Val d’Aosta

Mountains rise on every side […] villages […] higher up […] nestle in the shade of walnut trees.

Boyd Winchester, 1891

We awoke to a grey lake and the mountains veiled by curtains of rain. We were both a bit despondent, until I remembered my new pilgrim poncho that had sat so far at the bottom of my pack and that I was looking forward to forcing Stephen to watch me wear.

However, by the time we had got dressed, the skies had cleared and the lake was once more in full sun. A tale of three weather systems in a few hours.

We were sitting on the same table as two Italian men whom Stephen had been talking to last night over supper, who were doing an enormous cycling route, today arriving at Veres 80 km away, which we will get to in a good few days time. Breakfast was bread, butter and jam and hot chocolate in bowls. Stephen used three of our remaining Swiss francs to buy himself an espresso coffee; one of the Italians took a sniff and pronounced it not to be of the best quality.  Stephen agreed.

I decided with the descent I was going to break out my second pair of shoes that had lain in the bottom of my pack, the high-top version of my Altras, which should give me more ankle stability. Last night we had had instructions to take our shoes off and leave them and our poles in the boot room three floors below our bedroom and use flip-flops or crocs provided to walk about indoors. Interestingly, walking the three floors up from collecting my shoes to repack them, I found myself absurdly and uncomfortably out of breath. Definitely the effects of altitude, then.  Stephen looked up at the famous Carrera marble monument to Napoleon’s fallen officer and remarked that it was rather like me, yesterday.

We had just a few steps to remain of our time walking through Switzerland. For Stephen, seven days, for me the whole country. The lake was breathtaking against the background of the jagged rocks that on this side of the pass were so extraordinarily different to the lumpier ones of the Swiss side.

And then it was time to cross over into my fourth country on the Francigena. It was so wonderful to be sharing the moment with Stephen.

Looking back up at the hospice, I felt a rush of warmth for the thousand-year-old tradition of hospitality and enormous gratitude for the double room I had paid a little extra for: all of the people in the dorms last night had complained over breakfast of sleep disrupted by snorers.

The first couple of hundred metres of the path took us along the road, and not having to focus on the terrain underfoot meant that I could give full attention to the 360° panorama of mountains — massive in every sense of the word.

It was hard to bend my mind around how vast they were.

The road snaked down as though it were a home-made scalextric track, so distant that it seemed not part of the same mountain slope. Below us we could make out several pairs of tiny walkers.

The first very steep section was laid stones on which we took little mincing steps to protect our knees against the heavy blows of landing with our full weight plus our packs.

But thereafter the paths down this first precipitous section were unexpectedly excellent, wide and easy to safely descend, despite the steepness, and even grassy in places.

There was enough brain space to appreciate the mountains encircling us, and the warning cries of the marmots, serenading our descent. It was an inexpressible relief to feel once again my walking self.

We lost an immense amount of height really quickly, since the mountains were like knife edges here, and we were not zig-zagging like the road, and all too quickly, we joined the tree line, which seemingly just moments earlier had lain far below us,

then fell below it.

We both felt a sense of loss at leaving the high mountains, the harsh but beautiful solitary landscapes that now towered above us where before they had embraced us. It had been all too brief an experience.

We made swift time because although we were losing height quickly, the gradient was always considerate and the rain last night had laid a lot of the slippery dust on the shaley paths and made our feet less likely to slide out from under us.

The character of the landscape here was completely different to the other side of the mountain. The path yesterday although tough had been reasonably varied, but those poor souls that passed us on their way up were in for an unremitting day ahead of them, with no respite either in terms of gradient or of view.

Here the slopes were covered in low-growing, mat-forming conifer with bilberry filling in the gaps, with a clear track so we were no longer picking our way amongst rocks.

We ran into James and Adrien from Bristol, Adrien taking photos of the gorgeous mountainscape with an honest-to-goodness Pentax film camera. It was fabulous having a proper conversation in English which both of us could join in equally. They too are doing the Tour de Combin, and every time this route is mentioned Stephen gets a little glint in his eye. They mentioned good coffee in St-Rhémy. More glints.

Here was another difference to the other side of the mountain: a series of well-spaced-out villages we would walk through today, strung like a necklace down the Val d’Aosta.  St-Rhémy was a tiny village giving us an immediate welcome with the little Francigena emblem figures on top of each lamp-post,

and our first taste of the valley’s characteristic stone-slated roofs, ubiquitous scarlet geraniums and overflowing planters full of petunias, and the valley’s many friendly cats.

Stephen was enthused by one of those little Richard Scary Piaggio Ape vehicles which he dreams of driving into Malvern and loading up his shopping in the pick-up back.

