What a great place to put some ski lifts: the high, sheltered, north-facing bowl of Pila.

When it comes to ski resorts, does bigger always mean better?

I’ve never been convinced of the fact, and the Aosta Valley resort of Pila is a good reason why. This friendly ski area, perched above the ancient Roman town of Aosta offers 70km of pistes served by 17 lifts. It’s modest by anoyone’s standards.

But you’d be hard pressed to find a better spot for skiing. Set in a high, north-facing bowl, it holds its snow well, and offers a wide variety of pistes and powder in a compact and comprehensible package. It’s all there right in front of you as ascend the lifts: the pistes numbered 1-28 as you look across the mountain from east to west; and the powder above the treeline off a couple of ridges (there are some tree runs to be skied lower down when the snow’s in good nick, too). There’s a decent terrain park here too – no doubt fed by a steady stream of teenagers and twentysomethings from the town of Aosta below.

Now my home resort this season is the vast Three Valleys in France. It offers 600km of pistes and oodles of off-piste in between – and of course, it’s a privilege to ski there. But I’m forever wondering if I’m in the right i.e. best place, especially on a powder day. Here, there are no such worries. You can see it all as you ride the lifts. You make your choice and get stuck in.

The quality’s good too. Because the skiing’s all in one place, there aren’t many dull traverses of the kind you find in bigger areas which are necessary to knit all the different bowls or valleys together. And best of all it’s quiet. At the weekend, there’s a fair amount of local traffic, up from Aosta; and in late February the local schools are out which ups the visitor numbers on weekdays too. But for the rest of the time – especially on a Wednesday in January – it’s all but deserted. Because everyone wants big ski areas these days, little places like Plia get overlooked. Every run feels good as a result.

Midweek, this is what passes as lift queue in Pila.

My guide Giuseppe Abruzzini points out some of the off-piste.

I teamed up with local guide Guiseppe Abruzzini for a whirlwind tour and we skied wide, rolling reds and blacks all day. Reds 1, 2 and 3 in particular were a treat. You can hammer down them as fast as you like, and they’re just long enough to get the heart going and remind the quads about their true role in life: but not so long that you’re grimacing from excesses of lactic acid at the end. Smiling from sheer delight more like.

I saw a couple of reassuring blues too. But as you’ll see from the Pila piste map below, this is a place of wide open reds and blacks, of the kind you dream about on a ski holiday – but rarely find in most resorts except first thing in the morning before eveyone else gets out of bed.

Pila’s piste map – for more information about the resort, visit pila.it, and read the welove2ski resort report.

There are good restaurants too – and a new hotel, La Chance, which sits at the bottom of the slopes and must be one of the friendliest and hippest three-star hotels in the Alps (although it should have four stars). It comes complete with a lovely spa and half-Scottish owners who are both laid back and helpful, and would make a perfect base for a long weekend or a stop-off on a week’s Aosta Valley ski safari, just like the one I’m doing!

No need to book ahead: lunch at La Chatelaine, on the mountain.

Read Alf Alderson’s blog from Courmayeur, also in the Aosta Valley, click on this link, and his La Thuile blog here. For more information about the Aosta Valley, visit aosta-valley.co.uk.