The best cycling routes around Bard

The climb is at times truly challenging

Located in the heart of the hamlet of Viering, in the municipality of Champdepraz, this small chapel is an emblematic example of the rural religious architecture of the Aosta Valley. Characterized by a white plastered facade that contrasts with the exposed stone side walls, the building features valuable frescoes above the entrance portal, depicting the titular saints. The most distinctive element is its bell gable, which houses a bell with a unique history: it still bears the marks of bullet holes inflicted by Nazi soldiers during World War II, making the church not only a place of worship but also a silent witness to local resistance.

An ancient cemetery dating back to the Napoleonic era, abandoned in the 1940s. https://fondoambiente.it/luoghi/cimitero-del-fiorentino?ldc

From the centre of the village you start to climb

While traveling along the Via Francigena, on the stretch from Arnad to Bard, you cross this characteristic three-arched pedestrian bridge. On the left orogr. area with a bench for rest.

Emarese is located on a beautiful plateau that is sunny all year round. The village has beautiful stone houses, many of which have been renovated respecting the original materials and architecture. On the walls of some of these houses, reproductions of period photos have been hung, showing the faces of the people who lived in the village in a past that is becoming increasingly distant.

The Roman road of the Gauls, built to connect Rome with the Rhone Valley, has in the Donnas section one of its most characteristic and spectacular points, carved into the living rock for a length of 221 meters. At a place where in antiquity the rocky promontory plunged into the waters of the Dora, the Romans launched a real challenge to nature by carving a living rock on which they could draw perfectly vertical walls and in whose womb they carved the roadbed. Exciting and unusual, here the Via delle Gallie gives its best by offering the spectacle of a vaulted passage 4 meters thick, 4 meters high and almost 3 meters wide which eloquently illustrates the amount of rock removed and shows all the refinement of a road engineering that has never been reached again until viaducts and modern tunnels. In the Middle Ages it served as the gate of the village, which was closed at night; the other defenses were natural: on one side the mountain and on the other the river. A fundamental road, which has been used a lot over the centuries, as evidenced by the deep ruts left by the passage of carts and the wear of the walking surface which has been patched and repaired at various points over time. A little further on, on the right, we recognize the excellent profile of a milestone, also spared in the rocky bank, which informs us of the distance to Augusta Praetoria (the current city of Aosta): XXXVI miles (about 54 km).

At the mouth of the Champorcher Valley, Hône is divided into three different areas: the main town in the plain of the valley, the sunny side of the “adret” with terraced slopes and villages and the wooded expanse of the wild and rugged “vers” slope.