Tracing the course of the Italian Campaign of 1800 gives the modern traveller a fine opportunity to appreciate several dimensions of Napoleonic warfare: Here are a bold strategic maneuver over hundreds of kilometers against an enemy's lines of communication, an heroic march over forbidding terrain with its attendant logistical challenges, the thorny (and nearly disastrous) passage of the bottleneck at the Fort de Bard, and the epic Battle of Marengo (a near-run thing if ever there was one!). All of this is accessible within an easy three days of travel time.

In the campaign of 1799, the resurgent Austrians with Russian assistance had undone all of France's gains made in Bonaparte's Italian Campaign of 1796-97. By April of 1800 the strategic position in northern Italy was catastrophic, with Massena's corps besieged in Genoa and an Austrian army occupying Nice. The only trump in the French hand was their continued possession of Switzerland. The Swiss salient could serve as a springboard for a flanking move north into Bavaria, or south into Italy via the Alpine passes.

In remarkable secrecy, the French assembled the Army of Reserve of some 50,000 men at Dijon. On 6 May 1800, First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte left Paris to lead these troops into Switzerland on his first campaign as head of state. After a steady march up the gentle floor of the Rhone valley, the Army of Reserve arrived in Martigny, at the foot of the Great St. Bernard Pass.