The World & I: Archeology at Sait Bernard Pass

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By Christie Cochell

**Statue of Saint Bernard towers over the Italian Alps**

Saint Bernard Pass may seem cut off from the world, but all the old roads crossed here: Neolithic, Celtic, Roman, medieval, and Napoleonic.

lie awake in the albergo above Aosta, full of jet lag and apprehension. The next day I am to go up into the Alps (terrified, unworthy, small), up to the monastery to join the archaeologists, with my luggage full of woolen socks. I open the inn's shutters and windows wide to the Italian summer night. There are a few lights farther up the slopes of the green mountain and, later, voices carrying on the night: companions returning uphill through the orchards from town after midnight, in reveling spirits. Later still, I listen to a dog barking far away, somewhere in the foreign darkness.
I had chosen to get to the Great Saint Bernard Pass from its Italian side: to fly into Milan and travel by train west to Aosta, past a litany of unknown stations--Rho, Magenta, Novara, Vercelli, Santhi? Chivasso--and then unnamed castles and towers on sheer crags; to catch the bus up the mountain from Aosta the following day, from the valley bottom to eighty-six hundred feet elevation. The others were all coming from California through Geneva instead, where a much jauntier train, the bright red Saint Bernard Express, takes you around the lower curve of Lake Leman and through Martigny as far as the village of Orsi�res, for the final ascent by bus. I knew Italy, though; I felt at home there. And I needed to make my own way to the pass, to come to it quietly and get my bearings before continuing.
We had come in low and slow over the Alps, on the plane from Heathrow, seeming almost to hover the whole way. The vastness and stern demeanor of the mountains made me ask what in the world I thought I was doing there. I was anxious about both the physical challenge--though I'd been preparing for it since January, with steep uphill hikes in the Northern California foothills,

**Archaeologists collecting roof tiles at the site of a Roman mansion in nearby Switzerland.**

against the protests of my unaccustomed lungs and knees--and the even more daunting test of character. I was afraid of being found wanting. But it had been a dangerously deadening year, and I needed an adventure of the spirit to shake myself alive again. This was it: archaeology in the Swiss and Italian Alps with Stanford University's Continuing Studies program, excavating the ruins of Summus Poeninus, the highest Roman temple ever built.
        I have fallen head over heels in love with Aosta and find it ironic that I must travel to a monastery the next day, leaving this place where I could settle happily for a very long time. The mountains are glorious and terrifying. The albergo I have chosen is above town, on a hillside with stone farmhouses and apple trees and sudden rushes of turkeys following a farmer as he clears branches.
        In the morning I rise late, since the bus doesn't leave until 2:20 for the Gran San Bernardo--summit, not tunnel--from the station down by the old Roman wall. I am comforted by the sound of tennis balls on a red clay court, with an occasional accompanying volley of good-natured invective in Italian; and then by strong coffee and a wheel of local fontina. I am allowed to slice as much of it as I want for my lunch-hour breakfast in the bar downstairs, the breakfast room having long since been cleared.
        After that I summon my courage, gather my bags, and start down to the station. When I come down again, I will be much changed. And little wonder: one of the aims of the monastery to which I am headed is to encourage those who pass through "to live life as an ascent."

Men on the roof

he men who work on the monastery's roof are at breakfast with us every morning in the refectory, eating bread and butter and jam hungrily in their thermal shirts and unstrapped overalls. They have their own table away from the window, which heavy cloud blows past. They always sit in the same places, so there's only one whose face I've really seen. A gingery walrus mustache, cheeks rosy with windburn, eyes oddly opaque over the bowl of café au lait that he holds in both hands, like a chalice, as if reading fortunes in the muddy swirl of coffee and warm

