This audio journey isn’t merely a trail guide; it is a walk through the great cultural transformation that taught humanity to love the mountains it once feared. Guided by Marco Tessaro — a retired Italian alpine guide who has walked this circuit more than forty times — you’ll loop 170 kilometres around Mont Blanc through France, Italy and Switzerland, with the landscape’s own history triggered stop by stop as you reach each col, village and glacier.
Along the way you’ll meet eight voices drawn from across the centuries: Hannibal, who crossed these Alps with thirty-seven war elephants in 218 BC; the Emperor Augustus, who engineered the mountains into submission; Amadeus VIII of Savoy, the duke who became an antipope and then walked away from it all; Mary and Percy Shelley, who stood on the same glacier in the volcanic summer of 1816 and could not agree on what they saw; Henriette d’Angeville, who was told the summit was not for a woman and went anyway; and a present-day glaciologist, Dr. Sylvie Moreau, who measures what is now being lost.
Three trail variants are woven into the guide. Listen for Stop #4A at the Col de Tricot (2,120m) for Hannibal’s crossing, or brave the Fenêtre d’Arpette (2,665m) at Stop #22 — the dramatic glacial gap that opens like a window onto the Trient bowl.
Purchase this guide to unlock this, and all the remaining chapters.
The guide draws on a sourced bibliography including Robert MacFarlane’s Mountains of the Mind, Polybius’s Histories, and the GLAMOS glacier monitoring reports.
Follow the full circuit the way Marco walks it — anticlockwise around the massif, through France, Italy and Switzerland. The map marks each col, valley and village where an episode unfolds.
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