We stopped off for the recommended coffee in the bar, and sat there feeling entirely content. There was a group of four from Cambridgeshire who are walking the Francigena in two-week chunks — they started with the final two weeks into Rome, and were bitten by the bug. Reader, beware! Long distance walking is addictive!

Happily caffeinated we continued on, following sometimes red and white stickers on lamp posts, and sometimes yellow painted signs with the route number, 301. Generally speaking today the signage was good, important since we were winding our way through increasingly large villages and then towns.

A stunning grassy path led us to the little village of St Léonard, and a chap out collecting rosehips turn into soaps and other scented products.

He had brought his little daughter in her buggy, and an Italian couple we had met higher up, who were doing two days up to the pass and back again to Aosta, were enchanted by the little girl.

The village had certainly capitalised on the pilgrims passing through. There were signs everywhere welcoming pilgrims and masses of Francigena interpretation boards, all pointing into the fact that they had made a significant economic opportunity out of the route.

The village followed the steep slope so that stone-slated roofs felt like a main feature of the village, as well as its sentinel dogs.

Every surface was covered with flower-filled planters,

or planters in preparation.

The paths between the villages are old and established, and akin to the green lanes that are the ancient walking ways between communities.

I got a sudden flashback to the pilgrimage through Umbria I undertook with my mother and father and brother when I was 10 years old, where we stitched together these ancient and much used terraced footpaths, constructed with a low stone wall on one side.

Down in the hamlet of St-Oyen, Stephen spent some time coveting a tiny tractor, 

while I got into conversation with a local who answered my Italian in French, explaining that here in the village they are trilingual, speaking French and Italian, and also the local patois, which he said varied from village to village.

It was noticeable as we descended the valley that the villages had French names and offered chambres d’hôte accommodation instead of pensione.

Flower meadows had been cut for a late crop of hay, the rich mix of species fed in their entirety to livestock.

The flower meadows were lusher and greener here and contained many more flowering plants, even including hops, which I have not seen before Italy.

Flowing beside our path, was a cement canal which we initially thought might be a way to keep water off the path, but later discovered that it was the Ru Neuf, a 13km-long canal dating from 1400 when the inhabitants of Gignod further down the valley petitioned the bailiff of Aosta to have water to irrigate their lands.  It takes the water from the Artenavaz stream and contours it along the valley; the Francigena follows alongside for almost its whole length.

It was now about time for lunch and we had reached Étroubles, 15km down from the pass, the village we had considered as a possible finish for the day. We had planned a rest day in Aosta in an Airbnb after nine days’ walking, splitting the 30 km down from the pass into two flexible days, depending on how our knees were coping with the descent.  So we hadn’t booked accommodation in any of the villages, but extended the Airbnb booking in Aosta by one day, and were going to simply stop when our knees had had enough and catch a bus down to the city for the night and a bus back the next morning to complete the walk and start our rest day.  However, today our knees weren’t hurting at all, and the worst of the descent had been negotiated with so little difficulty that instead of stopping as we had planned, we decided to just walk the whole 30km in one go, not walk at all tomorrow, and thus score not one but TWO rest days.

For now our task was to find a sustaining lunch to see us down to the bottom of the valley.  It had unsurprisingly been cool 1200 m higher up and first thing in the morning, but now it was hotting up, and Stephen soaked his hat and flopped it back on his head.

We walked through the village trying to find a little bar that would sell us a panino, but all we could find were little restaurants wanting to sell us a full meal.

Despite the heat and the extra walking (we ended up at a little bar back on the edge of the village we had come in on), I would have been sorry to have missed walking through the village and particularly admiring its piazza, where the commune had decorated the whole of the municipal buildings with frescos of pastoral scenes, seemingly in honour of the Via Francigena.

In fact, the whole valley is still absolutely capitalising on the travellers to the pass, as they have done for centuries — the interpretation boards had given us a little historical context for the valley, bound inextricably up with the history of the Alpine pass. The exclusive rights to accompany travellers (and carry their luggage, either on pack animals or on their backs) was granted by the Savoiards in the early 10th century to the villagers of St Rhémy and Étroubles, our next village, in exchange for maintaining the road up to the pass.

Martigny and Bourg-St-Pierre had also based their local economies on travellers, but in Switzerland their summer focus had been very much on hikers and mountain-bikers, whereas here it was almost exclusively on providing pilgrim accommodation. Although not providing passing pilgrims with water, as none of the fountains contained aqua potabile. In this respect, we missed Switzerland already.

The bar was staffed with a jokey team and a cook who discussed our panini options in meticulous detail — our choices involving the opinions of the whole team.  Sitting next to us was a lovely Italian couple who bring their caravan up to a local campsite for the summer and come away into the Val d’Aosta for weekends. In comparison to the frustrating French conversations I had been trying to have, I can’t tell you how absolutely pleasurable it was just being able to chat easily in Italian. And eating in a café made us feel on holiday.

