Tradition

Along the Balteo Way you will learn about local customs, handed down for generations, actual witnesses of farmer culture, linked to the seasons, the cycles of life, legends and religious devotion.

The artisan tradition of the Aosta Valley is alive and handed down thanks to skilled hands that work wood and stone, wicker and leather. The artisans exhibit their works during animated fairs, which have always been occasions for celebration and meeting.

The Aosta Valley cattle breeds are particularly agile on mountain terrain, resistant to diseases and cold climate. The Red spotted cow breed produces a lot of milk while the other two breeds, the Black and the Brown, have a lively temperament that induces them to face each other in spring fights, not violent, to establish the hierarchy within the herd.

This innate behaviour of the cows is at the origin of the "battles of the Queens" (batailles de reines), popular throughout the region. The “Reines”, winners of the spring and summer selections, meet in October for the regional final, which takes place, with great public participation, at the "Croix Noire" arena in Aosta. The queen is decorated with the typical “bosquet”, a spruce branch enriched with flowers and ribbons.

Goats also face each other, in a similar way to that of cows, in the “bataille de tchevres”. The winners are awarded with the "tchambis", collars made of maple and walnut wood, inlaid by hand and equipped with the typical bell.

In Verrès, the historic carnival evokes an episode of 1449 with the noble Catherine of Challant and her husband Pierre d'Introd as protagonists. The program is rich: presentation of the characters in the town square, costume parades, party in the castle.

The Pont-Saint-Martin carnival recalls the defeat of the Salassi, the local population, by the Romans, and grants the vanquished the possibility of a revenge in the "chariot race" but is also inspired by the legend of the "Nymph of Lys", the stream that crosses the town, and by a legend about the devil, whose effigy is hung on the arch of the imposing Roman bridge and burned on the evening of Shrove Tuesday.

In Saint-Vincent on the occasion of the children's carnival, for a week the town's government is entrusted to children, after a real election campaign among the pupils of the fifth grade.