Gran San Bernardo - Italy

Regions about:Aosta valley
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Provinces about:
Aosta
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Argoments areas Gran San Bernardo:
Mountain holiday
Ski holiday
Nature holiday

Gran San Bernardo

Great St Bernard Pass (Colle del Gran San Bernardo) is the most ancient pass through the Western Alps, with evidence of use as far back as the Bronze Age and surviving traces of a Roman road. In 1800 Napoleon's army used the path to enter Italy, an event depicted in Jacques-Louis David's Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass and Hippolyte Delaroche's Bonaparte Crossing the Alps, both notable oil paintings. Having been bypassed by easier and more practical routes, its value today is mainly historical and recreational.

The pass runs northeast-southwest through the Valais Alps (formerly known as the Pennine Alps after the Roman name for the pass, poeninus mons or summus poeninus) at a maximum elevation of 2,469 m (8,100 ft). The road running through the pass, highway E27 in both Italy and Switzerland, joins Martigny on the upper Rhone river in the canton of Valais, Switzerland, to Aosta in the Aosta Valley region of Italy. From Martigny Route 9 descends to Lausanne and from Aosta Route A5 descends to Torino.
From the north (Switzerland), the route to the pass follows the Dranse River valley above Martigny, then into the wild and desolate valley of the Dranse d'Entremont. The Great St Bernard Tunnel (and the main road) plunges through the mountains at the 1,915 m (6,283 ft) level, reducing, since the tunnel's opening in 1964, the commercial relevance of the road over the pass. A reduction of utility began after the construction of the Simplon Tunnel, strictly a railway tunnel, 100 km (62 mi) to the east in 1905. The much smaller historic road winding over the pass itself, which lies a few hundred metres from the Swiss border with Italy, is only passable June to September. On the south side of the pass, the Great St Bernard Valley is drained by the Artanavaz River, which runs down to Aosta.
The pass at narrowest point runs between the peaks of Grande Chenalette at 2,889 m (9,478 ft) and Mont Mort at 2,867 m (9,406 ft). Slightly to the west in Pointe de Drône at 2,949 m (9,675 ft), the highest peak. Between it and the pass is Petite Chenalette at 2,885 m (9,465 ft).

Gran San Bernardo: map

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