Poetry in motion

On a mountain top in Cervinia, Stephen Wood can see why the view inspired Byron to wax lyrical

Lord Byron was a big fan of the Alps. The part of his travelogue, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, devoted to the mountains established him as "the most famous poet of the Alps", according to the writer Jim Ring. In How the English Made the Alps, Ring credits Byron and his fellow-poet Shelley for having done "more than anyone to popularise the mountains" during the first half of the 19th century.

I have read Ring's book, but not, I fear, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. However, I can quote Byron on the subject of the Alps. He wrote: "Happy is he who may spend time in these mountains; happy is he who – having been forced to leave – sees them again." Byron's own words were probably a little more poetic; my version is merely a loose translation of an incomplete French text with what appears to be some borrowings from the Aosta Valley dialect. The text appears – in weatherbeaten wooden letters – on the façade of the cable-car station in the Italian ski resort of Cervinia.

To have poetry occupying such a valuable site is an unusual departure from the norm, which is vast hoardings advertising expensive watches or four-wheel-drive cars. There are other unusual aspects to Cervinia, too.

Until October 1934, it was an isolated mountain village called Breuil. (Don't try that with an Italian accent: it's pronounced "broil".) But that was the era when fascist Italy was enthusiastically creating a road network, developing a tourist infrastructure and adorning buildings with texts, usually the heroic thoughts of Il Duce, Mussolini. So up from the valley came a road, and the first car (a Fiat, naturally), much to the dismay of the village's resident poet, Guido Rey. "I cannot survive the advent of the road," he proclaimed, with only a little poetic licence: he died the following year, and his memorial is a piazza named in his honour, now a roundabout.

Two years later the cable-car opened; then came the hotels – and the Oxford and Cambridge University skiing teams. The resort adopted the name Cervinia, on the grounds that Breuil sounded insufficiently Italian. And with the help of celebrated Italian skiers and mountaineers plus, in later years, film stars (Gina Lollobrigida) and TV personalities (the absurd and absurdly popular Mike Buongiorno), it became one of Italy's premier ski resorts.

It is set high in the mountains, the ski area stretching up from the 2,050m village to almost 4,000m; it is almost snow-sure, with a season which lasts from late October to early May; and it offers superb views down towards the Gran Paradiso national park. But to discover the hidden secret of the transformation of little Breuil into big, bustling Cervinia you have to ski around the area's main peak, which the Italians call Mont Cervino. Drop across the ridge at the top of the ski area – also the border between Italy and Switzerland – and a few minutes later, miraculously, you find yourself looking up at the Matterhorn and down at Zermatt. Seen from Cervinia the peak is impressively big and gaunt, but unfamiliar; 180 degrees later it's the most recognisable mountain in the Alps.

The description of one resort as a "back door" to another's ski area is a now-familiar cliché. Brides-les-Bains is known for offering skiers access to the Trois Vallées without their having to pay the premium prices for bed and board charged at the main resorts of Méribel and Courchevel; similarly, Celerina is frequently commended as a base for skiing the slopes of St Moritz to those who find its old-money style oppressive. Cervinia is considerably cheaper than Zermatt: in the Crystal brochure, a week's holiday in mid-December at the four-star Sertorelli Sporthotel in Cervinia costs £475, while an equivalent hotel in Zermatt is £100 more. But Cervinia is no back door to the Swiss resort's ski area.

For a start, it's a front door: it has its own, fine skiing. True, there are few slopes to challenge the expert; but the range and quantity of the intermediate skiing – on more than 200km of pistes – are excellent. The 10km descent of the Ventina Ghiacciaio piste from the 3,480m Plateau Rosa down to the village would normally stand out; but it was barely visible the weekend before last. In a white-out of low cloud and swirling snow I had to feel my way down – a pity when the early-season cover on the piste was so good.

Until quite recently, Cervinia's ski area was effectively self-contained. Access to Zermatt's slopes and the iconic side of the 4,478m Mt Cervino/ Matterhorn only became easy in the mid-1990s when a joint lift-pass was made available. But even then the notion of using Cervinia as a base from which to ski in Zermatt remained fanciful. Even the back entrance to Bill Gates's spread probably isn't 10km from the front – and that's the distance, as the crow flies, between the villages of Cervinia and Zermatt. To be sure of skiing home to Italy, you have to leave Zermatt by 2pm. Linger over a coffee and it could cost you £260: the last time I heard, in 1997, that was how much a taxi driver would charge to take you the long way round (ie by road) to the other side of the mountain.

Look at Cervinia this way, instead. It is inexpensive and unpretentious; it offers good intermediate slopes by day and good, simple food by night; and anyone who wants tougher skiing and a picture-postcard view of the Matterhorn has only to pop over the mountain – access that adds only €25-€43 (£16-£28) to the cost of a six-day Cervinia lift-pass (depending on the extent of the Zermatt area to be skied).

It must be said that the village of Cervinia is not a pretty sight, its buildings scattered around as if to show what can happen without proper development control. But at least its main historical structure – the 1936 cable-car station – survives. A mostly concrete building, its main façade is clad in stone, with a wooden, top-floor balcony to consolidate the "rustic" feel. But a grand staircase ascends to the cable-car entrance, a heroic gesture echoed by the plain, white-rendered columns typical of fascist architecture.

It would take a skilled architectural historian to deconstruct all that, plus the romantic poetry stretching across the façade. Is there anything like that in Zermatt? No, nothing.

Packages to Cervinia with Crystal Ski & Snowboarding (0870 160 6040; www.crystalski.co.uk) departing on 5 and 12 January cost from £129 for two-star self-catering accommodation