Andata e ritorno di nuovo

Returning home is an integral part of a certain kind of pilgrimage, a journey to a place, an arrival and a temporary sojourn, with the hope, perhaps the expectation, that some important benefit, some improved understanding will derive. Returning home is the final leg. Andata e ritorno di nuovo. There and back again!*

It is only in modern times that the journey back is of a categorically different nature than the journey there. In the past, if you walked there, you walked back. You would have met returning pilgrims on your way there and going pilgrims on your way back. Most of today's pilgrims who travel the Via Francigena and the various routes to Compostela arrive in some way to the beginning of their walk, they spend days, weeks or a month trekking to their destination, and they return home some way other than by retracing their steps. Some stalwarts do, indeed, walk back the way they came. Most do not.

The journey home is a critical part of this type of pilgrimage. You are not exactly who you were when you left. You are not yet fully formed as the different person you will be on your arrival home, The difference may only be the memories you've accumulated, but perhaps something else about you has changed.

But there is another definition of pilgrimage, a wandering of extended duration without a specific destination.

Each year, I engage in both of these pilgrimages, the journey to a specific place, or at least progress to it, in recent years, Rome, and the wandering journey which encompases the more mindful aspects of my walks. I try to bring those wanderings home with me, the thoughts remembered and facts reconsidered, the hazy constructs not yet taken full form and remaining unresolved, the insights gained and, sometimes, the lessons learned. During the journey home and in the period between arriving there and leaving for my next walk, if personal history is any guide, the thoughts I had during my journey will resurface, intentionally recalled or arisen unbidden. They will become part of me.

Between the end of my walk and arrival home, I had some other small adventures. Parick and I took an evening and a morning to visit Portovenere and La Spezia on the Golfo dei Poeti, The Gulf of Poets, named in remembrance of the drowning there of Percy Bysshe Shelley. I headed to Milan where artist/friend Colleen showed me her favorite sites. I was floored by the frescoes at the Chiesa de San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore. She, her husband Matteo and I filled up during aperitivi, dined at a Neopolitan pizzeria where I had a five-toed pocket pizza overstuffed with mussels (don't ask; you had to be there), and took a giretto, a stroll, through the busy summer evening streets of the Navigli, the canal district.

And, in a sign that there is some balance in the world, at least in trivial matters, my disaster of an under three hour direct train voyage cum seven hour train-bus-train pergatory to Zurich was compensated for by a surprise at-the-gate upgrade to an almost empty first class cabin on Swissair.

I bring home with me the memories of a really great time. I would say "despite the hard work of walking," but if not for the walking it never would have been as great a time. The adventures would have been different, I'd never have made new friends of Claudio, Mirella, Giuseppi, Cristina and Marco, or met interesting people, like Massimo and the tenor Francesco Pavesi, or ever had the opportunity for Patrick and I to build on our friendship. And I'd never have had that less-than-a-conversation with the almost spectre of a woman who asked, "What is the passion?", an exchange that carried tomes. I think that woman and that question will be with me always.

Well, I am home. Back with mia carina. Glad of it.

So there I was, and back I am.

[*You may, perhaps, recognize that phrase as the subtitle of Tokien's The Hobbit. It isn't a literal translation. What's more, the Italian edition has an entirely different subtitle with an entirely different meaning: Un viaggio inaspettato; An unexpected journey. Well, I think that applies as well. The larger journey is often comprised of shorter, unexpected ones, whatever happens to you on any particular day when you set out the door of where you stayed the night before.]