Winter in the Valle di Gran San Bernado

It’s carnival time on a cold February morning in the Great St Bernard Valley in northern Italy’s Aosta Valley region. I’m in a tiny hamlet just above Étroubles, though I could have chosen to be in a number of places as the carnival is celebrated in all the villages and towns in the valley, from Saint-Rhémy-en-Bosses down to Aosta.

The carnival is known in the local Franco-Provençal dialect that’s still spoken around here as the carnival of the , the ‘cold valley’, in reference to the icy winds that blow down to Aosta from the Great