Sono arrivato nella Toscana

Made it. No drama. Three days after I set out from Sivizzano to cross the Apennines, the major mountain chain wholly within Italy, I arrived in Tuscany, the town of Pontremoli, in the foothills on the other side of the mountains. Tuscany is pretty hilly in its own right, so there are more ups and downs to come. But that is an issue for next year. This year's hike is over. I had no fixed stopping point in mind, just the number of days I planned to walk. In that sense, the walk does not feel as complete as arriving in Compostela or at the top of the Saint Bernard pass. The recompense is that I really had a great time. I met some wonderful people with whom I spent days walking. With very few exceptions, everyone I met along the route was friendly and willing to help out, many even when I did not ask. My Italian lessons paid off. Despite forgetting probably 80% of the vocabulary my lessons covered, some of which I knew would not be of particular use on the walk anyway, what I did retain was enough to get a place to stay, a meal, and to engage people in conversation. Most satisfying, I was able to handle the physical and mental challenges these walks always entail.

It will take a few days to reflect on the more mindful aspects of this year's hike, but I do want to get out a post on the experience of the last several days. I heard from some of you asking how I am doing. Fine!  Achy knees and a whole load of blisters aside, really fine. 

Each year before I begin my walk, I think about the physical and mental challenges to come. Mia Carina says that I invent problems just so I have something to worry about. True to type, therefore, I always have some angst over whether I will have enough stamina, whether my legs can sustain the punishment of so many miles, especially the climbs, whether my lungs have the capacity to allow me to walk inclines for hours at a steady, deliberate but slow pace over sections of trail where there are few level sections to give respite. In short, these walks represent the most physically demanding thing I have ever done. Others may not find it so, though I think many do. When I ask people why they do these walks, they often give several answers. A very frequent response is "to prove to myself I can do it." To be sure, this response also refers to the mental challenge involved. I don't know if this is the most mentally challenging thing I have ever done, but it ranks right up there.

I thought about not reporting the gory details but I do want to give you a sense of what this section of the hike was like. In three days you go over a series of hilltops, gaining and then losing altitude, but in something of a stair-step fashion, so that although you finally reach an elevation of about 1,200 meters, something more than 3,600 feet, it is really like walking up a staircase about 1.5 miles high, counting all the ups you have to walk over again because of the down sections where you lose what you just climbed. These successive tops have a name: i salti del diavolo, the leaps of the devil. 

It took me a day-and-a-half to reach the top above the Passo della Cisa and the same amount of time to get down to Pontremoli. On the first two mornings, I started the hike early, at six, to avoid climbing in the worst heat of the afternoon. The first morning was the most difficult, the most punishing. The morning had a touch of cool but you could already feel the heat lurking behind it, promising another day around 90F, 32C. The sun was constant except when walking through woods, or hugging the shadows of the few buildings along the route, or, when on a farm track or country road, repeatedly crossing to take advantage of a few meters of shade thrown from a tree. For the most part, the trail was a continuous rocky upslope, sometimes shallow but mostly tough.

I play these games with myself: glancing up ahead to see if I can spy a local top, a leveling, where I can catch my breath while continuing to move. Then I drop my gaze and try not to look up until my feet sense the shallowing of the path. Didn't work. The up sections were almost continuous. After a bit, without any signs from my feet, I would glance up again to find that the upslope just kept going on and on. When I did find a local top, it was often only a few meters of level walking. I really do not like to stop moving if I can help it. To do so is a small chink in the armor of resolve. Too many and you start thinking of bailing out at the next road you pass.

The most effective strategy for conquering these sections is a plodding pace that you can keep up over long periods, using the naturally occurring steps that rocks and tree roots make, sipping water from your hydration bladder every time the thought occurs to you. You can't wait until you are thirsty. By then, you are already dehydrating. When I feel fatigued, I pull out a bag of peanuts, raisins and dried figs I keep in a tummy pack, or stop just long enough to get a banana out of the backpack. I usually don't have to stop to eliminate water (TMI). I sweat it out instead, a signal that I am not drinking enough. But no matter how much I drink, I just do not have to stop for that reason.

