Glaciers, moraines and one valley that collects them all

The Aosta Valley is entirely alpine and has not a metre of plain: its lowest point is at Pont-Saint-Martin, just above three hundred metres, and from there it climbs to the 4,806 of Mont Blanc. The Dora Baltea rises at the foot of Mont Blanc, gathers the torrents of every side valley and crosses into Piedmont after about a hundred kilometres.

The four thousanders

There are four and they all stand on the edge: Mont Blanc to the west, the highest in the Alps; the Matterhorn to the northeast, an almost perfect pyramid; Monte Rosa, which is a massif of many summits rather than one; and Gran Paradiso, 4,061 metres, the only four thousander entirely inside Italy. Around them are the glaciers, which here still cover about a hundred square kilometres.

The side valleys

There are thirteen and each has a character. Val Veny and Val Ferret lie under Mont Blanc; Valgrisenche, Val di Rhemes and Valsavarenche are narrow and little built on; Cogne opens into a wide basin; the Valtournenche aims at the Matterhorn; the valleys of Gressoney and Ayas look at Monte Rosa. At the head of nearly all of them is a hut and a path going up.

Gran Paradiso

The Gran Paradiso national park was created in 1922, the first in Italy, on the land of Victor Emmanuel II's hunting reserve. In the nineteenth century the ibex of the Alps were down to a few dozen and survived only here: every ibex on the alpine arc today descends from that population. Several thousand live within the park, and in summer you see them without binoculars.

The climate

The valley is closed by mountains on three sides and gets little rain: the Aosta basin is one of the driest areas in the Alps, so dry that the valley floor is steppe-like and the vineyards climb to twelve hundred metres. Summer nights are cool even in August, and a jumper is always needed.