The Winter Issue

We begin in St. Moritz because this is more or less where the whole idea began. In the winter of 1864 the hotelier Johannes Badrutt bet a group of departing English summer guests that they would enjoy his valley in the cold months too, and staked their travel costs on it. They came back at Christmas, stayed until Easter, and the Alpine winter holiday was invented on the spot. A century and a half later the town still runs on that idea, and still does it better than almost anywhere.

But the name has a way of swallowing the valley it sits in. St. Moritz is one bright, moneyed town on a lake; the Engadin is the long, high valley around it — a chain of frozen lakes, larch forests that turn gold in autumn, and quiet stone villages like Sils Maria, where Nietzsche spent his summers, and Pontresina under the Bernina peaks. The light up here is the thing people remember: thin, dry and almost painfully clear, because you are at 1,800 metres and the air has nothing in it.

Winter here is partly the skiing on Corviglia, reached by funicular from the middle of town, and partly everything that happens down on the frozen lake — the White Turf horse races, polo and even cricket played on the ice, and the long lunches on sun terraces that are an institution in their own right. You do not have to ski a single run to have a full day of it.

This is the first issue of Amorielli, and the plan is simple: to answer, place by place, the two questions that actually shape a trip — where to stay, and when to go. No star ratings, no endless listings, no brochure language. And if you can, come in the slow way, over the Bernina Pass on the Rhaetian Railway, which is a reason to make the trip on its own. Thank you for reading the first one.

Vivienne Hartwell, Editor-in-Chief