Crossing into Italy’s Aosta Valley is always a stunner. Castles impossibly balanced on canine shaped mountain peaks, vines lining the sides of the mountains and thousands of walking tracks – it’s a hiker’s heaven.
This time, with my great school friend, Pina, we’re heading up to Bionaz, in the Valpelline Valley, at its head the great Cervino, or Matterhorn, juts up into the clouds. The sun beats down as we park up at Camping Lac Lexert – a field in a bucolic glade.
I almost imagine nymphs emerging from the pine and oak trees to dance. The grass is fresh green, the small lake an emerald gem and, always, the mountain peaks majestic on the skyline.
This rural idyll is behind a pizzeria, bar and hotel adorned with vivid pink convolvulus in carved out oak trunks and hanging troughs on wooden balconies. The stone slated roofs are typical of the valley, built to withstand great falls of snow, though that’s one concerning thing about this visit.
Four years ago, when Pina brought us here, Monte Cervino was capped with glistening ice. This time there’s only a scrap of glacier left. Pina tells us that the summers are becoming suffocating down in the city of Aosta, which was once blessed with a temperate summer climate.
Pina whisks us up to the start of our walk in La Lechere in her Panda and I’m grateful that it’s such a perfect car for mountain bends as the sheer drop plunges from the road as we twist upwards. After a panino made with Fontina, a mountain cheese, from Le Chalet du Barrage open air café, complete with a stunning mountain view, we set off.
Our walk takes us by Lago di Place Moulin, the walls of the dam an engineering feat, the sheer russet cliffs austere, the water a swimming pool blue from the copper in the rocks. It’s a strange otherworldly place. We finally arrive at the old chapel and the inn at the end of the reservoir, and I wonder at the isolated world up here. This is a place where people still practise transhumance. Pina tells me of how the people celebrate the arrival into the high pastures and the return to the valleys of the herds.
We return to the open-air café in La Lechere to listen to Pina’s son Matteo’s band, who change their name and repertoire regularly. Now, they’re called Rico & The B.O.O.M. and they launch into a reggae inspired set. Two walkers dance on the track, walking poles in hand, and two young women travellers blow exuberant kisses as they pass. The sun setting down the valley shows the contrast between the good-times music and the powerful, moody mountains, which it has got to be said are the perfect backdrop to a Gothic fantasy.
The next morning, we wake to the clearest air, the greenest meadow, a kestrel swooping through the pine trees and a mist rising from the emerald lake. The peace is disturbed though by the arrival of a film crew, rolling trees in tubs and boulders into place, topping them all off with armfuls of greenery.
We have a Returner List for all the places we like so much that we’ll come back to and this one is top of it.
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