Hannibal in the Alps: the routes behind the myth

After 2,200 years, we still don't know where Hannibal crossed the Alps: the three routes vying for the glory

When Hannibal Barca set his 37 elephants to crossing the Alps in 218 BC, he could hardly have imagined that twenty-two centuries later the debate would still be open. There is no time tunnel, but there are three serious candidates: the Little St Bernard Pass (2,188 m), the Col de la Traversette (2,947 m) and the Col de Montgenèvre (1,854 m). Each one has supporters as solid as the Alps themselves.

The Little St Bernard: the military case

Theodore Dodge, a Union general in the Civil War who fought at Gettysburg, studied the terrain in the late nineteenth century and came down in favour of this route. His argument: Hannibal would have minimised the time spent on mountain roads, and the Little St Bernard offers a long stretch through wide valleys before the pass. Moreover, Polybius mentions that after the summit, a landslide held up the army for three days — and in the upper Aosta valley, below 1,700-1,800 m, there is a narrow spot with trees that fits the description. The exit, besides, lay in the territory of the Insubres, allies of Carthage.

The Traversette: science and the faecal controversy

In 2016, a study from York University analysed horse gut bacteria found at the Col de la Traversette and dated them to around 216 BC. The headline was explosive: "Hannibal's horses' dung found". But the sceptics responded with the error margins of carbon-14 (2070±31 BP, which gives a range between 85 and 23 BC) and, above all, with the fact that the same pass was used by Hasdrubal Barca barely ten years later. No arrowheads, no elephant bones — let alone of the extinct African subspecies — so the bacterial evidence is not conclusive. What's more, the Traversette is the steepest pass, with a goat track at the summit, and several armies crossed the Alps between 231 and 97 BC.

Montgenèvre: the academics' favourite

The historian Peter Connolly and Gaetano de Sanctis backed this route. Montgenèvre has a lake near the summit — a possible campsite — vegetation below 2,000 metres and a manageable climb. The problem is the descent: it leads into the plain of the Taurini, a tribe hostile to the Carthaginians. Hannibal had to fight his way through, which in a way is also plausible.

With the current evidence, no route is definitive. Not even the elephants — which belonged to the extinct North African subspecies, smaller than the Asian ones — have left a trace. As has been pointed out, the day an elephant coprolite turns up in the Alps, the argument will be settled. Until then, Hannibal's crossing remains the enigma that every history buff wants to solve.

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