Arrivo

I am in Rome. But it is going to take a little while to write this next post. Have patience. Give me a few days. 

Due giorni più a Roma

Two more days to Rome. I am sitting at the table in a room in Compagnano di Roma, an apartment really, facing a bricked terrace and a garden, sipping a cup of Verbena tea.

My pace has slowed considerably, not my walking speed, but the speed of my movements when not walking, and my thinking speed. On the other hand, the last week has been a flash. The days seem to have rushed by. I've run into a number of other pilgrims – some I've already mentioned to you, others not – but in the roughly forty hours I've spent on the road since I last posted, I would be surprised if I've spent more than two hours walking and talking with others. I have been walking alone. I have been staying alone. 

During this trip, I've occasionally stayed in spedali, the pilgrim hostels. No longer. The various guidebooks and lodging directories I have access to, in English, German and Italian, those I am carrying on my phone, and those other pilgrims have shared with me, paint a distressing picture. It doesn't bother me that many of the hostels do not have beds, just mats on the floor. I stayed in a number of those during my three walks to Compostela. I met Patrick in one of those. I had one of my most significant coincidental experiences in one such hostel just off the Camino Frances, an event that must have an incredibly low probability of occurrence, that a person of faith might take as a sign. It was so improbable, I still shake my head at it. People I tell it to react with pelle d'oca, goosebumps. 

No, it is that the guidebooks describe the hostelers as gruff, unpleasant, and the hostels themselves as less than attractive, dark, dirty. The pilgrims that have stayed in them confirm those assessments. The wonderful hostel in Formello is an exception, but that's not one of my stopping points. So I've opted for leased bedrooms, monasteries, and B&B's. Sometimes the latter means cello-wrapped cakes and zwieback for your breakfast, with the fixings to make your own coffee. Sometimes it means it big buffet breakfasts. But other times it means gracious hospitality, a well crafted omelet and a real attempt at friendship. Thinking of the latter brings a warm smile to my face.

I've had reasonably good luck staying at monasteries and convents. One should certainly not expect any measure of extravagance, but the generally tiny or shabby or somewhat in disrepair rooms and public areas are often balanced by quiet spaces, a chance to shed the fatigue of the day, places to relax and think. Sometimes they offer more. 

A few nights ago, I stayed at the Regina Pacis monastery outside of Vetralla. It's not an old, medieval structure as some of them are. It looks like it might have been built sometime in the last century, but it could be a bit older than that. Only thirteen nuns are in residence. There's nothing really remarkable about it all, except for sorella Mary Bernadette. 

The sisters at Regina Pacis are cloistered in silence from the outside world but, as in other monasteries that take guests, there is usually one sister who interfaces with them and may, as necessary, speak with them when she brings dinner and breakfast, or when she stamps the pilgrim's credential, or takes payment for the stay. Mary Bernadette is, as she says, from "the Congo." Her glistening deep cocoa skin is luxuriant, reminding me of that rich dark cup of hot chocolate one gets at Angelina's in Paris, the oils collecting and shimmering along the surface, almost hypnotizing you. She must be in her late twenties but it is hard to tell in the wimple and the almost floor length black and white habit. Thirteen years in Italy, away from her home, she is quiet, proper, stiffly functional as she wheels the rumbling food cart into the dining room. But that reserved demeanor cracks, her face turns into a wide grin, and she bubbles when she hears the language of her youth as I tell her in French that though I speak a little of her language, I will not because it would utterly confuse my already poor Italian. She begins to talk in rapid French, effervescent, and then, understanding what I had said, in Italian, and she is no longer that reserved young woman but a happy, almost jumping young girl.

I had a terrible night's sleep at the Regina Pacis. As soon as I lay down in bed my back started itching and then my entire body. At first I thought it was insects of one sort or another and I applied an ultra strong tropical repellent that I purchased a number of years ago in Switzerland. The itching continued to worsen. I then thought it might be hives or some other allergic reaction to some cherry tomato-sized plums that were served at dinner. Thinking the insect repellent might be aggravating the situation I towelled myself off with cold water from the sink in the bedroom. No help. For hours I dozed briefly and then woke, tossing and looking for a more comfortable position. Finally, I concluded that it must be the bed linens themselves and I pulled my silk sleep sack from my backpack, sunk down deep into it so that not an inch of skin was touching anything other than silk. In the deep dark of the night, I was able to put a few hours of sleep together. The next morning I mentioned it to another of the pilgrims who was staying at the monastery. He too had experienced that hairshirt of a penitent's bed.

