Unless you happen to be of old-world aristocratic stock, you likely haven’t dreamed of owning a home in alpine Aiguille du Midi. But you don’t have to be a countess, or hold a Swiss bank account, to live (temporarily, at least) like a skiing European. Just a few alps away, in Italy’s Valle d’Aosta, you can rent a two-bedroom apartment overlooking the Matterhorn for as little as $620 a week. The pad is right there for the taking on Homeaway.com, one of the many apartment-letting sites we’ve canvassed in an effort to unearth the web’s/world’s finest winter-getaway rentals. In the following pages, you’ll find 38 of them, plus nineteen homey hotels in case you’d still prefer to keep your out-of-town accommodations in someone else’s hands.

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