Courmayeur Culture

Courmayeur is two things at once: a small alpine parish with a working guiding tradition, and an international resort, and the two do not always like each other.

The guides

The guides' society is the oldest institution in the village and still the most respected. Its members are the people who take clients up the mountain, who do the rescues, and who decide what is and is not on today. That authority is real and visitors are expected to accept it.

Mountain as employer

Almost everybody here works in the mountain economy in some form: guiding, lifts, hotels, avalanche control, rescue. It is a single-industry village with a very high-value industry.

The resort layer

The winter season brings a Milanese and international clientele and a fur-and-aperitivo culture that sits oddly on a village of two and a half thousand. Locals are matter-of-fact about it: it pays.

Patois and French

The valley's Franco-Provencal patois is still spoken by older residents, and French is co-official here as across the region; Chamonix is closer than Aosta and the border means very little socially. Place names on the map here are French, not Italian, and that is not decoration.

The two sides of one mountain

Chamonix and Courmayeur share a massif and not much else: the French side is the larger climbing town and the Italian side is steeper, smaller and warmer, and the rivalry between the two guiding traditions is old, real and mostly affectionate.

Food

Mountain cooking heavy on fontina, polenta, game and cured meat, served in a resort price bracket.