Lauzun and his personal history make interesting reading for one versed in things Italian and French. He made a famous mot when being transported to his mountain prison. He was requested from time to time to descend from his carriage, whenever by chance it had got stuck in the mud or wedged between offending rocks. With much apology he was begged to descend. “Oh! this is nothing; these little misfortunes of travel are nothing of moment compared to the object of my journey.” Other prisoners may have put things similarly, but hardly with the same grace of diction.
Let no automobilist, on leaving Turin, come out by way of Pinerolo unless he is prepared for a detour of a hundred kilometres, a rise of 2,000 metres and a drop down again to 1,300 metres at Cesana Tarinese, where he strikes the main road over the Col de Mont Cenis to Modane in France, or via the Col de Mont Genevre to Briançon. The direct road from Turin is via Rivoli and Suse.
Not every traveller in Italy knows the half-hidden out-of-the-way Val d’Aoste, the obvious gateway from Turin to the north via the Col du Saint Bernard. Travellers by rail rush through via the Simplon or Mont Cenis and know not the delights and joys which possess the traveller by road as he plunges into the heart of the Alps through the gateway of the Val d’Aoste.
The Val d’Aoste, less than a hundred kilometres, all counted, has more scenic and architectural surprises than any similar strip in Europe, but it is not a piste to be raced over by the scorching automobilist at sixty miles an hour. On the contrary it can not be done with satisfaction in less than a day, even by the most blasé of tourists. The railway also ascends the valley as far as Aoste, and one may cross over by coach into France or Switzerland by either the Col du Petit Saint Bernard or the Col du Grand Saint Bernard. It is worth doing!
The whole Val d’Aoste is one great reminder of feudal days and feudal ways. Curiously enough, too, in this part of Piedmont the aspect is as much French as Italian, and so too is the speech of the people. At Courmayer, for instance, the street and shop signs are all in French, and ’om the diminutive of homme replaces the Italian uomo; cheur stands for cœur and sita for cité and citta. This patois is universal through the upper valleys, and if one has any familiarity with the patois of Provence it will not be found so very strange. French, however, is very commonly understood throughout Piedmont, more so than elsewhere in north Italy, where, for a fact, a German will find his way about much more readily than a Frenchman.
One blemish lies all over the Val d’Aoste. It was greatly to be remarked by travellers of two or three generations ago and is still in evidence if one looks for it, though actually it is decreasing. Large numbers of the population are of the afflicted class known as Cretins, and many more suffer from goitre. It is claimed that these diseases come from a squalid filthiness, but the lie is given to this theory by the fact that there is no apparent filthiness. The diseases are evidently hereditary, and at some time anterior to their appearance here they were already known elsewhere. They are then results of an extraneous condition of affairs imported and developed here in this smiling valley through the heedlessness of some one. There are certain neighbourhoods, as at Courmayer and Ivrea, where they do not exist at all, but in other localities, and for a radius of ten kilometres roundabout, they are most prevalent.
The southern gateway to the Val d’Aoste is the snug little mountain of Ivrea, 50 kilometres from Turin. The cheese and butter of the Italian Alps, known throughout the European market as Beurre de Milan, is mostly produced in this neighbourhood, and the ten thousand souls who live here draw almost their entire livelihood from these products. Ivrea has an old Castle of imposing, though somewhat degenerate, presence. It has been badly disfigured in the restorations of later years, but two of its numerous brick towers of old still retain their crenelated battlements. The place itself is of great antiquity, and Strabon has put it on record that 3,600 of the inhabitants of the Val d’Aoste were once sold en bloc in the streets of Ivrea by Terentius Varro, their captor.
The Val d’Aoste, from Ivrea to Courmayer, about one hundred kilometres, will some day come to its own as a popular touring ground, but that time is not yet. When the time comes any who will may know all the delights of Switzerland’s high valleys without suffering from the manifest drawback of overexploitation. One doesn’t necessarily want to drink beer before every waterfall or listen to a yoedel in every cavern. What is more to the point is that one may here find simple, unobtrusive attention on the part of hotel keepers and that at a price in keeping with the surroundings. This you get in the Val d’Aoste and throughout the Alps of Piedmont, Dauphiny and Savoy.
Up high in the Val d’Aoste lies a battery of little Alpine townlets scarce known even by name, though possessed of a momentous history and often of architectural monuments marvellously imposing in their grandeur and beauty.
Near Pont Saint Martin, high above the torrent of the Doire, is the picturesque feudal castle of Montalto, a name famous in Italian annals of the middle ages.