Skiing in Sestriere, Italy

Sestriere, Italy 39 inches and 55 inch storm total. One of the world's pioneering ski areas, and certainly Italy's, Sestrière was built by the Fiat car company in 1934. The mountain-top Possetto hotel first opened through the winter a decade earlier and more lifts and hotels opened before 1934. It was one of the earliest and still one of the highest purpose- built ski stations and was established in Valsusa, an area on the French border where downhill skiing was first taught in Italy by a Swiss engineer, Alfredo Kind. Today the resort where those lessons took place a century ago, the border village of Clavière, is linked by lift to Sestrière itself in the huge Milky Way.