Aosta Valley

The valley was home to the Salassi, a Celtic people who controlled the passes and their gold workings until Rome defeated them. In 25 BC the Romans founded Augusta Praetoria, modern Aosta, on a grid plan to guard the routes over the Great and Little St Bernard passes, and much of its walls, gates and theatre still stands. After Rome the valley passed to the Ostrogoths, Lombards and Franks, and later to the Kingdom of Burgundy.

From the 11th century it belonged to the House of Savoy, which ruled it for more than eight hundred years, though real power in the valley often lay with local noble families. The Challant family built or rebuilt many of the castles that line the main road, among them Fénis, Issogne and Verrès. Aosta's most famous son, Saint Anselm, became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093.

The valley kept its French language and its own institutions under the Savoys, but after Italian unification, and above all under Fascism, French was suppressed and workers from other regions were brought in for the steel and hydroelectric industries. Local resistance during the Second World War and a brief French occupation at the war's end led to a special statute in 1948 that made the Aosta Valley an autonomous region, officially bilingual in Italian and French. The Mont Blanc Tunnel, opened in 1965, made the valley a main route between Italy and France.

Valdostans have a strong sense of separate identity. Italian is the everyday language, French is co-official and taught in schools, and many older people and villagers speak patois, a Franco-Provençal dialect close to that of neighbouring Savoy and Valais. In the Lys valley below Monte Rosa, at Gressoney and Issime, Walser communities descended from medieval German-speaking settlers keep their own dialect and wooden architecture. Place names are often in French, such as Pré-Saint-Didier and Saint-Vincent.

The biggest date in the calendar is the Fiera di Sant'Orso, a crafts fair held in Aosta on 30 and 31 January for about a thousand years, where carvers sell wooden utensils, toys and the grolla, a lidded drinking cup. Other traditions come from mountain farming: the Bataille des Reines, in which cows lock horns to decide the queen of the herd, and the autumn descent of the cattle from the high pastures. Traditional sports include tsan and fiolet, played with sticks and a small ball.

The mountains shape the culture as much as history does. Courmayeur's Alpine guides are among the oldest guides' associations in the world, and the valley hosts the Tor des Géants, an endurance race around its high trails.

Only about 123,000 people live in the Aosta Valley, the smallest population of any Italian region. Around 33,000 of them live in Aosta, the only real city; Saint-Vincent, Châtillon, Pont-Saint-Martin and Sarre are the other larger towns, and much of the rest is scattered in mountain villages.

Autonomy gives the region control over most of its tax revenue, and it is one of the wealthier parts of Italy per head. Tourism, winter and summer, is the main earner, alongside hydroelectric power from the Alpine rivers, the Cogne steelworks in Aosta, public-sector jobs, dairy farming and small vineyards on terraced slopes. The Saint-Vincent casino once drew visitors from across northern Italy.

Life follows the seasons: resort towns fill from December to April and in high summer and are quiet in between. Current issues include the retreat of the glaciers, the effect of climate change on the ski season, heavy traffic through the Mont Blanc Tunnel and the depopulation of high villages.

Aosta Valley cooking is Alpine rather than Mediterranean, built on butter, cheese, cured meat, rye bread and polenta. The king of the table is fontina, a rich cow's-milk cheese matured for at least three months and protected by designation of origin, which is melted into fonduta, a cheese fondue thickened with egg yolk, and layered into seupa à la vapelenentse, a soup of bread, cabbage, fontina and broth from the Valpelline. Polenta is served with fontina or stewed meats, and carbonade is beef cooked in red wine.

Cured meats are a speciality: lardo d'Arnad, pork fat traditionally cured in chestnut-wood tubs; jambon de Bosses, a mountain ham; and mocetta, dried lean meat. Sweets include tegole, thin almond wafers, and the valley's chestnut and honey products. After dinner comes caffè alla valdostana, hot coffee with grappa, orange peel and sugar, shared from a many-spouted wooden coppa dell'amicizia, the friendship cup, and génépy, a liqueur of Alpine wormwood.

The terraced vineyards produce some of Europe's highest wines, notably the white Blanc de Morgex et de La Salle below Mont Blanc, as well as reds such as Torrette and Fumin and the white Petite Arvine.

Aosta keeps its Roman plan and much of its fabric: the Arch of Augustus, the double Porta Praetoria gateway, the tall façade of the Roman theatre and a cryptoporticus under the cathedral, along with the Romanesque cloister of Sant'Orso. Down the main valley towards Piedmont stand Fénis Castle, the frescoed Issogne Castle, the fortress of Verrès, the Fort of Bard with its Museum of the Alps, and the Roman bridge at Pont-Saint-Martin.

At the head of the valley, Courmayeur sits beneath Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps, on the French border. The Skyway Monte Bianco cable car climbs from Courmayeur to Punta Helbronner, and the Val Ferret and Val Veny are classic stages of the Tour du Mont-Blanc trek. The thermal spa at Pré-Saint-Didier is close by.

South of Aosta, Gran Paradiso National Park, Italy's first, protects ibex and chamois around the Gran Paradiso, the highest mountain entirely within Italy. Cogne and the Valnontey are its main bases, with the Paradisia Alpine garden and waterfalls at Lillaz. To the east, Breuil-Cervinia lies under the Matterhorn, whose Italian ridge was first climbed in 1865, and its ski area crosses the Plateau Rosa glacier to Zermatt. The Ayas and Gressoney valleys lead up to Monte Rosa and the Monterosa Ski area.