Sestriere, Italy 39 inches and 55 inch storm total. One of the world's pioneering ski areas, and certainly Italy's, Sestrière was built by the Fiat car company in 1934. The mountain-top Possetto hotel first opened through the winter a decade earlier and more lifts and hotels opened before 1934. It was one of the earliest and still one of the highest purpose- built ski stations and was established in Valsusa, an area on the French border where downhill skiing was first taught in Italy by a Swiss engineer, Alfredo Kind. Today the resort where those lessons took place a century ago, the border village of Clavière, is linked by lift to Sestrière itself in the huge Milky Way.
