Aosta (part 1)

Thursday was supposed to be drizzly and gray -- as good a day as any to drive through the Mont Blanc tunnel and emerge into Italy for a day trip.

Hannibal and his elephants never had it so good. The tunnel is more than 10 km long, right through the mountain; it's only one lane in each direction. Driving is tightly regulated. You must travel no faster nor A slower than a certain range of speed. The sides of the tunnel are illuminated by white lights interspersed at regular intervals by blue ones; the distance between two blue lights is the minimum following distance. All trucks must be inspected before entering the tunnel; the inspection points are in towns some distance away. The authorities also control commercial traffic entry times so as to smooth out usage peaks.

A lot of these controls, as well as extensive physical safety features, were put into place after the 1999 truck fire that killed 38 people and closed the tunnel for three years. We read about that from the Wikipedia page -- I translated the French page on the fly for Mark, because it was more extensive than the English one -- after I noticed a memorial marker near the tunnel entrance.

+ + +

You can get completely different weather on the opposite side of the mountains, but it was just as drizzly and gray when we emerged in Italy. It's about an hour to Aosta altogether. Even with the drizzle it's a lovely drive with the mountains rising up all around you, many of them terraced and quite built up.

Aosta was once Augusta Praetoria Salassorum, a Roman camp-turned-planned-city strategically located near two mountain passes. It had a squarish layout crossed by two main roads that exited the city at four main gates. One such gate, the Porta Praetoria, remains in very good condition.

I wish I had a better picture. The gate is truly awesome. It is double-walled, and each wall is doubled in thickness. There is a beautiful, ripply stone on the outside, and some of the marble facing remains. There are niches on the outside for statues. It is still embedded in the Roman city wall, much of which continues around the city.

We stopped near the gate at the tourism office, where an English-speaking staffer gave us a nice big paper map and circled the specifically Roman sites on it, pointing out a path to walk from east to west through the city that was once the Roman castrorum.

Not far down we came to the remains of the theater:

They have erected scaffolding all over the site so you can walk through and around it. You can get quite close to the Roman brickwork that went under the stage.

 

And see the wall stones, cut into triangular shapes so as to present more surface area for adhesion to the concrete.

Rows of "bleachers"

 

Underneath the theater floor

An entrance

 

Remains of buildings outside the theater

 

more...

 

Posted with Blogsy

Comments

[Amber]

I've never heard of that tunnel - wow! What an engineering feat. And those ruins are amazing - I remember being in Italy and having to constantly remind myself just how old these ruins are. Incredible that they are still there to see. Looks like a lousy day, weather-wise, but that you made good use of it!