Twenty minutes to Italy
From a French valley to an Italian one under the mountain.
Christophe Jacquet, ChrisJ — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Marc Mongenet — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Marc Mongenet — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Marc Mongenet — CC BY-SA 4.0
Yes if you have a car and a spare day; it is one of the best short trips from Chamonix. Twenty minutes later you are in **Courmayeur**: an Italian mountain town on the other side of the same massif, with a wholly different language, kitchen and character, and from it the **Skyway Monte Bianco** cable car runs to Pointe Helbronner in rotating cabins with a view of the mountain's southern face. Budget for the **toll both ways** — a return ticket is far better value than two singles. And take your passport.
This happens more than people expect: **scheduled annual maintenance** shuts it for weeks, plus short closures for incidents or security. Check the operator's site for its status on your travel day. When it is shut, every alternative is **much longer**: north into Switzerland over the Grand Saint Bernard pass or through its tunnel, or south to the Fréjus tunnel — both adding hours. If your journey connects to a flight or a booking, don't build your timing around the tunnel alone.
Sign in to write your review of this place.
No reviews yet — be the first.
A tunnel some **11.6 kilometres** long piercing the Mont Blanc massif from Chamonix to **Courmayeur** in Italy, opened in **1965** after years of boring from both sides until the two teams met beneath the mountain. It cut a journey that once went right around the massif down to about twenty minutes. It is not a tourist sight but **a road** — yet it holds a place in European memory because of what happened in it: in **March 1999** a lorry caught fire inside and turned the tunnel into a closed furnace, killing thirty-nine people in one of the worst tunnel disasters in history. The tunnel closed for three years and its systems were rebuilt entirely before it reopened in **2002**: pressurised refuges at short intervals, a fire station inside the tunnel itself, new ventilation and monitoring, and **strict rules on the distance between vehicles**, electronically enforced. For a traveller today it is the fastest road between Chamonix and Italy: you go in from a French Alpine valley and come out twenty minutes later in an Italian one, with a different language and different food and the same mountain overhead.
From a French valley to an Italian one under the mountain.
Refuges, an internal fire station and enforced spacing rules.
The Italian side of the same massif — another language and kitchen.
Tunnel du Mont-Blanc, 74400 Chamonix