Yes, that is Italian. I've been preparing for this year's walk with, among other things, a short course in elementary Italian to make getting a bed, a meal, and other of the road's necessities, a little less difficult. It will be far from perfect, perhaps only barely comprehensible, but hopefully good enough.That is how I am feeling about a number of things this year. I always start off thinking that the portfolio of little aches and pains I've been accumulating will fade into the background as my body accustoms itself to the pack load and the miles of walking. Generally that's been true, but this year I will be starting off with some of last year's foot problems still unresolved, a returning case of medial epicondylitis (don't panic - just golfer's elbow), and a nagging sciatica. Well that's what another year will do to you. But hopefully, I'll hold together well enough.
Not solely because of these little complaints, the walk from Winchester, England to Rome will take a year longer than originally envisioned. Last year's approximately forty five days and 750 miles got me and my friend Patrick to the Col du Grand Saint Bernard, just about 100 meters from the Italian border. That walk was too long, too rushed, and too many miles per day. So, whereas the original plan was to do an equivalent hike this year ending in Rome, I've convinced Patrick that we should take an extra year, maintaining an average daily distance closer to my preferred eighteen miles (thirty kilometers). With no set endpoint other than the necessity of making my flight home, it doesn't really matter how far I make it along the Via Francigena this year in the three or so weeks I will be walking. I expect to get somewhere between Parma and La Spezia, about 400 miles from the Saint Bernard pass, but a little less will be just fine.
This is, after all, Italy. I hope there will be days where I prefer to linger than to walk. If there are, then faró niente, I'll do nothing but explore some little village, meet some interesting people, and meditate on "life, the universe, and everything." No, Douglas Adams is not on my iPhone, but Matsuo Basho, Joseph Conrad, and Belden Lane are.
As last year, if it can be arranged, I'd like to see some friends, Colleen, l'artista eccezionale, and her husband, now residing near Alba, and Giorgio, il pellegrino molto dedicato, whom Patrick and I met last year, the day before we arrived in Besançon, and who I've arranged to meet in Vercelli. Giorgio was one of the very few pilgrims we met last year and the only one we reconnected with on at least a few days. I expect and hope we will meet more walkers this year, the Italian section of the Via Francigena more established as a contemporary pilgrimage route than are the sections through France and Switzerland.
As Kathryn, a wonderfully knowledgeable professor at GTU in Berkeley reminds me, Chaucer wrote that April is the month in which folks' thoughts turn to pilgrimage. In my case, I've been thinking about this year's walk almost from the time I returned from last year's. Rumination turns to reality at the beginning of June, a week from Sunday.