Dr Nick Gordon

Of all the ways to arrive in Italy, few are as spectacular as crossing the Great Saint Bernard Pass from Switzerland to the Val d’Aosta. The pass is among the highest across the Alps – it traverses the ridgeline between Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa – and the road down into Italy hugs the mountainside, with splendid views across the alpine forests, shepherds’ cottages and snow-peaked mountains on either side. In summer, when the pass is open, the golden light of the Mediterranean shines across the valley, a first sign of having begun an Italian journey.

*The trail over the border of Italy and Switzerland at the Great Saint Bernard Pass in summer*

Arriving in Italy this way is an experience shared across the millennia: the pass connecting the northern and southern sides of the Alps has been used by travellers and traders for at least 5,000 years. Two thousand years ago it became a key Roman road and later still it was used by pilgrims to Rome, as part of the medieval Via Francigena. Some less-welcome visitors to Italy have also taken this route, including Hannibal and, more recently, Napoleon. He crossed it on a donkey, although Jacques Louis-David depicts the scene with the Little Corporal on horseback.

The sublime majesty of the alpine pass has also entranced artists, including JMW Turner. He first visited the region in 1802, after the ascent of Mont Blanc had already captured a generation’s imagination, and he sought to be at the forefront of the Romantic craze for dramatic landscapes and the peculiar effects of sunlight, stone and vapour. Turner would return to the Val d’Aosta in 1820 and throughout the 1830s, like many northerners seeking Italy’s climate as much as its Roman and Renaissance heritage.

ROMAN AOSTA

The Great Saint Bernard Pass leads down to the town after which the region is named: Aosta. It was built under Emperor Augustus as part of a systematic attempt to control the roads to Switzerland and the border territories of the Rhine beyond. (“Aosta” is a contraction of the original name, Augusta Praetoria Salassorum, a bit of a mouthful.) The remains of the Roman town are beautifully preserved, from the triumphal arch of Augustus – celebrating the Emperor’s defeat of the local people – to an almost complete circuit of walls and the picture-perfect theatre, whose 22-metre-high facade is set against a backdrop of mountains. Indeed, Aosta has the second highest concentration of Roman ruins of any town in Italy. (There are no prizes for guessing which town is in first place.)

Beneath the town, too, are quite extensive remains of the Roman past, including a huge cryptoporticus or covered passageway made of travertine arcades, located beneath the Forum. Its exact purpose remains elusive, although it was certainly costly to construct. The development of the region in the Augustan Age is also visible in a number of surviving Roman bridges. These include the Pont de Pierre in Aosta, Pont-Saint-Martin in the hamlet of the same name, and the Pont d’Aël, an aqueduct and enclosed viaduct across the valley. Many of these can still be crossed on foot, and it’s not every day you can (safely) cross a 2,000-year-old bridge.

*The facade of the Roman theatre in Aosta*

A Different History

If these place names sound French, or at least French-inflected, to you, then you would be onto something. Val d’Aosta is an autonomous region of Italy in which French and Italian are the official languages, as well as the languages of instruction in local schools. But French is still a minority – a far greater number of people speak Valdôtain, a Franco-Provencal language, as their mother tongue. The majority of people here speak Italian first and foremost, although schooling means people tend to be at least conversant in French, too.

The region was only part of France briefly, under Napoleon, and the persistence of French and its role as an official language points instead to a different, and earlier, part of Val d’Aosta’s history and cultural identity. After the decline of Rome, the region remained vital for any ruler seeking control of the former Western Roman Empire. Charlemagne created fiefs and allocated land to barons, who would fortify key points on the roads and rivers; later, the Holy Roman Emperors would do the same. Castles of the numerous minor barons and lords dot the countryside to this day, often precariously perched at the edge of ridges overlooking the valley.

*The ruins of Castle Cly, high up in the Val d’Aosta*

Numerous small fiefdoms, however, were problematic to control from a distance, and in the twelfth century the Counts of Savoy, whose ancestral lands are in modern France and Switzerland, were given the task of bringing the region to order. One of their earliest efforts to achieve effective control of the territory was to grant autonomy to the citizens of Aosta. In effect, this helped to foster loyalty between the townspeople and the Savoy, and weakened the authority of the smaller barons. Aosta would remain a self-governing city until the advent of Napoleon.

