The Col de la Traversette (Italian: Colle delle Traversette) is a bridle pass with an altitude of 2,947 m in the

Cottian Alps The Cottian Alps (; french: Alpes Cottiennes ; it, Alpi Cozie ) are a mountain range in the southwestern part of the Alps. They form the border between France (Hautes-Alpes and Savoie) and Italy (Piedmont). The Fréjus Road Tunnel and Fréjus Rai ...

. Located between

Crissolo Crissolo (Vivaro-Alpine: ''Criçòl'', French: Crusol) is a ''comune'' (municipality) in the Province of Cuneo in the Italian region Piedmont, located about southwest of Turin and about northwest of Cuneo, on the border with France. The source of ...

and

Abriès Abriès ( Vivaro-Alpine: ''Abrièrs'') is a former commune in the Hautes-Alpes department in southeastern France. On 1 January 2019, it was merged into the new commune of Abriès-Ristolas. It belongs to the Queyras Regional Park. It is located ...

, it lies on the border between Italy and France and separates the

Monviso Monte Viso or Monviso (; oc, Vísol; Piedmontese: ''Brich Monviso'' or ''Viso'') is the highest mountain of the Cottian Alps. It is located in Italy close to the French border. Monte Viso is well known for its pyramid-like shape and, because it i ...

(3,841 m) from the

Monte Granero Monte Granero is a peak in the Cottian Alps, in western Piedmont, northern Italy. It has an elevation of 3,170 m. It is located between the Val Pellice and the Valle Po, not far from the boundary with France. Administratively it's divided ...

(3,171 m). The Blue Trail of the

Via Alpina The Via Alpina is a network of five long-distance hiking trails across the alpine regions of Slovenia, Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Italy, France, and Monaco. The longest of trails is the red trail, whose termini are in Trieste a ...

and the Giro di Viso cross the pass. The 75 m long

Monte Viso Tunnel The Monte Viso Tunnel (Italian: ''Buco di Viso''; French: ''Pertuis du Viso'') is an Alpine pedestrian tunnel excavated in the rock during the Renaissance and located eight kilometres north of Monviso (Cottian Alps), northern Italy. It is 75 ...

(French: Tunnel de la Traversette, Italian: Buco di Viso) is a pedestrian tunnel constructed between 1478 and 1480 to bypass the Col.

Possible site of Hannibal's Alpine crossing

In the 1950s,

Gavin de Beer Sir Gavin Rylands de Beer (1 November 1899 – 21 June 1972) was a British evolutionary embryologist, known for his work on heterochrony as recorded in his 1930 book ''Embryos and Ancestors''. He was director of the Natural History Museum, Lon ...

was the first to propose the pass as the likely site at which Hannibal had crossed the Alps. However, the eminent Polybian scholar

F. W. Walbank Frank William Walbank (; 10 December 1909 – 23 October 2008) was a scholar of ancient history, particularly the history of Polybius. He was born in Bingley, Yorkshire, and died in Cambridge. Walbank attended Bradford Grammar School and ...

rejected de Beer's theory in 1956. However, de Beer's thesis received renewed support in 2016 when geologist William Mahaney et al. reported that sediments had been identified near the pass that had been churned up by "the constant movement of thousands of animals and humans" and dated them to approximately 218 BC, the time of Hannibal's invasion. However, since the

radiocarbon dating Radiocarbon dating (also referred to as carbon dating or carbon-14 dating) is a method for determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon. The method was dev ...

method that processed the Mahaney expedition samples had a standard deviation of plus or minus 60 years, Mahaney's findings were not definitive despite widespread speculation at the time. In particular, no Carthaginian artifacts or elephant bones attributable to the numerous fatalities suffered by the army have been found.

References

External links

{{coord, 44.7105, N, 7.0664, E, source:wikidata, display=title Mountain passes of the Alps