The highest point on the road to Rome is the Great St Bernard Pass at 2,469 metres, and there is a building on it that has been receiving travellers continuously for something close to a thousand years.
The pass was Roman, carrying a road and a temple to Jupiter Poeninus, and it remained the principal crossing between the Swiss plateau and the Aosta valley. It is also lethal in winter, exposed, and was long infested by robbers. Bernard of Menthon, an archdeacon of Aosta, founded a hospice at the summit in the eleventh century, and the community of Augustinian canons established to run it is still there. Their obligation was and is to shelter anyone who arrives, and the canons and their servants went out into storms to find travellers, which is the origin of the dogs. The St Bernard breed was developed at the hospice for exactly that work, and the animals are still kept nearby, though the rescue role passed to helicopters decades ago.
The pass is snowbound for much of the year and the road tunnel now takes the traffic, so the summit is quiet in a way it has not been for two millennia.
The Via Francigena as a whole owes its modern existence to two things. Sigeric's eighty stage itinerary of 990, which fixes an actual line, and the Council of Europe, which declared it a European Cultural Route in 1994, seven years after doing the same for the Camino. Italy has developed its section furthest, with the Tuscan stretch through San Gimignano and Siena the busiest, and the northern sections remain thin on accommodation by Camino standards.