“Have you had a shat?” the beaming waiter asked. “A what?” I queried, thinking that I must have misheard. “A shat. I recommend it. It’s a local delicacy and tastes very good.” I looked down at where his finger was pointing on the menu and the fog cleared. “Oh! The sciatt. No, I can’t say I have. But I’ll certainly try it.” The sciatt — local dialect for toad — turned out to be delicious morsels of melted casera cheese encased in buckwheat (think camembert fritters, only nicer, and you won’t go far wrong). It’s commonly served in Livigno, the Italian ski town, as a starter to share, but it became so popular in our family that we nearly had a riot on our hands when our elder son ate the last one by mistake at another restaurant later in the week. Even our younger son, Samuel, who is prone to murmuring plaintively, “I only like cheddar cheese,” was hooked on it. And a platter of sciatt, enough to feed four as a starter, was only about €11 (£10) — far less than you might pay in the French Alps for a margherita pizza.
It was not only the sciatt at Luciano’s — a small mountainside restaurant on the Mottolino side of Livigno — that was outstanding: I can practically still taste the roasted porchetta and the moist lamb loin with almond crust. All the pasta is made on the premises, but even so I passed on the pizzoccheri (another local speciality, of buckwheat tagliatelle with savoy cabbage, potatoes, butter and Swiss chard) because it is incredibly filling.
Not for nothing is Livigno known as “Little Tibet”. The village is set on a plateau high in the Italian Alps — the local beer, 1816, takes its name from Livigno’s altitude in metres — and is surrounded on three sides by Switzerland. It has a pleasingly remote, end-of-the-line feel: the only way in or out (unless you want a long detour) is through a rustic single-lane road tunnel carved through rock by the Swiss in 1965. Livigno’s altitude means that the snow tends to last well into the latter throes of the season. When we visited last Easter there was fresh snow falling daily (last winter, all agreed, was exceptional). There are two main ski areas, one either side of the resort: Costaccia-Carosello 3000 and Mottolino. You can follow the sun round, skiing one side in the morning and the other in the afternoon. It is, though, a bit tricky to get from one side to the other: either a tiresome trek across the valley floor or a short bus ride (of which more later).
The runs are wide, well groomed and there are two well-designed fun parks (one incorporating a “stranded” fighter jet) and mini fun parks at the bottom of almost every run in the village, some of which have Olympic-style entry gates, jumps and timers.
Everyone we met seemed to have been coming to Livigno for 20 years, and in the case of Amanda Bench, the marvellously helpful, fairy-godmother-like Inghams rep, to treat it like a second home (it’s the only place she will go in winter and hopes one day to retire there). After a while it became clear why: wonderful (and inexpensive) food, genuinely friendly people, good hotels, duty-free shops galore (a tourist perk offered in Livigno’s infancy, but which the village has somehow clung to) and a wealth of extracurricular activities, making it the ideal resort if one of you doesn’t like downhill skiing. There are 30km of cross-country skiing, snow-shoeing, ice skating, tobogganing, husky sledding and “fatbiking” (not what you think — it’s normal bikes with fat, studded tyres for cycling on snow), ice rally driving, snowmobiling, bowling and ice go-karting — you name it, they’ve got it.
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The après-ski is good too, if you have any energy left; most people seem to gravitate to Miky’s Pub by the end of the night. If you have younger children in tow, the best places for pizza are Mario’s and the Bait dal Ghet (“House of the Cat”, but be prepared to queue). For ice cream it’s hard to beat Goloseria Galli, near the bottom of Mottolino — the ice cream is made below the shop and it’s exquisite (try the hazelnut or the strawberry; €1.80 for two scoops).
We stayed at the Hotel Lac Salin, arguably the best hotel in Livigno. It overlooks the pistes, has excellent restaurants, stylish balconies and a fabulous indoor pool and spa complex. The manager, Mauro, is a joy. After a fall left me temporarily unable to ski he took me and my younger son snowshoeing with his dog in the mountains, close to the Swiss border. The silence and sense of isolation were intoxicating. Had we had more time we would have yielded instantly to Mauro’s entreaties to go cross-country skiing with him.
The only slight downside to the resort is the colour-coded bus network. The verde (green) bus is actually yellow — the electronic sign on the front of the bus says green, but the bus itself is painted bright yellow. Or white. It’s all rather confusing. One man in my ski lessons group, a regular visitor to Livigno, said he had already come once this year — simply to master the buses.
But that’s a piffling quibble; the upsides dwarf any downsides, and I can imagine my family joining the select band of Brits who regard Livigno like their second home.
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Andrew Riley was a guest of Inghams (01483 791114, inghams.co.uk), which has seven nights’ half-board at the four-star Hotel Lac Salin from £1,428pp based on two adults and two children sharing at Easter, including flights and transfers. For more information see livigno.eu