Northern Italy has been caught in a Siberian weather-front that’s sweeping across Eastern Europe. The snow is a foot deep and still coming down. Flights to Milan and Turin have been delayed or cancelled, and the motorways are grinding to a halt as heavy lorries struggle for traction on the ice-covered tarmac. Great! Let’s fire up the Lamborghini and go for a drive.

Even by Italian standards this may seem like a batty idea, but Lamborghini takes the view that if you can learn how to control a 520bhp Gallardo on snow and ice, it’ll stand you in good stead all year round. That’s why it has launched the grandly titled Lamborghini Winter Driving Academy, and why I’m hustling west from Milan airport to the Alpine ski village of Sestriere in a chauffeur-driven Audi – the marque that has been adding German business-sense and resources to Italian flair since it took control of Lambo’ in 1998.

My driver is called Ivan, and he’s from Sicily. Struggling to resist cracking a fatuous joke about ‘Russian mafia’, I strike up a conversation on less risky ground. Ivan tells me he’s been on holiday to New York.

Oh, really? What did you do while you were over there? ‘I went to see the street where they filmed The Godfather’...

Our chat enlivens what is turning into a very tedious journey. The snow has started to fall heavily and the front-wheel-drive Audi is operating at the limits of its tractive capabilities. At least the conditions will be ideal for tomorrow’s driving school – if we ever make it.

But you should never underestimate a Sicilian determined to deliver his guest to the destination. The hardest part of our journey turns out to be the driveway leading up to the hotel. It takes 15 tense minutes for the Audi to claw its way the last half-mile to the front door. Just outside, an Alfa 156 is buried in a snowdrift that reaches up to its roof. Are we really going to be allowed out in £120,000 supercars in these conditions?

Most definitely. Next morning, a ragbag mix of 12 very assorted journalists is greeted by the slightly surreal sight of half-a-dozen new Gallardos lined up outside a temporary outdoor ice rink. Next week, it will be turned into a car park for the Winter Olympics, which are just about to get under way; today it is going to be our playground, where Lamborghini instructors will encourage us to experiment with power oversteer while the traction control is switched off. Oh, very well, if you absolutely insist.

But first comes a short lecture on the importance of establishing a good driving position and of holding the steering wheel in the approved ten-to-two manner. Twelve journalists shuffle their feet and listen politely as Rinaldo ‘Dindo’ Capello, Lamborghini’s chief test driver, goes through the basics. It’s a bit like watching the stewardess point out the emergency exits on a jet plane, except that the person addressing us is a double Le Mans winner who has just returned from testing Audi’s 2006 Le Mans entry, the R10, at Sebring. In the course of which he set a new lap record.

Capello is the perfect ambassador for Lamborghini. With his impeccable English and natural charm, he is always approachable and ready to chat, treating even the dumbest observation as though it were a philosophical point worthy of intense consideration. He’ll be one of our instructors today, along with a handful of other guys who work for Lamborghini on a contract basis.

The tool for their job is the 2006-model Gallardo, an updated version of Lamborghini’s entry-level supercar. It’s a squat, purposeful animal, which puts the 520bhp of its mid-mounted V10 down to the road via permanent four-wheel-drive. Main differences between the 2006 car and previous Gallardos are an increase in power, from 493 to 520bhp, and shorter gear ratios that improve acceleration while, perversely, allowing a slightly higher top speed. Like any modern supercar, the Gallardo is stuffed full of electronic driver aids, but one of the Academy’s key roles is to show you the difference in how the car performs when you hit the stability ‘off’ switch.

First, though, we’re despatched on some gentle laps to get a feel for the Gallardo and to see what happens when you deliberately induce understeer and oversteer with the electronic stability programme – ESP – switched in. My first outing is with Dindo Capello and he urges me to boot the throttle as we head down the straight. The Lamborghini’s V10 barks like a grand prix car and we slither away at a rapidly increasing rate of knots, before natural caution and the rapidly approaching snow bank at the end of the straight induce me to back off.

This ESP gizmo is damn clever. If you dump the throttle on a slippery surface, it doesn’t cut the power immediately; it lets you enjoy a moment or two of high-volume posing before gently reining you back in. But the throttle control is also linked to the steering input, so if the wheels are at an acute angle – when you’ve just oversteered dramatically, for example – it reduces power so that you don’t make a bad situation worse.

The irony is that, because the Gallardo has four-wheel-drive, if you’re deliberately driving in, shall we say, a committed manner and have purposely kicked the tail out, you actually need to keep on the power to pull the nose back into line. This is contrary to instinct, which tells you that when sliding towards a wall of snow, your right foot should be heading for the middle pedal. Do that and chances are the result will be a cracked front spoiler. Fortunately it’s relatively easy to repair the Gallardo’s thermoplastic outer panels using Airfix cement, or something like it.

You can order a Gallardo either with ‘flappy paddle’ shift or conventional gearstick, and while Luddites like me might naturally gravitate towards the traditional option, it’s a lot easier to go the high-tech route when driving quickly on slippery surfaces. The paddle-shift is guaranteed not to unsettle the car’s balance as you attempt to hurriedly downshift for that sharper-than-expected corner; and when changing down the throttle blips itself in a hugely satisfying manner, allowing you to maintain a Bond-like level of calm detachment all the while.

‘Our’ Gallardos were equipped with a secret weapon that even secret agents couldn’t deploy without falling foul of the local constabulary: metal studs screwed into the Pirelli Sottozero winter tyres. Studded tyres are illegal for road use in Italy, as in most European countries, which is why some poor sod had the job of swapping over six complete sets of tyres at the end of our session. He was last seen wielding a trolley jack with all the enthusiasm of a guy who’s been told he has to change 48 wheels in the freezing dusk of an Alpine winter.

It will have provided little consolation to him, but those studs made all the difference. Particularly when we were invited to experiment with the pendulum effect, in best Roger-Clark-and-MkI-Escort style. Approaching a 180-degree right-hand corner at the end of the first straight, we were told to turn the wheel left while flicking the tail right with a jab of throttle, then whip the wheel over to the right, whereupon the back of the car should obligingly swing to the left and send you round the corner in a spectacular power slide. Too often, you’d be not quite heavy-footed enough with that initial bout of oversteer and would need to kick the throttle again as you turned right – which usually led to an embarrassingly lurid understeering slide towards the far side of the corner. Miniature drifts of snow, shovelled inside the Gallardo’s front grilles, gave the game away afterwards.

Not surprisingly, this being Italy, proceedings were interrupted for the obligatory four-course meal at a local restaurant before everyone waddled back to the ice-rink for a second session. As a finale, the instructors took us out individually for a couple of high-speed laps of the circuit.

Improvising an excuse that I need to get a picture of Dindo Capello in action, I jump in alongside the ever-affable Italian and we rocket out onto the track, V10 snarl bouncing off the valley sides, rooster-tails of powdered snow streaming from all four wheels. Like the pro he is, Dindo shows barely a trace of emotion as he flings the car from corner to corner, engine revs rising and falling as the tyres lose grip, then find it again: a cycle endlessly repeated on this short, tortuous bobsleigh-ride of a circuit. Must make a change from the wide open spaces of Sebring or Le Mans.

Fabulous though the Gallardo is, it wouldn’t be my first choice for winter driving, studded tyres or no studded tyres. Instead, get yourself a Fiat Panda 4x4. And leave the Lambo in the garage until the snow melts.

The Lamborghini Winter Driving Academy costs €1200, or €1500 including a night’s hotel accommodation. For contact details, visit www.lamborghini.co.uk.