Stags and Snails

Just before we leave France for Spain, I decided to share this with you.

French snails can climb this high.


















But French stags reckon they can jump much, much higher.

A picnic ambush

In the Languedoc-Roussillon area, as we crossed the Montagnes Noires we stopped for a picnic at one of those loops of old road which had been left after the road had been straightened. In that desolate curve we were ambushed by history. 

 First of all there was the road itself. The surface was the ancient pavé. Treacherously slippery in the wet, it must have made negotiating the hairpin bends quite exciting.






And in amongst the bushes I found a stone commemorating a 1944 battle where a group of 150 of the Franc Corps de la Montagne Noire ambushed a 1,000 strong column of the retreating German Army and inflicted losses on them with only one soldier wounded on their side.

Just when I thought I had exhausted the interests of this abandoned corner I came across this modern monument.  Apparently we were crossing the Green Meridian. This was an imaginary line drawn from the Paris Meridian (which is like the Greenwich Meridian but nowhere near as important despite what the French might tell you) northwards to Dunkirk and southwards to Barcelona in Spain.

La Meridienne Verte was inaugurated in 2000 and along it, trees are being planted to make a green line across France from top to bottom. This was the French way of celebrating the millennium.


We built The Dome.

Cru La Livinière

Being teetotal you would think that I might feel myself unqualified to write about wines but, let's face it, nobody with any sense of self esteem ever reads what the wine pundits say and even fewer believe them. So, if you want to know about Cru La Livinière then look it up on the internet.

What I can tell you is that they are doing the vendanges. 

When I was at school I tried to get a job grape-picking in the south of France but they said I was too young.





Now they would dismiss my application automatically. There are no grape pickers. It's all done by one man operating this clever tractor-type grape harvester.

Deported from Borgo San Dalmazzo

Further down the valley from St Dalmas de Tende is the bustling town of Borgo San Dalmazzo. During the Second World War a concentration camp was established here and the Jews who had fled occupied France were incarcerated in it.

In 1943, on 21st November, 329 Jews were taken from the camp to the railway station and pushed into cattle trucks and transported to the transit camp at Drancy, near Paris. From there they were sent to Auschwitz. Only eighteen survived.

Go to the railway station today and you will see, set into the platform in front of three goods trucks, the names of those deportees in the positions in which they stood before being carted away.

The names of the survivors have been set upright in steel.

Part of the text on the board reads:

"Each name is a ray of hope that has been extinguished forever. Come closer. The sound of silence and the absence of people will help you to understand how much damage man is capable of causing when he puts himself and his rights above those of others."

Railway Station One-Upmanship

In 1928 the railway was opened between Nice in France and Cuneo in Italy and suddenly two insignificant villages found themselves to be the centre of attention. St. Dalmas de Tende was the last Italian station before the border and Fontan Saorge the equivalent French. Mussolini was never one to hide his light under a bushel and built this enormous Palladian style edifice (he didn't do it himself, he employed people) to show off to the French just how great Italy was.

The enormous building running across the centre of the photograph is the railway station of St Dalmas de Tende. It is utterly out of proportion to the size of village that it serves.

The view from the station yard.

The view from the platforms.

Not to be outdone, the French erected this orange barrack-like monument at their frontier station: Fontan Saorge.






During the Second World War the 143 km of railway line with its 105 tunnels and 96 bridges suffered severe damage and was unusable. Under the Treaty of Paris 1947, the frontier was redrawn and France gained the communes of Tende and Brigue, so both the stations were now French. Another provision of the treaty was that Italy was to restore the line to operational status as part of its war reparations. It was apparently in no hurry because the line was only opened in 1979!
Ironically, the Mussolini station at St Dalmas de Tende is now bricked up and derelict - used as an unmanned halt and the 'French' station at Fontan Saorge serves as a holiday camp for the SNCF as well as a halt for trains.

Trucks in Demonte

We came over the Col de Larche from France into Italy this morning. It was a very pleasant journey with very few cars and only three trucks in the thirty kilometres from the frontier. This was just as well because it is not a wide road. Then everything changed at a place called Ruviera. Down in the valley we could see some sort of distribution depot stuffed with about two hundred articulated trucks. I could not understand the rationale of siting such a depot at the extremity of Italy on a road which only led to France. I had little time to ponder this conundrum because I was suddenly dodging trucks on their way up to the depot and being chased by those on their way back down.

Ten kilometres further on we stopped at the ancient village of Demonte. We drank a coffee in a bar under the mediaeval arcades. 



Here is one of the churches in the street.

The entire facade is a painted trompe l'oeil







And here are two trucks stuck outside it. One truck is on his way up and the other on his way down.






But they have no need to hurry to disentangle themselves because the end of the street is blocked by some of their mates. 



It's a funny old world, isn't it?

Potatoes in Piedmont

Here we are in Sauze d'Oulx, a ski resort in the Piedmontese region of Italy. Yes, I know, I don't ski but the Hotel Derby in the Via Monfol made me an offer I could not refuse.

The ski resort is part of the Via Lattia (the Milky Way) which was developed in the 1930s by Giovanni Agnelli, the owner of FIAT. Out of season, Sauze has a quaint, village-like atmosphere with everybody seemingly greeting everybody else by name in the street. 

Potatoes

There was no snow of course but we did have potatoes. The annual potato festival took place on the Saturday, right outside the Hotel Derby.

Potato Menu

Not only do I not ski, I am not particularly fond of potatoes, so I was completely nonplussed by the menu for the festival meal which featured potatoes at every course.

Would you queue to eat potatoes?

And dumbstruck by the sight of people paying money and queuing up to eat potatoes.

This is not a potato.

It is a cabbage.

I like cabbage.