Road to Home 2023 Day 65: Châtillon - Verrès

Mortel, tu n'es qu exilé sur la terre: arrêt un bref instant ici tes pas, abbreuve ton âme dans la prière, pense à la valeur de tes jours d'ici bas!

(painted on the side of the Chapel of the Holy Innocents in Cillian)

My third day of walking this section of the Via Francigena began early, with breakfast at a café in the town square of Châtillon as soon as the croissants came out of the oven, followed by 7:00 mass with the Franciscan friars who had hosted me overnight. This did not delay my departure by very much, as it was a brief mass, appropriate for a working day morning, with no sermon!

Wood carving is a fine art in Valle d'Aosta

After mass I swept up and tidied my room at the monastery before setting off for the day. The pilgrims who had booked the other two beds never did turn up, which meant I had the whole room (and adjacent luxurious bathroom - see yesterday's post!) all to myself, but it was a real pity for the many pilgrims I met who would have liked to stay at the hostel, and had been told it was full! 

Please, please, if you are a walker, do call and cancel your reservation if your plans change - even if you haven't paid a deposit or left a credit card number, and left only your first name! It pained me to see those beds empty after I'd heard another woman walker ringing the doorbell and asking the friars if they had a bed, only to be turned away, and seen a young couple with backpacks sitting on a bench leafing desperately through a guidebook looking for somewhere to stay - and then I had three places all to myself!! 😩

That's my sermon for the day, seeing as the friars didn't give one. 😆

Today's stage began with a climb high above the town of Châtillon to the hamlet of Conoz, where the Via Francigena follows paths and minor roads traversing the mountainside along the Rû de la Plaine, one of the many rûs providing water to irrigate crops on the arid south-facing side of the valley (again, see  yesterday's post for an explanation).

Wine press in Pessin-Dessous 

The Rû de la Plaine took me across the slope high above the resort town of Saint-Vincent, passing through the pretty little village of Pessin-Dessous, with its restored 18th-century wine press. Every farming village in the valley used to have a communal wine press, oil press, flour mill and oven. In Cillian, on the other side of Saint-Vincent, the communal wine press has been torn down and replaced with a chapel, built in 1954 in fulfilment of a vow made during the Second World War, with a painted façade and an invocation inviting passers-by to stop and reflect.

I paused on the bench in front of the chapel, though more to eat a granola bar than to reflect on my own mortality. As I did so an American couple walked by. I later met two more Americans, two Italians and three Frenchmen; all told, with the other pilgrims I had seen the previous evening, there are about a dozen of us walking the same stage each day - much more than I expected!

Shortly after my break outside the chapel I took a brief detour to see the ruins of a Roman bridge. After 18 centuries of constant use, the bridge finally collapsed in 1839, leaving only one abutment standing; still an impressive sight!

After returning to the main path from the bridge detour I ran into Frédéric and his son, who had started out later than me. We walked the rest of the way to Verrès together, making our way up and down the slope of the mountainside several times along the way!

Frédéric would have lost his jacket here if I weren't right behind him 😄

In Chenal

We passed below the castle and church of Saint-Germain, where the sprinklers on the grass created a beautiful rainbow! 🌈  Then we stopped at another Maison de l'eau to top up our water bottles with chilled, filtered water for only 7 cents a litre - only it cost us a bit more because we kept dropping pennies down the drain below the machine! 😆

We rounded a corner and the valley floor opened up before us, with the motorway, the old highway and the railway line running parallel to the river. In contrast to these modern traffic routes, we were following the route of the ancient Roman road connecting the Italian peninsula with Gaul, the Via delle Gallie, following cart tracks carved into the solid rock roadbed. 

When we came to the church at Montjuvet, visible in the photos above, we stopped for a lunch break and a nap on the grass - only to be rudely awakened when the church bell struck one o'clock!

We had already walked two thirds of the way, but the remaining third was the most difficult. Not only because it was the last, because the sun was getting hot and we were walking into the wind, but because we climbed almost 200 metres up, then steeply down most of the way, and then back up again! From the last high spot we could see that we were right above Verrès and all that remained was the steep descent to the outskirts of the town and then the road to the city centre.

The town of Verrès is divided in two by the river Evançon, and dominated by the 13th-century castle perched high above the town. Needless to say I did not take a bonus hike all the way up there, but I did stroll through the old town centre to the 11th-century church and monastery complex of the Collegiata di Saint Gilles. There is normally a pilgrim hostel there, I had read (and been told) that it was closed at the moment but pilgrim laundry hanging outside seemed to suggest otherwise. In any case, I was glad to have a comfortable, quiet private room at Affittacamere Betulla, in a bright green building on the far edge of the town centre. I had quite a long rest there to recover from all that walking in the sun before venturing out in the cool of the evening to see the town and get something to eat from the supermarket. 

Today's accommodation: Affittacamere Betulla

Châtillon - Verrès 22 km