As I made my way from Bolsena to Viterbo to Vetralla to Compagnano di Roma, the paths taken since I last wrote have included another section of the Via Cassia Consolare, well more than a mile of it. I am convinced that whatever modern man may do to this planet, that road will remain as it did 2,200 years ago and still be functional, if there are any of us around to make use of it. Every pilgrim I've spoken with who has walked it is in awe of its age, condition and beauty. I've walked through acres upon acres of hazelnut orchards, past Etruscan tombs, medieval towers hidden among the trees, through forests alongside brooks that make the sweetest music as they tumble from rock to pool, and throw diamonds as they move from shadow to sunlight. I've smelled and seen sulfur springs as they bubble up naturally in this region of terme. I've been surprised when I turned a bend, exited a forest and found a Roman amphitheater, not built, but cut into tufa and just next to it an Etruscan necropolis and next to that a two-thousand year old Mithraeum, no external feature indicating its presence, but inside the classical architectural elements remaining, three naves, long benches cut from tufa, and a pit in the floor to collect the blood sacrifice. And on the ceiling, crystal salts sparkled from a still recognizable painted St. Michael, his oval face jutting out from the otherwise smoothed, arched ceiling dating from when that pagan temple to Mithras was taken over and consecrated to the Christian faith. 

But I've also walked on a lot of asphalt, only a couple of miles of it on busy thoroughfares. On occasion the trees on either side reach across and shadow the walker from the intense sun, but far more often I glance ahead and see long stretches of sunlight between the momentary umbral relief cast by two lonely trees. Much of the day I am walking on near-white rock, pulverized to the consistency of cinder, that reflects the sunlight and radiates the heat up into what would otherwise be the cooling shadow of my wide brimmed Tilley. At the end of each day I am obligated to make a long climb, steepening as I progress, to a hilltop village, or town, or city, Etruscan or Roman in origin, repurposed in the Medieval.

There I find my place for the night, another day closer to Rome. 

Da solo, l'ultima mattina in Toscana

Alone, the last morning in Tuscany. Patrick caught the bus from Radicofani to Chiusi yesterday afternoon, continuing by train to Rome. We had known from the start of this year's walk that we would not be finishing our journey together. Though the "dream" to walk the VF was mine, I invited Patrick to join me. Thus the "dream" became his as well. 

That the dreams might not be identical became evident in the accommodations we each needed to make. Patrick accommodated me in many ways, probably more than I realize. I accommodated him as well, in ways I am certain he does not realize. Through almost ninety days and nights we had only one "discussion."

My dream was to walk the VF. I'm pretty sure I will make it to Rome, but I will not have walked the entire way, as those who have been following along since the beginning might recall. I gave up that dream early in the walk, several days before Canterbury, when I made the really big accommodation to Patrick. One day we skipped a leg and took the train instead. The why's and wherefores aren't important now. It's history. I did it for friendship, though it hurt me deeply. But it's a slippery slope, and once you skip a leg there are many imagined good reasons to skip another. As I recall, we skipped three in total that first year, certainly less than fifty miles in a total of more than 1,500 from Winchester to Rome. 

When Patrick suggested skipping a leg this year, I demurred. "Why?" Patrick asked. "We've done it before." I told him " Not since we left the St. Bernard pass and entered Italy" – actually not since Besançon a couple of hundred kilometers earlier. A small victory for a dream reconfigured. 

Whether from the beginning or emerging at some later date, Patrick's dream was to walk the last stages and arrive in Rome with several others he holds dear, Colette and two long time friends, in addition to myself. I had always intended to walk the VF alone. But when Patrick was suffering through some difficult family issues, I invited him to join me. Knowing he is a man of faith, I thought the project would excite him and help him, and a pilgrimage to Rome would be a devotion, an extended prayer for intercession, an act of faith. 

For me, though, a walking quintet could never be in the cards. I know and like the people he will walk with. I stayed at the home of one during a visit to Paris. They are good people. But I know myself. It is not the way I want to walk to Rome. I expressed this to Patrick last year when the possibility arose that some of the others might join us for part of that year's walk. Perhaps I was too politic. Perhaps I should have been more direct, more definitive. But this could never be my dream. 