**A bridge supposedly crossed by Charlemange lies just outside Bourg St.-Pierre.**

milk poured together from separate metal pots. These roof menders from the Valais speak French in a dialect I can't quite make out, distanced as I am by the long table and distracted by the conversation among ourselves, the American archaeologists (wondering if there's an ATM in the nearest Swiss village).
When we go out to the site we're exploring on the Roman road, I see him laying bright sheets of copper on the steep roof of the monastery's companion building. The musée/chenil, the museum and dog kennels, consists of two rooms of Celtic and Roman artifacts and the smelly quarters of the Saint Bernards, clumsy footed puppies and massive mother dogs, all teats and jowls. Standing disturbingly upright on the high, copper-lined roof, which slopes steeply against the forty-some feet of snow that pile up on the pass seven or eight months of the year, he is working fast against the winter that's always already coming in these Alpine regions. His eyes, I understand now, are like those of sailors who have been too long at sea: full of the elements, mesmerized by blowing cloud and the mortal betrothal to snow.

The journey and return

ehind the monastery is the hospice, a beautiful, self-contained building. It is constructed of the local schist, dark gray with lighter plaster, and rusted with the blood-colored lichen that thrives at that elevation. Lapped stone shingles rise to a gradual peak. The building is almost indistinguishable from the native rock of the hillside it's built into and the running wall below it, all drenched with melted snow. I walk around it with my camera, looking for an opening. But there isn't one. It's a building without windows or doors. A five-foot square cut in either end--too high off the ground to have been meant as a way in or out--has been plastered over. A simple cross at the apex of the shingled roof makes you wonder if it might have been a chapel, sealed for some reason.
But it isn't. I later learn that it's a morgue I've been circling, home to the bones of travelers found dead on the mountain and never claimed. In that bedrock it's impossible to bury anyone or anything. The monks--or canons, as they're called--are themselves cremated and interred in the crypts and catacombs in the lower levels of the hospice.
The mission of the Saint Bernard order is to assist travelers through the perilous pass (all the monks are expert mountaineers); before that, the Romans built a temple beside the

One of the aims of the monastery to which I am headed is to encourage those who pass though "to live life as an ascent."

impervious gray lake and made votive offerings to Jupiter, storm god of the mountains, "for the journey and its return." Some travelers don't get through it, just the same. There are the unclaimed bodies in the stone morgue, and bones are said to lie in the lake. Midweek we attend a service for a 33-year-old monk killed in a fall in June with two other climbers.
        "Who wants to walk to Italy for a drink?" someone asks. We're in the second-floor salon of the monastery at the top of the stairs, which have been worn smooth and even concave by the centuries of stocking feet or borrowed slippers. We meet there every evening after supper to go over the day's archaeological findings--to plot maps and sort over the bits of iridescent Roman glass and square-shafted nails with lovely lopsided heads. So we bundle up, though it's late July, and walk the half mile down the pitch-black lake from Switzerland across the border to the lighted Italian Hotel for creamy, thick, hot chocolate or espresso and Calvados, fragrant apple brandy.
        We come back late, back up the lake through icy blowing fog, four or five abreast on the road, arms linked. The undergraduate with us has started singing Harry Belafonte songs into the high Alpine darkness, beginning with "Day-O" as we pass the Swiss guardpost, long since closed for the night. It's the farthest I've ever been from anywhere, I think.
        We're fighting our way up the last stretch to the hospice in the fog, unable even now to see its lights, when two dogs come rushing toward us. I think, "Ah, the noble Saint Bernards, doing their duty toward the poor lost travelers!" ... but instead it's the two Lhasa apsos of the woman who looks after the museum, out to pee. I feel rescued, just the same, as the buildings solidify again at the top of the road, out of utter obscurity.

