Fort Bard

The rock rises on the left bank of the Dora Baltea at the point where the valley tightens into a gorge, a narrows that has marked a cultural, political and religious boundary of the Aosta Valley for centuries. Whoever held it controlled the road between the Po plain and Savoy, and the position was garrisoned early: documents record an Ostrogothic post here, the Clausurae Augustanae, manned by sixty soldiers in the age of Theodoric.

Travellers who crossed the valley in the early Middle Ages wrote of the place with something like awe, and in 1034 it was described as an inexpugnabile oppidum, then held by Boso, viscount of Aosta. The counts of Bard, a feudal house probably answering to the bishopric of Aosta, kept the rock until the middle of the 13th century. Hugh was the last of that line to garrison it: around 1250 Amadeus IV of Savoy took the fort into his own hands and installed a heavy garrison of his own, and under Savoy the defences were repeatedly strengthened.

In 1661 Charles Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy, made Bard the ducal garrison for the whole valley, moving his artillery there after dismantling the neighbouring strongholds at Verrès and at Montjovet's castle of Saint-Germain. Consolidation and enlargement of the defences continued through the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1704, during the War of the Spanish Succession, Victor Amadeus II used the position to obstruct a French descent into Italy.

On 14 May 1800 a French army of 40,000 was brought to a halt beneath Bard by 400 Austro-Piedmontese soldiers. They held the gorge for a fortnight and wrecked Bonaparte's plan for a surprise descent on the Po Valley and Turin; when the news reached him he called the place the vilain castel de Bard. The army that had crossed the Great St Bernard in a snowstorm took the fort on 1 June.

The defence cost the fortress its life. Bonaparte ordered it razed to the ground, angered by the resistance of the Italian and Austrian soldiers who had shamed him, and set on removing an anti-French stronghold from the road for good. In 1801 Nicolas-Antoine Taunay painted the First Consul resting after the crossing, the outline of the fort behind him among the ravines and rough paths.

Thirty years passed before Savoy, fearing fresh French aggression, ordered the rock refortified — the order credited to Charles Felix by some accounts and to Charles Albert by others. The design went to the military engineer Antonio Francesco Olivero, and the work ran eight years, from 1830 to 1838.

Olivero built not one fort but a set of self-contained works stacked up the slope: the pincer-shaped Opera Ferdinando and Opera Mortai on two lower levels, the Opera Vittorio in the middle, the Opera Gola and Opera Carlo Alberto above. The upper level carried conventional battlements; lower down, fifty gun ports were cut into casemates laid out so that each work covered its neighbours if the place were attacked. Its 283 rooms could billet 416 men, twice that if they slept on the floor, and 176 service rooms faced a courtyard that served as the parade ground. Magazines at the Opera Mortai held ammunition and food for three months, watched, like the rest of the fortress, by some fifty guns.

By the end of the 19th century the fort had lost its military value and fell out of use, serving afterwards as a military prison and then as a powder magazine of the Italian Army until 1975, when ownership passed to the government of the Autonomous Region of Valle d'Aosta. A partial reopening to visitors in the early 1980s came with many buildings still in urgent need of repair, and in the late 1990s it closed again for a restoration that ran more than ten years.

The Museum of the Alps opened in the restored works in January 2006. In 2015 the fort and the town below it stood in for the fictional eastern European state of Sokovia in Joss Whedon's Avengers: Age of Ultron.