The ritual is repeated every five years. In the month of July the inhabitants of Fontainemore, in Val d'Aosta, organize a procession to the sanctuary of Oropa in Piemont, on the other side of the mountain. Over 600 pilgrims set out in the evening and reach the sanctuary the next morning after crossing Balma and walking all night.
In 1989 the event was brought forward because the Pope was visiting Oropa. Marguitta Rolland, born in 1906, went with her family.. She took part in the procession the first time in 1920 and has missed only one of the eighteen pilgrimages organized since then. Her memories are the central theme of this documentary that also presents some rare film taken in the twenties and thirties by Father Alberto Maria De Agostini and now kept in the historical film library of the Duca degli Abruzzi - National Museum of Mountains in Turin.