Local sports

The Fiolet is the traditional sport of La Salle. In the beginning, it was considered a Sunday pastime for the young people of the village.

This sport requires simple equipment: a smooth, rounded pebble (the Pira), an oval ball covered with nails (the Fiolet), and a stick with a thicker end to better hit the Fiolet, called Èima or Maciocca.

The player places the Fiolet on the stone, strikes it with the Maciocca lightly on the ‘beak’ to make it jump in the air and then strikes it again, on the fly, and hurls it as far as possible. Each team consists of five players, and each player can make thirty throws.

The fiolet is practiced in spring, in the open countryside, as soon as the snow melts and before the grass for the Aosta Valley cattle breeds comes out.

The playing field is triangular and at least 150 metres long. On the ground, starting from the stone from which the fiolet is thrown, concentric semicircles are drawn, 15 m apart; each semicircle passed corresponds to 1 point. The poles (rods marked with progressive numbers) count the points obtained after each throw.

The first Fiolet championship was held in 1953, but even before then it was played at the foot of the Aosta Valley mountains, such as the Cervino and Mont Blanc, or even in the centre of Aosta. Germano Cheillon from Allein, born in 1873, said: “I was already playing fiolet in the last years of the last century, both with my peers and with those who were many, many years older than me”. Today, the championship final is held in Brissogne on 1st May, and the winner is awarded the Batôn d’Or.

Fiolet could be considered a mixture of golf, baseball and shot put.

Fiolet is part of the Federazione Italiana Giochi e Sport Tradizionali (F.I.G.E.S.T.), which is the Italian Federation of Traditional Games and Sports.

This game is perhaps among the oldest in the world. In the past, it was characterised by the throwing of flat stones towards a fixed point, almost always marked by a wooden pole partially driven into the ground. It is a mountain adaptation of the game of boules, from which it differs in the shape of the thrown object, the palet. This is a flat iron disc, weighing around 800-1100 g, 0.5-1 cm thick and with a diameter of between 10 and 11 cm. The ‘boccino’ or ‘pallino’ towards which the palet is thrown is also made of iron. Two wooden stakes called ‘boume’, which are driven into the ground in the centre of the field, are also used instead of the ‘boccino’. The field consists of two rectangles at least 1.5 metres wide and 4 metres long (the area where the game is played), separated by a neutral zone 8 metres long.