Pierre-Louis Vescoz

Pierre-Louis Vescoz (1840–1925)

Born in 1840 in Charrère, a hamlet in the municipality of Verrayes, Pierre-Louis Vescoz was one of those extraordinary figures – a priest, scientist, naturalist and man of letters – who characterised the clergy of the Aosta Valley in the second half of the 19th century.
Ordained in 1866, he began his ecclesiastical career as an assistant parish priest in Cogne, then in Courmayeur, and subsequently as parish priest in Pont-Saint-Martin between 1874 and 1893. He was subsequently appointed canon of the Cathedral, and thus resided in Aosta until 1925, the year of his death.
His career as a natural scientist began whilst he was still in Cogne, where, together with Abbé Carrel, he founded the Petite Société Alpine de Cogne. In Courmayeur, he met many of the most famous English mountaineers, including Richard-Henry Budden, who was fascinated by Vescoz’s project to build a scale model of the Mont Blanc massif.
The honours earned by the canon in the field form a long list: we shall limit ourselves to mentioning his work as a professor of physics and positive philosophy at the Seminary of Aosta; his status as an honorary member of the CAI (as well as other scientific societies in the Alpine region); the Cross pro Ecclesia et Pontefice awarded to him by Pope Leo XIII for the creation of a 6-square-metre model of the Aosta Valley, exhibited at the 1888 Vatican Universal Exposition; the silver medal he won at the National Exhibitions in Turin, again for models of the major mountain ranges of the Aosta Valley.
Nor should his literary and journalistic work be underestimated, carried out mainly in the columns of the Catholic newspaper *Duché d’Aoste*, in which he endeavoured to disseminate a scientific interpretation of natural phenomena, whilst maintaining a strictly Catholic and fundamentally conservative perspective.