Olympic Games introduce tourism to Italy's Piedmont
RegionHost
to the 2006 Winter Olympics Games, the world's attention
was drawn to Italy's Piedmont Region, where skiers,
skaters, snowboarders and over one million spectators
from around the globe gathered for the quadrennial celebration
of winter sport.
American
travelers - for whom Torino and northwestern Italy is
an unknown corner of Europe, often overlooked in favor
of Paris, London and Rome - are in for a pleasant surprise.
The Piedmont Region offers several world-class attractions:
from outstanding ski slopes to first-rate cuisine to
the many opulent castles and mansions of the Savoy royal
family. Whether you're one of the one million Olympic
visitors or just planning a european getaway, you're
sure to fall in love with this Italian hideaway.
Winter
Sports
With magnificent ski resorts mixed in with traditional
mountain villages, all surrounded by unspoiled woods
and forests, the Piedmont Alps is set to captivate the
world as the setting for the 2006 Olympic Games. The
region offers winter sports enthusiasts more than 1,200
miles of ski runs, spanning from the Maritime Alps to
the Monviso and the Susa Valley to Monte Rosa. The Olympic
Mountain's renowned ski resorts all are located within
60 miles of Torino, including Sestriere, Sauze d'Oulx,
Claviere, Cesana Sansicario, Bardonecchia, Prali and
Pragelato. Nestled in the snow-drenched area nicknamed
"the Milky Way," these resorts offer varied
options including dynamic downhill skiing, cross-country
skiing, snowboarding, heli-skiing, nighttime skiing,
ice-skating, ice climbing and dog sledding with Siberian
Huskies.
Culinary
Delights
To experience the Piedmont Region is to experience culinary
delights that can be found nowhere else. With meals
made of impeccably fresh ingredients, dug from just
over the next hill, or picked from the field just outside
the kitchen window, it's no exaggeration to say the
people of the Piedmont region live to eat and drink:
as the saying goes, in Piedmont baby's comforters are
dipped in wine!
Piedmont
is home to the Slow Food Movement, a global organization
founded in the small town of Bra. Heralded as the "cure"
for a distressingly fast-food world, slow food promotes
the sanctity of taste, taste education and food preservation
with fairs and events and also produces food and wine
guides.
Piedmont
also is home to tuber magnatum pico, commonly known
as the white truffle, a fungus coveted by gourmands
around the world. Piedmont now is in the height of white
truffle season (late October through early December),
and a pound of the tubers can go for more than $2,000. (CONTINUE...)
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