A street. A stone wall of a building that someone calls home. A new-looking wooden window. And a street sign that most would barely notice.

There is a bit of a double header here too, with "via" being Italian for street, and "rue" being French for street, so... it's a little redundant. But what about the rest?

Back in image 4955 I mentioned the Casaforte Passerin d'Entrèves; a strong house which was not quite a castle or a fort, but could have held off attackers in the pre-explosives days. It's behind me in this shot, and you can get a glimpse of it in the traffic mirror.

An interesting point; the strong house dates from a feud between Courmayeur and Entrèves in the mid-1300s. Wait, aren't they the same place? Not exactly. Courmayeur is a town and comune (municipality) in the Aosta Valley. It is made up of several frazioni, that is, sub-divisions of the municipality. Such sub-divisions often fall outside the main town.

Entrèves is one of the sub-divisions, and is in fact where our hotel is located, along with the Skyway Monte Bianco that we'll be riding up to the mountains later that day. It's a 5 minute car trip or half an hour's walk outside the main township.

The thought of there being a war between two townships 30 minutes apart by foot seems vaguely ludicrous, but with the state of transport in those days I suppose that they seemed quite remote from each other back then.

Over the centuries the need for a casaforte petered out and it became more of a home. However it was not until 1711 that the building (and thus, probably this street) acquired its current name when the Passerin family from Entrèves (thus, "Passerin d' Entrèves") bought the building.

I Passerin is a noble family with its origins in Florence (Firenze). Some moved to this area after coming out on the wrong side of the Guelph (papal supporters) and Ghibellines (supporters of the Holy Roman Emperor) wars. They have provided many of the leaders of the region over the centuries. Their most notable recent(ish) member was Alessandro Passerin d'Entrèves (1902-1985), a political philosopher who also fought as a partisan in World War II.

In any case, the key point is that they were/are a very notable family in the area, and thus this street, which runs past their castle, was named after them.