Dolomites, Italy

The Dolomites sit apart from the higher-profile Alpine resorts in France and Switzerland: villages like Ortisei and Corvara are smaller, cable cars do more of the climbing than lifts do, and family-run cabin stays are still the norm rather than large hotel chains. That keeps a ski week here noticeably calmer with young children in tow.

Ski schools across the region teach in German, Italian and increasingly English, since the area sits in South Tyrol where all three are spoken day to day. Beginner slopes are typically walkable from the cabin rather than requiring a lift pass on day one.

Outside winter, the same cable cars run through summer for hiking access to alpine meadows well above the valley floor, which is when we book most non-ski family trips here, July through September, with far lower accommodation rates than ski season.

The range sits in a part of Italy where German is still widely spoken alongside Italian, a legacy of the region's Austro-Hungarian history, and the cuisine reflects it — expect speck and strudel alongside pasta. Cortina d'Ampezzo and the Val Gardena valleys are the most accessible bases, both reachable by shuttle from Venice or Innsbruck airports, and the same lift network that serves skiers in winter opens for hikers in summer, giving high-altitude trail access without an all-day climb.

A week allows time for both a couple of base towns and multiple hiking routes; shorter stays should pick one valley rather than trying to cover the whole range. It suits hikers and skiers specifically — travelers without an interest in either activity will find less to do here than in a typical Italian city break.

Getting there: 2h 10m from most European gateways, plus a transfer. We check routing and fare-class options across that itinerary and weigh them against December to March for snow, July to September for hiking, rather than booking on price alone.

The Dolomites take their name from the pale, distinctively jagged rock that makes up the range — dolomite, a carbonate mineral first formally described by the French geologist Déodat de Dolomieu in the 1790s. That same rock is why the peaks glow pink and orange at sunset, a phenomenon locally called enrosadira, caused by the way the stone's mineral structure scatters light differently than ordinary limestone. The region's layered history shows up most clearly on the plate: Tyrolean dishes like canederli (bread dumplings) and speck sit on menus beside proper Italian polenta and pasta, and German place names run alongside Italian ones on every road sign, a legacy of the area belonging to Austria-Hungary until 1919. Alta Badia and the Val Gardena valley are also home to the Ladin people, a distinct ethnic and linguistic minority with their own Romance language, predating both the Italian and German-speaking settlement of the region. World War I front lines cut directly through these mountains, and rusted trenches and tunnel systems are still visible and hikeable on several routes, including the Cinque Torri open-air museum — a genuinely unusual overlap of high-alpine scenery and preserved battlefield history found almost nowhere else in Europe.