The first night I stayed in Berceto, at a huge old seminary in a musty state of minimal use.

The second day's climb was nowhere near as difficult though it did add 430 meters, about a fourth of a mile in altitude. The air was fresh throughout the early morning walk. The top occurred early, around 9 AM, and the surroundings were a field of mountain grass and flowers reminding me of the famous scene in The Sound of Music. To protect my knees from the recurrence of problems I experienced early in the trip, I followed the advice of friends and took the road down from Passo della Cisa, after descending to it using the path from the elevation high point. The trail from there on is described as rocky and steep, and I thought it would be slick. Though I hadn't experienced more than a raindrop or two from the time I started at the Saint Bernard pass, there had been afternoon storms over the mountains. On my way up I passed over a number of slippery sections where water was draining across the trail.

Though the walk down the road was long, boring, hot and hard on my knees, it was still better than the alternative. Walking the road does not require me to make big strides to get down to the next rock "step" the way the trail requires. My meniscus did not have to support my body the way it had to on the first few days of the walk. 

You can never know for sure what a path you do not walk is like, but I am pretty sure I would have run a serious risk to my knees if I had taken the trail. When I arrived at the Eremo Gioioso, the Glorious Hermitage, a wonderful B&B in the five building hamlet of Previde, Cristina had just arrived from hiking down the trail. She was exhausted. Cristina guides pilgrimage groups on walking tours of the Via Francigena through Tuscany. In her spare time, what does she do? She walks. One year she put on 8,000 KM, about 5,000 miles. She averages about four or five thousand km a year. She is also the president of a volunteer group that is constantly walking the Via Francigena from the Italian border to Rome, photographing every trail marker, commenting on difficult divergences where the trail marking is missing or can lead to confusion, and reporting on other trail problems to the group that is responsible for promoting it and making certain it is maintained. So when you see Cristina exhausted and she tells you the trail was difficult, it was!

The second night's stay was tremendously refreshing and luxe. Eremo Gioioso is what I can only describe as a luxury B&B, a well hidden gem. It has been open for two years after a reconstruction taking three years from a ruin of a property that was little more than a broken down wall with half of an arched doorway. Run by the extraordinarily friendly and kind Marco and Marzia, the inn deserves almost as much blog space as the walk. Here's what I got: lunch of local cheeses including the silkiest ricotta I've ever tasted, and an assortment of local salami's and crudo's; single room (a luxury for me); private garden where I was invited to eat cherries directly from the tree; an offer by Marco to take me to a local lake for a swim; laundry, machine washed, hung dry and folded by Marzia (an even greater luxury); an aperitif before dinner (a Crodino) with sides of olives, focaccia, and chips; dinner of farinata (not really a pasta but cut squares of a farina pancake with olive oil and parmigiana cheese) for primi piatti followed by a secondi piatti of rendered pork fat (from Carrara that is aged with herbs for several months in marble vaults) on home made bread and an even larger selection of local cheeses, meats and a spinach torte, a local wine of Merlot and another grape I've never heard of before, and a very light honey tarta for desert; and a full breakfast including blood orange OJ, eggs, bread, jams, honey, more cheese, more ricotta, and that Italian state secret, COFFEE!!!!, all for the amazingly low price of fifty-five euro. It was appropriate for the last stay of my hike. How could I walk much further after that. And if pilgrimage is supposed to get you to heaven I had a foretaste of it there.

It was about seven miles to Pontremoli and involved another climb of a few hundred meters and then a descent. Needless to say, I moved pretty slowly on knees and a stomach that had seen too much action. We arrived in time for Patrick to go to mass. I accompanied him as I sometimes do, for the opportunity to meditate and to think. Then coffee and some fruit juice in the Piazza della Repubblica and a short walk to the train.

So there it is. Another year, another hike, three-quarters of the way to Rome.

I owe you one more post. It will be a few days before I get to it.