For a little girl who had just survived an extraordinary ordeal, trapped for two days and nights beneath a tsunami of snow, ice and rock, it was a disarmingly ordinary question.

"Can I have my biscuits, please?" six-year-old Ludovica Parete asked Italian alpine rescue experts as they gently lifted her out of the tiny space that had kept her and two other children alive for 48 hours after the four-star Hotel Rigopiano was struck by a terrifying avalanche.

She had carefully stashed a small packet of Ringos chocolate biscuits in her bag, ready for the journey home with her parents and brother from the spa resort deep in the Apennine mountains - a journey that never happened after Wednesday's devastating avalanche.

The little girl was one of nine people extracted alive from the wreckage of the resort by Saturday afternoon, with reports that rescuers had located another two people who were alive beneath the snow.

But as the number of living rose, so too did the death toll - so far five bodies have been recovered, all of them adults.