Geographical and internal space

he idea of rescue is what the Saint Bernard order is about, though the particulars of that mission have changed over the centuries. The monastery, the Hospice du Grand-St.-Bernard, was founded in 1050 by Bernard de Menthon, an Augustinian monk serving as archdeacon of Aosta. Saint Bernard dogs, first bred in the seventeenth century, are no longer trained for rescue work. They're too heavy or large for the helicopters currently used. They're raised only for sale, now; the fifteen puppies we see are all destined for distant homes.
But equally, the order is famous for its hospitality--and not just to those who have been stranded in the snow. The abbot himself gets up from the common table and makes espresso for us the day he's with us for lunch. He has arrived midweek, from his parish in Sion, in his dramatic long black woolen cape. We've brought apricots back for lunch, after a

**The participants walked to the Italian hotel (center left) for hot chocolate and returned to Switzerland in the dark.**

morning at the site of a Roman mansio (travelers' inn) farther down in Switzerland. It feels ungracious somehow to be offering this small bit of hospitality back to those whose lives are dedicated to that, as if we're finding theirs inadequate, but the abbot accepts the apricots as generously as he would have given them to us.
        The hospice is a place of spiritual as well as literal nourishment. The order works to "welcome, succor, be attentive to every person, to anticipate their needs, but without first wanting to annex or monopolize them." The abbot talks about its intent to "offer a geographical and internal space to everyone." Within this space, expansive and invigorating, you find yourself able to range freely.
        They live well, the Augustinians. Theirs is not an order that requires self-denial. Food is abundant and good: soups made with herbs and vegetables; chard and cheese casserole; pork ragout; celery root salad in mustardy vinaigrette; a variety of pastas; wine if you ask for it. The abbot plays the harpsichord for us in the chapel, while others of our group sing. He's a composer as well as a musician. Music is very important here. There's a CD for sale of the haunting liturgy sung by the choir and canons, Ici le Christ est ador?et nourri.
        Quiet moments of well-being at the heart of the monastery tell a story of pragmatic optimism (just as the smallest details reveal the past to an archaeologist): socks hung to dry in front of a sunny window; a bright blue towel confided cheerfully to the elements.

Roads all crossed here

hough the Great Saint Bernard Pass might seem cut off from the world, especially when the clouds and snow move in again, and the familiar figures of the roofers have come down at the end of the day, the roads all crossed here: Neolithic, Celtic, Roman, medieval, Napol�onic. Everyone came building roads.
The Veragri and Salassi, the ancient tribes of the region, made paths and came to worship their god of the mountains, appropriately called the "most high," at the summit of the pass. Rome's famous road builders came through, laying their measured miles of stone, and with them Caesar, out to conquer Britain and all Gaul. Charlemagne came on his own road, and on it too Pope Stephen crossed, from the Lombard kingdom into the kingdom of the Franks.
Two hundred years ago last summer Napol�on mounted the pass with forty thousand troops on the way to the battle of Marengo, with heavy ornate cannons hauled behind on sleds,

Quiet moments of well-being at the heart of the monastery tell a story of pragmatic optimism.

along a road built to accommodate them. Stendhal, at seventeen, was one of the forty thousand. He wrote dismissively of the crossing in a letter to his sister from Milan, but by the time he wrote his autobiography, Mont Saint-Bernard had acquired a more Romantic stature in the narrative of his life and become a "great feat." Charles Dickens wrote of crossing the pass as well, describing the hospice and morgue in a chapter of Little Dorrit.
Long after came the modern highway, bringing the bright red tour buses that blossom by day like Alpine poppies and vanish again at nightfall; it is closed by snow seven months of the year. Hiking trails also ascend the mountains to clouded Alpine lakes and Roman marble quarries, then plummet down to villages in Switzerland or Italy. A seventeen-year-old American pilgrim is taking this route tomorrow morning, walking from Brussels to Rome in her brown cloak in constant prayer against her sister's cancer.
The bedrock is a cicatrix of half-remembered roads. But I'm fooled by what look like endless paths, in a picture I've taken, crisscrossing the summer stone. Too many paths to count. I'm told when I wonder at their number that I'm looking at the scars of avalanches. These, too, look like ways down from the mountains.

