Curtea de Argeș was one of the first capitals of Wallachia, in the fourteenth century, and its great monument is a monastery that everyone in Romania knows. The cathedral, built in the early sixteenth century by Prince Neagoe Basarab, is a white stone building covered in carved lace, with slim towers and delicate patterns that look more like ironwork than masonry. A legend tells that the master builder, Manole, was made by the prince to wall his own wife into the structure so that it would stand, and that he fell to his death trying to escape the roof. The tale is told in ballads, and every Romanian child knows it. The church also holds the tombs of the country's kings, including Carol I and Ferdinand.
The town sits where the Argeș river leaves the Carpathians and spreads into the plain, at the foot of forested hills, and it is the usual southern gateway to the Transfăgărășan. This is the road Ceaușescu ordered after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, a military route over the mountains in case of a similar threat, built through the early 1970s with explosives and the labour of conscripts. It climbs from the south through beech and spruce, passes the huge Vidraru dam above its blue reservoir, and then heads upward in a cascade of bends toward the high bare ridge.
Just above the dam, the Poenari fortress on a rocky crag was one of the strongholds of Vlad the Impaler, and reaching it means climbing around fourteen hundred steps. The road then runs on to Bâlea Lake at just over two thousand metres, where a tunnel just under a kilometre long pierces the crest. The highway is usually open only in summer and early autumn, normally from around late June or July until about October, depending on snow, so check the status before you go. Weather on the ridge changes fast, with fog, cold wind and sudden storms, and the surface can be damaged by frost.
Curtea de Argeș has about thirty-two thousand people, and all the fuel, food and shops you need, so fill up completely here, as there is nothing on the climb. Cafes near the monastery are good places for a coffee and a plate of grilled meat before you start the climb.