PASTA MOUNTAIN
This Club Med skiing village in Italy offers family-friendly slopes and a buffet of activities, writes Stephen Wood
Skiing in Italy comes with all sorts of benefits
HOW do you choose a ski destination for young children? With difficulty. Adults select a resort by weighing up and trading off variables that include vertical drop, snow reliability, lift links, Michelin-starred restaurants and spa treatments, but kids just don’t get the big picture.
For my offspring, Lily, 11, and Stanley, nine, the basics of a resort are in place if hot chocolate and digital entertainment are streaming; beyond that, nothing else is certain, not even an enthusiasm for skiing — except when they are actually doing it.
Most parents choose the safe option and take their children to a family-holiday destination. But the term “family holiday” can be nuanced in different ways, and it embraces resorts where kids can go from breakfast to bedtime while hardly seeing their parents. These days, pre-teens are too sophisticated to fall for that sort of thing. If it involves being harangued by overstretched instructors, moving at the pace of the slowest in their group and missing out on treats, our two don’t want a family holiday. They’d rather be with Mum and Dad.
So what brought us to Club Med at Pragelato? Nothing as obvious as the mountains, the slopes, the childcare or the range of facilities and activities. Its real ace is the buffet. Kids love a good, big buffet — and in good, big buffets, Club Med is a world leader.
The set-up at Pragelato is unusual — it’s a holiday village, while other Club Med wintersports resorts are hotel-based. The village dwellings, each with their own front door, come in a variety of shapes and sizes, from Club Rooms for single guests through Club Apartments sleeping as many as 10, to Suites that have a lounge, a kitchen (blessed with a Lavazza espresso coffee machine) and beds for up to seven guests, plus a cot.
The units are grouped together in sociable huddles around the central piazza, a busy place with restaurants, bars and shops, plus — where the parish church would be in a real village — a gondola that whisks guests up into the Milky Way, a ski area with 400km of pistes and 75 lifts.
Our mornings went smoothly. We joined the throng of villagers heading towards the piazza and into the main restaurant, Il Piemonte.
Its buffet entirely lived up to expectations — so much so that we barely sampled the Italian specialities offered in the village’s other two table-service restaurants. The children hurried off and returned joyfully carrying unsuitable chocolate-based or topped treats, with an egg on the side. My wife ate the healthy stuff, and I had a croissant and savoured the espresso made by the hyperactive chef du village, Eric Lejeune. Second helpings were hurried, though; we had to get the kids to their separate ski clubs (due to their different ages), each one involving lessons, lunch and activities — at least on the first two days.
Pragelato is a community of villages set at 5 250ft in the Via Lattea (Milky Way) ski area of Italy’s Piedmont region, 110km from Turin and 15 minutes’ drive from the resort of Sestriere. Before 2006 the world paid little mind to it. But in that year, Turin hosted the Winter Olympics, and the ski jumping events took place in Pragelato’s narrow valley, where the organising committee created two stateof-the-art jumps (surfaced with ceramic for year-round use after the games) and a chairlift that accesses a red run down to the village.
The giant ramps protruding from the hillside and the startlingly steep landing areas, planted with 60cm-long blades of plastic grass, remain a stirring sight. But unfortunately the entire facility is now disused, a victim of well-intentioned but unrealistic management of the Olympic legacy.
A little further up the road lies our holiday village, with 770 beds. It, too, was built for the 2006 Olympics, and it has also flirted with failure. When it reopened as a holiday resort after the Olympics, the original investors struggled to make it work. An Edinburgh property company bought it, leased it to Club Med and then sold the freehold to the French HSBC — and it is now a thriving family resort.
Why is the village now such a success, with a claimed occupancy rate of 85%? The daily schedule of events posted at the piazza gives a clue. On a sample day, I counted 21 activities and entertainments between the 8.15am muscle warm-up and the 10.15pm nightclub show. Add the diversions available at the spa, pool and fitness room, and in the three kids’ clubs, plus the 14-hours-per-day food service, and you’ll get an idea of the effort Club Med makes to keep the place humming.
And that’s just in the winter. In summer, snow sports are swapped for golf, hiking and mountain biking and there’s an outdoor swimming pool. With direct access to the slopes, the village served Olympic competitors well; for holidaymakers wanting a busy resort, its out-of-the-way location was less desirable. Club Med’s philosophy of bringing the resort atmosphere in-house solved Pragelato’s problem.
When our kids Lily and Stan skied with us, they got what they wanted — including, on a whim, a drag-lift ride. Drag lifts are few and far between here, but on the piste map I found one, Orsiera, which accesses a red run. As we rode up, however, a slalom course was being set up on it so, rather than get tangled up with racers, we took a similar-looking run on the other side of the lift. In a howling gale we tacked back and forth across what turned out to be a very steep slope, with some big berms. We were elated at the bottom, and more so in the evening when we discovered that we had skied a black run rated among the toughest in the Milky Way, known simply as number 64. Naturally, the children insisted that we ski it again the following day.
Club Med holidays are all-inclusive, and not only in the resort. Guests can present vouchers at a couple of mountain restaurants — our longest ski adventure took us across Sestriere and into the neighbouring Sauze d’Oulx valley, where we were able to have a meal at Mollino Chalet, at the top of the Lago Nero lift.
But the highlight of the trip was going to the Sestriere golf course, which when covered with snow is ideal for dog-sledding. This was an add-on activity, bookable through Club Med at à60 each, and it was a great success.
Ordinary dog-sledding rides are two-apenny. But on this sled the children didn’t ride; they drove. In a short but intense briefing, Lily and Stanley learnt how to steer the sled and how to make their husky team start, slow down and stop. (These were English-speaking dogs — the commands were respectively “OK”, “easy” and “whoa” — but Stanley did try saying “whoa” with an Italian accent.) A final briefing included instruction on righting a capsized sled, using the brake — a metal plate dug into the snow — and helping the dogs by pushing on inclines. Then they were off, led by a guide towards the back nine holes of the course.
Flushed with excitement, they returned after half an hour, and spent almost as long petting Balto, Tebe, Ibis, Ra and the other dogs. A great success? It was more than that. Next time we discuss our holiday destination, the children will want to know about the dog-sledding options. And their parents, habituated to dishes such as Palermo-style shrimps with black rice and fresh tomato, and ricotta and spinach ravioli served with almonds, will want to be sure that the buffet is up to scratch. — ©
Its real ace is the buffet. Kids love a good big buffet, and in good, big buffets, Club Med is a world leader