Winter skiing in Tuscany

If you are going on holiday, or thinking about going on holiday to Tuscany this winter, no doubt you’ll be pondering your Italian break itinerary. With many great ski resorts scattered among the Tuscan mountains, beautiful crisp pistes are just waiting to be explored with the skies.

Fir winter skiing in Tuscany, see resorts such as Abetone, Careggine, Castiglione di Garfagnana, Cutigliano and others. Why not take a welcome change of scenery from the usual Alpine ski holiday?

Abetone for example is what you could refer to as a ‘down to earth’ ski resort filled with genuine folk who don’t find it necessary to drape themselves in the razzamatazz of the likes of Gstaad, Verbier or Chamonix.

Abetone means ‘Big Fir’ and as you can imagine this gem of a resort is surrounded by huge fir trees – perhaps this is why Abetone remains such as secret?  Though being only one and a half hour’s drive north of Florence, Abetone is no secret to the Florence skiing fraternity.

The mountains here are approximately 6000 feet but that’s sufficient to take a good dose of snow. Do you remember ‘Zeno’, the great Italian skier who was king of the skiing world in the fifties?

Zeno was born in Abetone and these slopes nurtured his talent and made him the star skier he became.

There are over forty trails and twenty ski lifts in Abetone. You can start you day’s skiing high above the tree line in the ‘valley of light’ and work your way back to base. The views are stunning over the snow and tree clad mountains and to anyone who had the idea there is no decent skiing outside of the Alps and the Dolomites they would have to think again.

Winter skiing in Tuscany generally starts in mid-December and goes through to early April.

With the crisp, firm snow, the sky heavenly blue and the thick fir forests doused in fluffy white powder, you’ll be hard pushed to find a more quintessential setting for an exhilarating skiing experience than in Tuscany.