Eventually, the bar owner came out and wanted to know what we were doing, and why on earth we were walking to Rome.  He had never heard of such a thing — obviously he hadn’t been keeping his eyes open because the Francigena is everywhere.

We felt very much that the author of this Cicero guidebook had undersold this day on the route. The path continued grassy and pleasant

and we kept leapfrogging happy pilgrims and walkers like the Italians and the German couple, who had stopped to cool their feet in the Ru Neuf. The tiny canal flowed through meadows and farm yards, complete with feed hoppers shaped like Roman amphorae

to feed the cows in the slate-roofed barn, built neatly into the hillside.

And there were extensive forested sections too, where the Ru flowed as a stream and not as a canal.

Here the steep gradient of the hillside and the type of rock meant that there were no settlements.  Precipitous streams tumbled down the mountain underneath the Ru. The rock here was loose shale and in exposed areas you could see where it had been laid down in layers and then the stone contorted over the millions of years.

There were many places where the hillside had slid down over the path and been cleared, and others where the soil had not been secure enough to hold the root systems of the pine trees.

At certain points the entire hillside had to be stabilised with metal nets.

Engineering miracles were also apparent in a viaduct carrying the whole road over a gorge. It made me feel quite dizzy to look at it.

However in general these paths felt bucolic, and we were not the only ones to think so. There were many dog walkers, and we tiptoed past a guy resting in a hammock slung between two trees on the other side of the stream.

The path swerved around a huge glacial boulder deposited aeons ago, made of harder metamorphic layers of rock in contrast to the shale which had in places been turned into muddy gravel by the Ru Neuf.

Part of the bucolic feeling was that it was wonderful having our conversation back, and to have a path where we could walk comfortably side-by-side. We discussed our Aosta shopping list, and Stephen’s need to find a barber to tidy his beard up a bit (the only time he has been to a barber before was in San Francisco and he found a Mexican barber to give him a shave — with a cutthroat razor).

At the end of the forest was the dog-walkers’ carpark, and warnings about wolves (which we hadn’t been warned about walking in from the other end) and what to do if you see one: be quiet and they should go away; if they don’t, talk loudly and clap your hands; if they approach you call 112 and ask for the Guardia Forestale — by which time we imagined it would be too late — and send any video footage to the group researching wolves in the area.

The wolf warning marked the end of the upper, more remote and more sparsely populated valley — and of the contouring flat section which followed the Ru Neuf.  Now the path started its inevitable descent again, becoming an old lane edged with trees in which crested tits and pied flycatchers were calling, occasionally giving flashes of views out over the Val d’Aosta to whole other valley systems terminating in more vast mountains.

It passed through fields filled with herbally-scented chopped hay, and standing meadows with fritillary and common swallowtail butterflies fluttering overhead.

The village of Gignod appeared below us where the valley started to open up at the confluence of three valleys. Its church bell tower is a feature visible for miles.

Once in the village we sat on a friendly bench beside the church and Stephen procured us some water.

The Germans rolled in and sat also, and they had had the same thought of walking all the way to Aosta in one day like us. They gave us the news that we had not 3 to 4 km to go, but 7 to 8.  It was turning into a very long day!

Gignod is the first of the rural suburbs of the city, and after it the suburbs flow one into the other. But we remarked that from one side of the valley to the other, the villages seemed remarkably remote one from the other.

The path descended on straight village short-cuts, crossing the snaking roads,

past houses and gardens

down a series of quiet — and always steep — roads.

Old orchards loaded with fruit: pears, apples of all kinds, and the ubiquitous walnut trees that unite all the villages, from the top downwards. Smallholdings — one with goats, which we appreciated, having missed out on chamois.

Vegetables were grown on any tiny available plot of land, tumbling end-of-season tomatoes, squash, leeks and cavolo nero, crammed in by a parking spot.

There was a distinctly early autumnal feel in the air, despite the heat, and always the views, backwards through the villages we had come through up to the high valley,

And now down to the plain where lay the city. Still distant and still below us!

We were all on pavements now, and sometimes on main roads with no pavements, unattractive, and increasingly industrial. Buildings were going up — I thought the wheelbarrow suspended from a giant crane particularly artistic.

Buildings by and large seemed shabbier — ‘faded grandeur’, said Stephen.

Down and down we plunged, kilometre after tarmac kilometre,

Until at last, in the early evening, we reached the old part of the city, the cafe culture buzz giving us just enough energy to locate our little flat,

our home for the next two days and three nights, with a view of the mountains we had left behind.

Stats for the Day

Distance: 31.45km

Time walking: 7.37hrs

Elevation lost: 1900m

Fellow pilgrims found in Aosta: 2