Italy … I love you, ba…by

This is the day. Crossing the border. Over the pass. A walk through the Alps, through history and the path that some many have taken in their own endeavours for trade or war or faith or love.
Up up up … we go.
And at the top of my climb at the pass it is a bit like a supermarket car park a mix of the sacred and the cursed.
You make of it what you will though - for some it was a pilgrimage; others it was a day trip in her Lotus or with his chick on a 1200 GS. Others a camper van beside the lake for the night; someone selling toy St Bernard dogs.
But for me this is the land of the $8 Negroni…. alleluia.
It is a bit more than that but will get to that later.
The land of the $8 Negroni and that shared with my Belgian buddies at a tavern in the Italian side of course beside the lake. On the ridge above a steinböck silhouetted. Also saw a marmot and heard them calling, me thinking it was a buzzard.

The pass had been used by the Celtic to invade Italy in 390 BCE. Julius had a crack at taking the pass, but got skittle by the Celts. His adopted son, Augustus, succeeded and a temple to Jupiter Poeninus was built, the consequence of the religious syncretism of the Latins, who assimilated the classical pagan god with Penn, the male divinity revered by the Celto-Ligurians as lord of the peaks, and from whom various toponyms derive, including Mount Penna, the Appennines and the Pennine Alps.
The Pass was used continuously throughout the Middle Ages and, with the major influx of pilgrims in around the year 1000, Bernard of Menthon, Archdeacon of Aosta who later became a saint, founded the large hostel structure that is still active today. The statue of St Bernard dominates Plan de Jupiter and he also got a dog named after him …. so cute.
Enough history. Check out the photos.Read more