Wandering in the Aosta Valley

A long weekend in the Aosta Valley. We get there by leaving the motorway early and taking the coach up to 1,700 metres to enjoy a splendid panorama. A visit to St. Vincent, with its churches and its famous casino. A stop in Chatillon, where we visit the church and stroll in the park opposite. Just before Courmayeur we discover La Salle, a small town whose town hall looks like a monument in itself, built in the typical grey stone, with roofs covered in “lose”, diamond-shaped stone slabs that are compulsory in the Aosta Valley above 600 m of altitude. A curiosity: we spot a bare-branched larch with the Aosta Valley flag, red and black, at its top; we find it in almost every village, planted in front of the mayor’s house, and it seems to recall the Jacobin tree of liberty.

Courmayeur, at the foot of Mont Blanc, although from the centre of the town it is impossible to see its peak, is the last Italian municipality you reach before arriving in France through the Mont Blanc Tunnel (coming out at Chamonix); an important tourist and winter-sports centre, it is crossed by the Dora Baltea, swollen with water these days. We discover that in the Aosta Valley people speak “patois” (patuà), a Franco-Provençal language.