A diplomatic and pragmatic approach to rule became a hallmark of the Counts of Savoy, who increased their territories from the border of Lyon as far as Nice and Turin. After the counts were elevated to dukes in the fifteenth century, they carefully negotiated a path between France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. The endurance of their duchy through 400 years of war between those three neighbours and superpowers is a testament to the family’s talent for diplomacy, as well as smart marriages into the royal families of Europe. The last Duke of Savoy, Vittorio Emanuele II, would even become the first king of a modern, unified Italy.

The Castles of the Challant

But part of the secret to the Savoy’s success was also knowing how to find the right people to enact their authority with loyalty. Among the nobility of Aosta were the Challant family, who were given land and titles by the Savoy in the twelfth century, and their castles remain two of the region’s star cultural attractions. The largest of them, Castle Fénis, is fairytale-like in its appearance, with sparrow-tailed battlements, heavy square towers and a more elegant keep hidden within. Unlike many of the other smaller castles, this one was built on a low, approachable hill. Although it uses the architectural language of military power, it was built primarily as a residence and its fortifications were merely a reminder of the Challants’ place in the medieval hierarchy.

During the Renaissance the family desired a more modern residence, and set about building Castle Issogne. Constructed with Renaissance principles of harmony and noble leisure in mind, it includes a large, south-facing Italian garden, open loggias around its large internal courtyard, and external windows designed to let the light in rather than keep enemies out.

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this castle, however, are the frescoes on which those windows shed light. Many of these are by two Savoyard artists known to us only as ‘Colin’ and ‘Etienne’, and they show the religious scenes we would expect in the castle’s oratories and chapels, as well as heraldic emblems and family trees throughout the other rooms. More remarkable is a series of lunettes that depict daily life, such as soldiers in a tavern in the company of ladies of the night, a cat trying to steal scraps from a butcher in his shop, bakers and tailors at work, and market stalls. Pride of place, however, goes to a scene showing the cheese sellers: it contains the earliest known depiction of fontina cheese, for which Val d’Aosta is famous.

*Fontina, in the fifteenth-century Issogne frescos (with graffiti in Latin and French from later centuries)*

Alpine Cuisine

And when it comes to cuisine, Val d’Aosta – along with neighbouring Piedmont – is a gastronome’s paradise. In addition to fontina, a semi-hard cheese whose sweet taste comes from the cows’ alpine pastures, there is the local fromadzo, a low-fat cheese made of cow and goat milk. It is sometimes flavoured with juniper berries or fennel seeds. If the word looks like the Italian formaggio to you, it is similarly the Valdôtain word for cheese. The region’s smallgoods – including quite a few varieties with protected appellations, such as Jambon des Bosses and Lardo d’Arnad – are also excellent and have a distinct local flavour thanks to the mountain herbs used in the curing process.

When it comes to eating, the typical dishes of the Valle d’Aosta region tend to be hearty, reflecting both Italian and alpine culinary traditions, and they often involve fontina cheese. Chicken or veal alla valdostana, for example, means making a pocket out of a fillet of either meat, filling it with fontina and prosciutto, crumbing it, and then cooking it until golden and crispy. Other dishes include game or local beef slowly stewed in wine and herbs, served on a bed of polenta, and there is also fonduta. Made with the local fontina, tegole alpine biscuits, dark rye bread, and different types of gnocchi, it is often served in a sauce of fontina and ham.

The heartiness of the cuisine also reflects the landscape: this is a small mountainous region, with very little arable land and relatively few people. (It is both Italy’s smallest and least populous region.) Rather than fields of vegetables and wheat, for bread and pasta, you tend instead to find orchards of fruits that prefer a decent frost, such as apples and pears, interspersed with groves of chestnuts and walnuts.

Many of these traditional foods make perfect sense for people who live and work in a high alpine region. They can be preserved and easily stored for long winters, and are the basic ingredients for a good meal that are also relatively easy to carry while up in the mountains. However, they are also a great way to enjoy an arrival into Italy, perhaps while stopping to watch the world go by in the elegant piazzas of Aosta, the provincial capital, with spectacular views of Europe’s highest peaks.