Aosta · Italy
The pilgrims' road
In 990 an English archbishop travelled home from Rome to Canterbury and recorded the stages of his journey. There are eighty names, and one of them is Aosta. That list is the document that gives the Via Francigena its shape: not a constructed road but a route which for centuries brought pilgrims, merchants, armies and anyone obliged to cross the Alps down towards the south. They arrived over the Great St Bernard, at 2,400 metres, where the canons kept a hospice open all year with the dogs everybody has heard of. Aosta was the first town beyond the pass: a bed, a meal and a physician, the worst of it behind them. The route is waymarked today and is walked again, and it is among the few journeys in Europe still made exactly as they were a thousand years ago.
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Who was the archbishop?
Sigeric, Archbishop of Canterbury, who went to Rome to receive the pallium from the pope. On the way back he had the stages written down, probably for practical reasons. It has become the main source on how people crossed Europe at the end of the first millennium.
What was the hospice at the pass?
A religious house founded in the eleventh century on the pass itself, which took in anyone crossing, free, in any season. The avalanche dogs came much later and are the part everyone remembers, but the remarkable fact is that the hospice has not closed in a thousand years.
Can you still walk it?
Yes. The Aosta Valley section comes down from the Great St Bernard to here and carries on towards Piedmont, waymarked and divided into stages. Many walk only a few days of it. The pass section is a summer walk: in winter the col is shut, as it always has been.
Where it is
More stories in Aosta
- Adret and envers
- When the railway arrived
- Arch of Augustus
- Regional Archaeological Museum
- The villages the city swallowed
- The Battle of the Queens
- Aosta Cathedral
- Church of Santo Stefano