Aosta Valley

Italy’s smallest region

At 3,260.8 km², the Aosta Valley is the smallest of Italy’s regions, about 1.1% of the country.^[2] It is one main valley, about 100 km long, cut by the Dora Baltea river, with side valleys running into it. The massifs of Gran Paradiso, Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa, with peaks over 4,000 m, separate it from Piedmont, France and Switzerland. Its average height, 2,100 m, is greater than any other Italian region’s.^[4]

The region has 74 comuni, and Aosta is both its capital and its only province.^[4] It had 122,877 residents at the end of 2023.^[3] The Little and Great St Bernard passes have long made it a main route between Italy and north-western Europe.^[5] In the 1960s the Mont Blanc and Great St Bernard road tunnels opened.^[4] The Great St Bernard tunnel opened in 1964.^[5]

A French-speaking duchy of the House of Savoy

The valley became a fief of the House of Savoy from 1032 and shared that family’s fortunes until the end of the Kingdom of Italy in 1946.^[5] In 1191 it formally submitted to Savoy, and from then on its history merged with the Savoy state.^[4] The regional council dates the valley’s charter of franchises with the House of Savoy to that year.^[6] A duchy of Aosta was created in 1238. The valley’s assembly of the Estates set up an executive, the Conseil des Commis, in 1536, but from the late 1600s the Savoy rulers cut back its liberties.^[5]

As Latin fell out of use from the 1300s, the valley turned to French, and letters patent from Duke Emmanuel Philibert made it the only official language in 1561.^[5] French and the local Franco-Provençal became the everyday languages of the valley.^[6] In the 1200s Walser settlers from the Upper Valais in Switzerland moved into the Lys valley, at Issime and Gressoney, where German dialects are still spoken.^[5] Under Napoleon the valley became part of a French département; it went back to Savoy in 1814 and stayed with it even when Nice and Savoy passed to France in 1860.^[5]

Italian only

From 1861, the year Italy was unified, Italian gradually replaced French in schools, the administration, the courts and the press. The population, led by its intellectuals and especially the clergy, pushed back, and a long language conflict began.^[5] Fascism then tried brutally to erase all trace of French in the valley.^[5] Italian President Sergio Mattarella has described it as an attempt to impose Italian as the only language.^[7]

Fascist rule also ended talk of making the valley an autonomous region separate from Piedmont.^[6] The names of its comuni were changed under Fascism and only restored at the first sitting of the valley’s council in January 1946.^[7]

1945: French troops and a promise from Rome

In the valley, opposition to Fascism mixed with hopes of separation and of autonomy. One movement wanted annexation to France; another, inspired by the resistance leaders Émile Chanoux and Federico Chabod, wanted autonomy for the Alpine valleys.^[4] On 16 December 1944 Prime Minister Ivanoe Bonomi’s government promised the valley administrative and cultural autonomy.^[7]

In the last days of the war, French Alpine troops crossed the Little St Bernard Pass. On 28 April 1945 they were stopped at La Thuile, where, according to documents found by the historian Andrea Désandré, partisans and soldiers of the fascist Italian Social Republic, enemies until the day before, held the line together.^[8]

The Allies wanted the French out. In May 1945 the US government asked France to withdraw its troops from north-western Italy and stop “irresponsible French annexationists”, and President Truman told the French foreign minister, Georges Bidault, that the occupation was harming relations.^[9] Bidault answered that France had no annexationist claims there apart from a small change affecting two villages, and not the Val d’Aosta itself.^[9] On 9 June the French chief of staff, Alphonse Juin, told the Allied commander that a withdrawal from the Val d’Aosta could be arranged quickly.^[10] The French left in June 1945 on the Allies’ orders.^[4] The valley’s leaders had themselves asked France to pull its troops back, and chose not to seek an international guarantee for their autonomy.^[7]

From decree to statute

A commission under Undersecretary Luigi Chatrian, a native of the valley, was set up on 29 May 1945.^[7] Two decrees of 7 September 1945 followed. The first made the Aosta Valley an autonomous district with its own legal personality, citing its very particular geographic, economic and language conditions. It abolished the province of Aosta, moving its towns outside the valley to the province of Turin, allowed free use of French with the authorities, and gave the president of the valley’s council the powers of a prefect.^[11]

The first council met on 10 January 1946, nine days after Allied military administration ended, and elected Chabod its president.^[7] The Constituent Assembly approved the special statute on 31 January 1948. It became constitutional law no. 4 of 26 February 1948 and came into force on 11 March 1948. Its first article makes the valley an autonomous region “within the political unity of the Italian Republic, one and indivisible”, with Aosta as its capital.^[1]

How the autonomy works

The region is run by the Council of the Valley, with 35 members, a regional government and a president.^[1] The council makes laws on a list of subjects that includes local government, farming and forests, regional roads, town planning, hunting and fishing, tourism, mountain guides and ski schools, and place names.^[1] The president of the region also keeps public order on behalf of the national government and sits in on the Italian cabinet when it discusses the region.^[1]

The region keeps most of the tax raised there. A 1981 finance law, quoted by the Constitutional Court in 2016, gives it the national income taxes collected in the valley, VAT worked out from local spending, and nine-tenths of all other state taxes except those on gambling.^[12] The statute also gives it nine-tenths of the state’s fees for hydroelectric dams.^[1]

French is equal to Italian. Public documents can be written in either language, except court rulings, which are in Italian, and regional schools give French as many hours a week as Italian.^[1] Since 1993 the statute has also protected the German-speaking communities of the Lys valley.^[1] In the late 1990s, the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland reported that Italian had become the dominant language, but four in five people spoke at least some French and about half had Franco-Provençal as their first language.^[5]