One of Italy’s leading resorts, Val Gardena, opens on Thursday, December 3rd after the region received up to a metre (40 inches) of fresh snow on the slopes in recent days.

It is part of the giant Dolomiti Superski area, one of the world’s largest single-lift-ticket ski areas covering some 50 resorts in 12 valleys that together offer 1,200km of piste served by nearly 500 ski lifts.

This area began opening last week and will be fully open by next weekend, with resorts like Cortina claiming some of the biggest snowfalls in Europe of the past week, with accumulations of over 1.2m (four feet).

It’s good snow news at most other Italian destinations popular with UK skiers too. Bormio has seen some of the biggest snowfalls of the past few days and now reports it has more than 1.8m (six feet) of snow lying, which should be enough to last all winter.

Monterosa, home to resorts including Alagna, Champoluc and Gressoney, which had to postpone opening planned for last weekend because of a thaw in mid-November of the big snowfall accumulations from earlier in the month, will now open on Saturday after it received several feet of snow.

The Milky Way pass resorts of Claviere, Sestriere, Sansicario, Pragelato and Sauze d’Oulx which are linked to Montgenevre over the border in France will also open on the 5th.

Resorts that are already open like Cervinia and Livigno also added half a metre (20 inches) to their covering of white stuff.

http://www.valgardena.it/