FARINDOLA, Italy —Rescuers on Sunday spotted a man’s body in the wreckage of a resort hotel buried by an avalanche, raising to six the number of confirmed dead.

Twenty-three others remained missing, with hopes dependent on whether anyone might have been able to survive in an air pocket searchers hadn’t yet reached.

Some of the survivors were sipping hot tea near the fireplace in the mountain resort hotel Wednesday evening, waiting for snowplows to arrive so they could finally go home. Their winter holiday had been made nerve-racking by a day of ground-shaking earthquakes and heavy snowfall.

Suddenly, Vincenzo Forti and girlfriend Giorgia Galassi were knocked violently off a wicker sofa. A few other guests nearby tumbled off their chairs in the elegant yet rustic reception hall.

An avalanche of snow — and not a tremendously powerful earthquake as survivors first imagined — had just barreled down the mountainside, smashing into the Hotel Rigopiano and trapping more than 30 vacationers, including four children, and workers inside.

The nine people who were eventually rescued, including all the children at the resort, remained hospitalized Sunday.

Some details of their harrowing survival accounts began emerging, through family, friends, and rescuers who spoke with them at their bedside or by telephone.

Many talked of the seemingly endless isolation because the snow absorbed any sound from the outside world.

‘‘There were four of us, in front of the fireplace, drinking tea,’’ Galassi recalled.

Suddenly, ‘‘everything collapsed on top of us, and I didn’t understand anything anymore,’’ Galassi, a 22-year-old university student, told Radio Giulianova, a radio station in her hometown of the Adriatic coastal town of Giulianova, where Forti, 25, owns a seaside pizzeria.

Cut off from the outside world, the couple heard no sound. But ‘‘we were convinced that someone would come because it was impossible they wouldn’t be aware of us,’’ Galassi said. ‘‘We banged until I couldn’t anymore, we yelled.’’

‘‘It was like we were in a tin can,’’ she said.

There was no food, but there was ice, from the avalanche. ‘‘We ate ice, that was our fortune,’’ Galassi said.

Forti’s fishing buddy, Luigi Valiante, added more details, telling reporters after visiting him in a hospital Sunday that the young man ‘‘realizes he is a miraculous survivor — also considering where he was, a 3 foot by 3 foot space in the cold, without lights, with a broken sofa, a girder splitting it up.’’

Until their cellphone batteries ran out, the survivors had some light. Then it was just dark, Valiante said.

Another survivor was near the couple. Francesca Bronzi was trying to find where her boyfriend, Stefano Feniello, ended up.

Bronzi’s parents, Vanessa and Gaetano Bronzi, said that the chair’s high backrest saved her, protecting her from a beam that ‘‘could have crushed her.’’

Bronzi continues to ask about her boyfriend, who remains among the missing.

Associated Press