that faintly amused half-smile of hers. “Spoiled, spoiled boys,” she says, finally. “Now we ski.”
Modern hotels
On the high Alpe di Siusi plateau, a crisp mod-Alpine style prevails at the Como Alpina Dolomites, as seen in the 60 rooms with wood headboards, the slouchy, hedonistic communal areas with pool tables and oversized chessboards, and the three restaurants, including the Northern Italian Trattoria Dell'Alpe. True to brand form, the Como Shambhala wellness area is the highlight, with its indoor-outdoor pool, NASA-designed Space Curl posture machine, and extensive treatments such as guided daily meditations in the sauna with essential oil infusions. Cortina d'Ampezzo is in the midst of a pre–Winter Olympics hotel boom, with classics like the Bellevue, Cristallo, and Ancora getting makeovers. The 22-room Hotel de Len, which means “of wood” in Ladino, is a new boutique in Japandi style by some of the team from Puglia's much-loved Borgo Egnazia. Cool staffers in brown-checked shirts lead guests to dawn yoga sessions in the glassy top-floor spa or to aperitivi at the art-filled basement cocktail bar. They're also happy to explain the mostly plastics-free hotel's focus on sustainability, including the recycled woods that help reduce net carbon emissions.
Traditional stays
Rifugio mountain huts, generally family-owned inns with simple rooms and serious food, are a key part of Dolomiti culture. A prime example is Baita Dovich, originally built in 1963 on a quiet valley roadside near the Marmolada glacier. Co-owner Manuela Chizzali charms guests while her husband, Jacopo, works in the kitchen turning out elevated Tyrolean dishes like canederli bread dumplings with porcini mushrooms and local Tisoi cheese. Berghotel Passo Giau has an even more spectacular location, on a high mountain pass west of Cortina, and a more old-school vibe, with fossil-stone walls, crucifixes, and a wood-paneled dining room. Hotel Pordoi, outside Arabba, is a beautiful old stone building that serves hyperlocal vegetarian food at its Aidin restaurant, including a fabulous spinach-and-ricotta pie and a raspberry-compote kaiserschmarrn, the Austrian pancake dessert ubiquitous in the Dolomites. The quirkiest of all is the Rifugio Fuciade, cradled by mountains high above the Fassa Valley. The main building, which sits just beyond a little church, is a warren of small rooms crammed with ephemera like wood masks, accordions, and butter rollers that owners Emanuela and Sergio Rossi have acquired over the years.
Mountain restaurants
It's hard to eat badly in the Dolomites. The locals tend to drink radlers and Trentino Lagrein red wines, often with a cheese-and-meat board. The terrace at Baita Daniel Hütte in Val Gardena is a great spot to look over the valley while sampling rare Tyrolean beef, while Masi Wine Bar in Cortina does excellent aperitivo. A standout lunch is the epic tomahawk steak in the very Alpine-trad Ciamberlain room at Baita Paradiso in San Pellegrino. We were served there by Marco Defrancesco, whose father owns the restaurant and whose uncle owns the cows that produce the meat as well as the Maso Ciamberlain vineyard, which made the 2021 Lagrein red. Back at Rifugio Fuciade, the family farm supplies ingredients in dishes like veal stew with polenta, cooked by the Rossis' son Martino.
This article appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
