For centuries, Forte di Bard has stood watch over a narrow pass into the Aosta Valley—a region in northwest Italy surrounded by Alpine mountain ranges. When Napoleon marched on the fortress in 1800, a few hundred soldiers billeted there were able to stave off the 40,000 at his flank. Today, the journey into and out of the valley isn’t quite so perilous—a car or train will do—but the dramatic, isolating landscape has fostered a unique culture. Scalloped slate shingles and timber replace the terra-cotta roofs and stuccoed walls commonplace in the Italian countryside. Vineyards, planted in stone-walled terraces, creep up hillsides. Italian and French traditions meld, as do the languages (into a regional dialect known as Valdotèn). The province enjoys special administrative autonomy from the national government, too. “New York City seems closer to Milan, mentally, than Aosta does,” Italian architect Mario Cucinella says with a laugh.
In the 33,000-person town for which the valley is named, Cucinella’s Bologna- and Milan-based studio has been busy reimagining a former military barracks first built for the Alpini—the Italian army’s specialized mountain infantry—into a new campus for the University of Valle d’Aosta. Situated just outside the town’s historic Roman wall and straddling its decumanus, the original 7½-acre encampment included four rectangular buildings that together formed a large courtyard, Piazza d’Armi. An administration building at the southern end of the square is being retrofitted as a library; to the north, a dormitory for soldiers will soon serve as faculty and administrative offices. The two longest buildings, running north–south on either side of the piazza, were demolished to make way for a pair of ground-up classroom buildings, the first of which has been completed and will welcome students next year.
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