Cuneo’s Albergo Barra di Ferro (a new name to us for a hotel) accommodates one for the price of five francs a day and upwards, and gives a discount of ten per cent. to members of the Touring Club Italiano. These prices will certainly not disturb any one who can afford to supply a prodigal automobile with tires at the present high prices.
We climbed up from Cuneo to the Col, a matter of thirty-three kilometres of a very easy rise, in something less than a couple of hours, the last six kilometres, the steepest portion, averaging but a five per cent. grade.
On leaving Cuneo the road ascends very gradually, running along the valley of the Vermagnana to the foot of the Col where it begins to mount in earnest. Below is the great plain of Piedmont watered by the Po and its tributary rivers, while above rises the mass of the Maritime Alps, with Mount Viso as its crowning peak, nearly four thousand metres high. It is a veritable Alpine road but not at all difficult of ascent. About midway on the height one remarks the attempt to cut a tunnel and thereby shorten the route, an attempt which was abandoned long years ago. From the crest, the Col itself, one gets a view ranging from Mont Viso to Mont Rosa in the north and on the south even to the blue waters of the Mediterranean. For fully a third of the year, and often nearer half, the Col de Tende is cursed with bad weather and is often impassable for wheeled traffic in spite of the fact of its comparatively low elevation. The wind storms here are very violent.
From Tende the road winds down into the low French levels, and in this portion takes rank as one of the earliest of Alpine roads, it having been built by Carlo Emanuele I in 1591.
Down through the valley of the Torrent of the Roya glides the mountain road and, passing San Dalmazzo and numerous rock villages, a distinct feature of these parts, in sixteen kilometres reaches Breil, the first place of note on French territory.
We had our “triptych” signed at the Italian dogana fifteen kilometres beyond the brow of the mountain, at San Dalmazzo di Tenda, crossing on to French soil three kilometres farther on. The French douane is at Breil, at the sixty-sixth kilometre stone beyond Cuneo, and at an elevation of less than three hundred metres above the sea. Here we delayed long enough to have the douaniers check off the number of the motor, the colour of the body work, the colour of the cushions and numerous other incidentals in order that the French government might not be mulcted a sou. “Everything in order. Allons! partez;” said the gold braided official, and again we were in France.
At Breil the road divides, one portion, following still the valley of the Roya, slopes down to Ventimiglia in twenty kilometres, the other, in forty kilometres, arriving at Nice via the valley of the Paillon.
It is not all down hill after Breil for, before Sospel is reached, seventeen kilometres away, one crosses another mountain crest by a fairly steep ascent and again, after Sospel, it rises to the Col di Braus—this time over the best of French roads—to an elevation of over one thousand metres.
From Sospel a spur road leads direct to Menton but the Grande Route leads straight on to Nice, shortly after to blend in with the old Route d’Italie, linking up Paris with the Italian-Mediterranean frontier, a straight away “good road,” the dream of the automobilist, for a matter of 1,086 kilometres.
THE END.