I'm not terribly good at that Proustian remembrance thing. You could drop a two-tonne madeleine on my head and it wouldn't record a flicker of recognition, let alone unlock a lifetime of reflection.

It is a standing, if somewhat bitter, joke chez Beaumont that, while my partner has a photographic recollection of our wooing, wedding and shared life, my recollections are full of dark lacunae. Still, I did have some hopes of my return to the Italian resort of Bardonecchia, where, as a rather spotty teenager, I learnt to ski on a school trip and - being at that age - got utterly hammered for the first time on local liquor.

My memories of the resort a quarter of a century ago are not exactly complete, but I have flashes. I remember winding up a long mountain road from Turin airport. I have intimations of a particular ski run, tootling round a little narrow bend among the trees. More strongly etched is the rather rough bar where we would sneak off for a drink - the kind of place the French call zincs . What I do remember very clearly - with a twinge of shame - is scaring the wits out of the hotel owners' toddler by coming down for dinner with a crepe bandage wrapped around my face and wearing sunglasses in some questionable homage to The Invisible Man .

So I can't really be blamed if in the intervening period a rather nice motorway has been built all the way from the airport to the resort. Or for not finding a particular bar in a town still full of rather similar bars. And trust me, I tried.

The reasons for going back to Bardonecchia were twofold. First, there was the personal odyssey thing. Second, the town is in the news. It is one of the centres for the 2006 Winter Olympics, bringing some much needed develop ment money to the Piedmont ski resorts. Bardonecchia, where skiing has been going on for more than a century, will host the women's downhill races and a series of snowboard events.

The Olympics may threaten to raise the profile of the resort, but Bardonecchia remains one of those places where you can ski on a budget without sacrificing the quality of the skiing. The season is shorter than elsewhere, but even at its height a week's pass comes in well short of £100.

If the skiing has one shortcoming it is a scarcity of black runs, although for beginners and intermediates it is nothing short of perfect, with a good mixture of wide, easy slopes and enough harder reds to keep the legs working. The town itself is not exactly pretty, but then Bardonecchia is not an ordinary ski town, and the shops and bars on the attractive Via Medail make up for a slightly gloomy ambience in the newer parts of the town.

The resort's proximity to Turin - an hour and a bit by train or motorway - means that many of its residents work in the city. Conversely, many Torinos weekend in the town, which has some 30,000 beds in apartments, but fewer than 2,000 hotel beds.

This has a profound effect on the population of the resort, and your experience of it. At weekends the town is packed with Italians. Campo Smith, the main resort-level area, is transformed into a mini-festival on sunny Sundays, full of tobogganing children and parents parading in their Sunday best. If the queues at the bottom seem endless and chaotic in an Italian way, don't worry. Come Monday, the slopes are utterly deserted.

Even on a Friday in high season after a big fall of fresh snow, I found myself skiing with a companion in the vast fields of off-piste snow that fill in between the runs in the Jafferau bowl - a short bus transfer from the town - with only a French mono-skier for competition in the race to track up the virgin snow.

So, what do I remember about Bardonecchia? The truth is that it is the feel of the place I recall best and the smell of heating oil in the cold winter air (although now pipes for natural gas are being laid in, that is another experience which will go the way of the mountain road).

I remember the rather gloomy but nonetheless friendly bars, with long counters where the bakers, postmen and civil engineers would stand in their work clothes silently sipping their beers or grappa. I remember, too, the smell of the delis with their exotic-seeming game and sausages and cheeses. Coming from the suburbs of London in the 1970s - a closed world of packaged cheddar and school cuisine - it was a revelation. It is still a revelation, situated just on the edge of the 'Milky Way', the line of southern Alps that demarcates the French-Italian border, a slope 1,300km long.

These days the world does not seem as fresh and strange and unexplored as it did then. But mountains always have the power to move me. And the views are stunning even by the standards of the Alps, with the monolith of the Barre des Ecrins towering in the distance. The best place to see it is from one of the little cafés on the long slopes of Jafferau, which with the linked stations of Colomion, Les Arnauds and Melezet, make up Bardonecchia's skiable terrain.

I left Bardonecchia after a week with a feeling of regret but also in the knowledge that I will be going back. And I won't be waiting another quarter of a century.