Milestone XXIIII

xcavating the Roman temple of Jupiter is inexact. It's more a matter of chasing after it--down in the cellars of the hospice and into the neighboring valleys, down from what was once Mons Jovis, Jupiter's storm-ridden mountain.
Nothing remains of the temple on its original site, except the rock cuttings and marble fragments. It was likely one of the pagan shrines ordered destroyed by Theodosius the Great in the fourth century. Two crosses at the pass--one in Switzerland, one in Italy--stand triumphantly on bases of temple marble; the imposing statue of Saint Bernard near the Italian Hotel has displaced the statue of the Roman god Jovis Poenninus, which the archdeacon is said to have toppled (and which had earlier displaced in its turn the Celtic god Pen, for whom these Pennine Alps were named). In the lower levels of the hospice we explore by flashlight behind enormous wooden wine casks, looking for marble in the earliest building walls. We test for fizz--carbonate effervescence--with a plastic measuring cup of hydrochloric acid. Marble fizzes, schist doesn't. The Romans used marble only for their sacred buildings, so it can be identified wherever it has ended up.
On Thursday morning there's a rainbow across the lake. When the rain closes

What intrigues me most is the idea of passage. You're constantly aware of it in this unsettling borderland between countries, eras, and elements.

in again, we drive down into Switzerland, following the descent of the Roman road from the Great Saint Bernard Pass to the nearest village, Bourg St.-Pierre. All over town--in window frames, in the ninth-century church tower, capping stone gateposts, forming the roof of a low structure behind the church--we find fragments of the temple's columns and inscriptions.
The town is fragrant with wet hay and with the chamomile, thyme, and fennel growing wild there. I crush herbs with my clunky hiking boots wherever I step. I'm overwhelmed by the relative lushness of the rich, wet, deep-green valley; by being below tree line again; by the beautiful Alpine garden we hike to, where a temple cornice was found. Even the chickens are living it up in an old stone structure, grand as what's left of the Norman castle, or the high bridge crossed by Charlemagne that spans a breathtaking precipice.
In the middle of town there's a Roman milestone, one of the stone columns capped with marble and inscribed with numerals that marked off every thousand paces of the Roman road. XXIIII [sic] is all I can make out. But that, too, proves to be inexact. The milestone doesn't belong here; it's been moved down from the pass as well. It marked the distance not from Bourg St.-Pierre but from Mons Jovis, back up the steep, clouded drop; now it measures only these capricious dislocations of the past.

Both to and from

hat intrigues me most is the idea of passage. You're constantly aware of it in this unsettling borderland between countries, eras, and elements. The temple of Jupiter was meant to assure safe passage for Roman travelers. Centuries later, Saint Bernard founded the monastery to assist those traversing the perilous pass, to help them on their way again, or as the French say, remonter le pente. The latter means, appropriately, to climb back up the slope, or get back on one's feet again. The idea is important symbolically, too, for my state of life.
        Somehow it hadn't occurred to me that the journey must be continually to and from ... and to again. I'd seen the from (my defeating year and its losses) but thought the journey itself was the to, back when I started out. Now I've been made to see that the pass itself can't be the end, only the means, the way forward or opening. It's liberating, as the Saint Bernard order intends, but awful too--more than the mountains were--suddenly to see nothing ahead.
        I realize that I met the physical challenge I had dreaded, but maybe that wasn't the real challenge after all. The harder undertaking will be to choose my next ascent and make it worthy of this lofty, whole-souled starting place.
        All morning there are departures. One by one the others have taken off, with towering backpacks, on foot, or into rental cars with laptop computers loaded with archaeological data. They are going back to Geneva, driving to Turin, hiking around Mont Blanc.
        Long before I'm ready, I'm sent down the hill to the Italian Hotel to catch the bus back to Aosta, in a brutal wind. Halfway down the lake, I look back, and in the blowing cloud my eye is caught by the bright patch of new copper on one of the black roofs. Heartened, I head off, my luggage full of dirty woolen socks, down into Italy.

Christie Cochrell is exhibit editor for Stanford University Press.