From Echevennoz to Aosta

7/14/2008 - Echevennoz-Gignod-Aosta - 11.5 miles trail, 17.21 total

Before I talk about the second day's walk, I would like to relate some of my conversation with Elena, the "grandma" from the previous post. At 84, she represented the 3rd generation of the owners of this charming bed & breakfast/hostel/restaurant/meeting hall/chapel. With such an important role in the village, I secretly pictured them as the big shots, but they certainly didn't act that way, nor were their toilets of the gilt marble variety, either.

Anyhow, I should preface this preface by saying that when I was a diplomatic history major at Penn, I wanted to write an honor's thesis about how strange it must have been for Italy to have swapped sides so sloppily during the second World War. For those of you that don’t know, the Allied invasion of Sicily and Southern Italy caused the Italians to be stuck between two forces. History tells us that they had secret negotiations with Eisenhower, but when the main negotiating party on the Italian side didn’t appear by the appointed time, Eisenhower leaked the story and the Germans turned their artillery around, this time facing the Italians. The Italian army didn’t know who to fight anymore, and many soldiers simply ran off or joined the partisans. Unfortunately, I was not accepted into the honors program, so I never performed all the interviews I planned of the various elderly people I had met while abroad in 2003.

Still, I have a lot of curiosity about this subject, so as Grandma Elena fed me a breakfast of hot milk, bread, butter, and raspberry jam (don't even bother to ask: it was homemade), I asked her whether she remembered anything about the war. This little old lady suddenly grew very fiery and emotional, and said that she was 13 when the war ended, and that "the fascists" burned down her house as they were pulling out. What's more, they pulled all the crops out of the ground and destroyed the storehouse with all the potatoes. After recounting this she paused, and with difficulty related the following: " the fascists killed my 17-year-old cousin, a mere farmboy, and his father, my uncle, as he was returning home with a sack of potatoes." "It was September 3rd," she said, "and I remember being up in the pasture tending to the cows, when I heard the shots as they killed my uncle and came whizzing by my head, sounding like high-pitched whistles. I don't know how I managed to escape, but I tumbled down the pasture, and ran straight to the [church of the] Madonna, where I thanked her repeatedly for saving me." "It was the partisans that finally came to free us, followed by the British. We were extremely grateful."

Having finished this short but poignant story, she immediately returned to herself, and started preparing for lunch.

Armed with a good story and nearly a pint of warm milk (not really my thing, but would you have turned her down?), I set out into the misty morning.

The second day's walk was different from the first, though no less beautiful. Instead of walking along the side of a mountain in the open, I was beneath a canopy of pines, with a stream running alongside for much of the way.

The highlight of the day’s hike was Gignod, which was one of the strangest towns I have ever visited. I saw two people in over an hour there, and the whole town had an odd electric charge to it. The closest thing I could compare it to would be a Giorgio di Chirico painting, not because of the architecture, per se, but because of the solitude, and the quality of being suspended in air.

Having stretched there for some time, I walked around for a bit, then headed off toward Aosta.

I started to get tired right as I was about an hour's walk from Aosta, but I occupied myself enjoying the progress from farm, to village, to Aosta.

On the way, I picked a slightly unripe green apple, my first petty theft of the trip. It tasted delicious, in the way that only produce stolen from the garden can.

When I finally came to the top of a large hill, at a small suburb called Signayes, I was very happy to see Aosta, but not so happy to see that the last stretch consisted of a decline of something like 15-20%. After descending so much in 2 days, I was pretty upset about having to walk backwards all the way, but it was worth it.

Funny how Aosta seems like a metropolis after only a few days in villages. I can’t wrap my head around how big this city is, and looking at Wikipedia, I see that it has about 125,000 inhabitants. Still, going from 15 families to 125,000 people in 5 hours is a big change. I can see why small town people are in such awe of the big city.

After laying in the main square a while with my shoes off, and doing the whole stretch program, I finally heaved the backpack on once more and made my way to the tourist information office, which supplied me with maps, hotel lists, and even some information about the Parco Nazionale Gran Paradiso, which will be my next trip.

I finally made my way to the campsite, which was about a kilometer out of town. I will save that experience for a separate blog all its own. Suffice it to say that I slept in my tent on a plot of ground that smelled like cow, and probably is used as a stable during the off-season. It was an awesome feeling, despite the smell.

This morning (Tuesday) was spent doing laundry (as you will see from a previous post), walking around Aosta, and writing all these posts. I will sleep at a different campsite tonight, maybe stop by the ‘’café’’ for one last internet hurrah, and then I’m off. So, the reason for all these posts at once is because I guess that I will not have too much access to the internet over the next few days, and I wanted to get all this out before I forgot about it.