Sylvio Berlusconi loves it here, lording it up amidst the belle epoque splendours of the Palace Hotel, Merano. Fashion designer Miuccia Prada comes here to get real, swapping her gladrags and strappy wedges for a dirndl dress and hiking boots to walk high up in the mountains. Rich Germans come here for the ski-ing, wine-fans for its pinot noirs. But tell most Brits that you’re off to the Alto Adige and chances are you’ll get a blank look by way of response; the other name this area goes by, South Tyrol, doesn’t help much either, as it suggests somewhere in the Austrian Alps.

In fact the geography is simple: Alps? Yes. Austrian? No. South Tyrol is the northernmost province of Italy, bordering Austria, a region of outstanding beauty, of craggy mountains and green Alpine valleys. In fact it’s so beautiful that when I first arrive and take a cable-car up to the Vigilius Mountain Resort, my first thought is that the scene before me - the snowy peaks above, the lush green below and in the distance the Rosegarten peaks of the Dolomites turning an implausible shade of pink in the sunset - is all a giant backdrop.

But if anything the view from the little town of Merano is even odder - or at least it was one balmy day in March, when keen skiers were heading up to the mountains for some of Europe’s best ski-ing, while in the town below, people splashed about in the outdoor pools of the thermal baths and dried off on the sunlit, palm-filled terrace. This contrast occurs a lot in Merano, which has a singularly benign mini climate - and which makes me think I must tell my brother and sister-in-law about this place. She loves to ski, he can’t see the point of paying good money in search of anything as cold and nasty as snow and quickly gets bored in an Alpine village full of ski-crazy Brits.

But both would be happy based in Merano, a medieval trading town which acquired the posh hotels and charms of a belle epoque spa when Empress ‘Sissi’ of Austria - glamourous, beautiful but slightly dotty, playing Diana to Franz Josef’s Charles - made this place fashionable. But South Tyrol in general seems like so much more than a ski destination. True, it has the Dolomites, the world´s largest lift and ski-run network, and in Alta Badia, one of the world´s most chic resorts. But those mountains and valleys generate much more than black runs, cross-country skiing or snowboard parks.

There´s excellent food and wine to be enjoyed here, for a start: just one per cent of Italian wine is produced in South Tyrol, yet it wins almost a tenth of the prizes. Plus that same landscape also seems to produce some extraordinary individuals: rugged, quirky or just plain delightful. Gilbert Proesch, half of the Gilbert & George art double-act (currently showing at the Tate Modern) was born here.

Then there is Reinhold Messner – mountaineer, writer, green campaigner and the founder of several extraordinary museums here celebrating mountain life everywhere from Tibet to Machu Picchu. Or the fabulously named Margherita Fuchs-von Mannstein, matriarch, icon and boss of Forst, Italy’s older brewers. Then there’s Alois Lageder - who combines wine-making and hosting the high-end, Summa wine festival with contemporary art, until recently curating the Museion gallery in the regional capital Bolzano.

In fact the wine-with-art combo seems to be part of South Tyrol’s particular shtick and its inhabitants endearing commitment to enjoying the good life, in all its forms. Take Count Franz Pfeil, a handsome, genial man who lives in an ancient manor house outside Merano - just below the Vigillius. In fact I tasted his passito pudding wine before I met him, at the hotel’s restaurant perched dramatically above the valley. Where’s this wonderful nectar from, I asked the waiter, who in response pointed straight down - seems that if I’d lobbed my glass of the window, it would land a few thousand metres below in the vineyards which produce the Count’s excellent Kranzel wines.

There or in his sculpture garden, complete with labyrinth, terraces and a tiny ampitheatre. This used to be orchards. South Tyrol produces something like 10 per cent of Europe’s apples: the valleys are sea of white blossom in the early spring. But when the Count realised that he’d have to adopt intensive, industrial methods to continue to compete, he chose instead to opt out; thus the orchards were replaced with this bold, innovative garden, full of art, allegory and flowers.

But of all the rugged inviduals making waves in South Tyrol, none has been so influential in making this a cool destination for savvy European travellers as the designer and architect Matteo Thun. Thun was part of the famous Memphis design group; more recently he’s done work for Alessi and Bulgari. But it his designs for ‘destination hotels’ like the Vigilius Mountain Resort and the nearby Pergola, which have put South Tyrol on the map with both Wallpaper-reading hipsters and ecologists. For both are equally impressed by his commitment to green tourism in the mountains and his bold new aesthetic, entirely free of the alpine kitsch which clutters many a traditional resort.

So one senses interesting things afoot in the South Tyrol. But a glance at those names – some Italian, some German-sounding – suggest another factor which makes South Tyrol so fascinating. Architecture also provides a clue. Merano, with its Viennese Jugendstil ‘Kurhaus’ and theatre, looks like a fashionable Austro-Hungarian spa town - which is what it was until 1919, when this largely German-speaking Habsburg fiefdom was handed over to Italy as a reward for joining the Allies.

And Bolzano, for centuries an important centre on the trading route through the Brenner Pass, seems almost to be two towns: one built by practical, savvy medieval merchants (who’s houses seem to have the kind of naturally-driven airconditioning which architects like Thun are currently rediscovering). The other, a dotty fascistic but sometimes rather beautiful celebration of Rome’s eternal grandeur, all colonnades and friezes of square-jawed Fascist heroes.

Both have their appeal, to be honest, but the latter also speaks of Mussolini’s aggressive Italianisation policy, in which migrants from the south elbowed out German-speakers, while both place-names and even first names were changed into Italian. Thus Meran became Merano, Bozen, Bolzano, while as late as 1965, Stefan, the German-speaking South Tyrolean who showed me around the city, had to be christened Stefano, as German first-names were still banned here.

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