Aosta · Italy

Piazza Chanoux

This is the square in which Aosta meets, and it bears the name of Émile Chanoux, notary and partisan, who died in prison in 1944 after an interrogation. He was forty, and he held a precise idea: that this valley should govern itself, in its own language, within a Europe of regions. The autonomy of the Aosta Valley, which today appears an administrative fact, arises in part from that night. The square was a market, then the centre of public life; now one sits here and watches people pass. A name upon a square is the most everyday manner of not forgetting.

Go deeper

Who was Émile Chanoux?

A notary and intellectual from the Aosta Valley, a central figure in the local Resistance and a theorist of Alpine federalism. He died in prison in Aosta in May 1944.

What is the Valley’s autonomy?

A special statute giving the region its own powers and protecting Italian and French bilingualism. It has been in force since just after the war.

What was here before?

The town market, and before that a sector of the Roman city. The square as you see it is the result of nineteenth- and twentieth-century reordering.

Where it is

Piazza Émile Chanoux 42, 11100 Aosta · 45.73728, 7.32036 · Open in Maps

Listen where it happened

Part of Memoro, a free audio guide you open in your browser. No app, no account.