So once Patrick committed to his dream and we set out this year, we knew that the day would come when we would embrace, kiss each other's cheeks, and wish each other a "Buon Cammino." We didn't know it would be Radicofani but we knew it would come. Patrick arrived in Rome Saturday night, forty-eight hours before his flight back to Paris. That gave him an opportunity to attend mass at the Vatican on Sunday, something he had long wanted to do. I hope he found great comfort in it. 

Since my down day in Siena, we had come another sixty five miles, walking through luscious Tuscan countryside. My spirits were much improved despite temperatures in the nineties and a few climbs made more difficult by the heat.

The morning after Patrick left, I started out with Giuseppe and Carole, friends I had made last year, who I knew would be finishing their walk to Rome this year but who I thought I would not get to see due to their different starting point and starting date. But after checking into the spedale in Radicofani, doing my chores, and returning from hanging up my laundry, who should I see but Giuseppe and Carole just getting settled in. So my first morning alone without Patrick, my last morning in Tuscany, I walked with them for about an hour. I walk at a pace that is natural for me, my passo naturale, and that pace is somewhat faster than theirs. So I did not see them the rest of that day. That is one of the differences between walking with someone and meeting someone, even someone you know. Groups form and breakup as the hours and days go by. Patrick's pace and mine are close but not identical. I'm a bit faster but he has the capacity to walk farther. Though we walk apart much of the time we always stop at some point to wait for the other. We always eat together. We always stay the night in the same place (with one exception not relevant to the discussion here). 

That morning was my last morning in Tuscany. As I entered Lazio, the province in which Rome is located, on my way to Acquapendente, I ran into a number of other pilgrims, a Japanese woman Patrick and I had been occasionally walking with and two Italian pilgrims from the Venezia I had met the night before. The next day, from Acquapendente to Bolsena, I ran into Giuseppe and Carole again and a few other walkers.

It was not until today, from Bolsena to Montefiascone, that I walked entirely alone. 

I started out late. I did not see another pilgrim all day. I occasionally ran into someone out for a bit of exercise, a man walking his dog, a farmer tending to his crops, but I did not walk with anyone. I spent the day in woods, in vineyards or walking through agricultural estates, on country roads and even an impressive stretch of the ancient Roman road, the Via Cassia Consolare, Roman basoli paving beneath my feet, more than two thousand years old, weathered but otherwise the Roman road of antiquity. There were wonderful views on and off of Lake Bolsena, a volcanic caldera, below me. For most of the day the only sounds I heard were sounds of nature, not a single car for hours on end. 

But most of the day was spent in walking meditation, deep in my own thoughts, occasionally coming out of my reverie to check whether or not I was still on the path, and then, moments later, I was back in thought again. Many of the thoughts I had in prior years came back to me. The fact that I am nearing the end of the journey prompted other thoughts. I began to get clarity on the meditation I referred to in an earlier post, the one that occurred to me on my way to San Gimignano, and which I hope to expand on in a future post. I walked in near silence, gravel crunching beneath my boots. My mind was calm. Tranquillo. 

Patrick and I have had some really great days walking the VF. Our reception and send off at Canterbury was memorable. Our hiking the alps and reaching the top of the San Bernard Pass together, ending our first year's walk in a triumphant embrace, was fantastic. We had several really glorious days this year walking in Tuscany. But I must tell you: today is right up there, one of the most satisfying days of the entire pilgrimage.

  

Mi sono svegliato in un veramente cattivo stato d'animo questa mattina

I woke up in a really foul mood this morning. It was a sort of Thomas Mann feeling, a slow-motion descent towards a silent lonely end.

It could have been the warm, sticky Siena night, uncooled in spite of the overhead fan that only succeeded in circulating the air within the stuffy room. The window facing the small rectangular courtyard three stories below provided no relief. It faced only on three other featureless brick walls.  

Or maybe that foul mood came from reading the news in the early morning dawn of mid-June in Europe when it is too early to wake yet only a glimmer of hope exists that it might be possible to coax another hour or two out of a restless sleep. So you find something to do that isn't stimulating and might actually bore you enough to drop off again. Didn't work. I read the news. I wish the media would strip the names of nations and politicians out of their stories so I can believe what I want about whatever place, rather than take the current reality-series world as it is. Or better yet, I should just divorce myself from what's happening out there and not let it intrude on the business of walking.

Or it could have been yesterday's visit to the Sinagoga di Siena, a tired sad place, full of history and a lot of pain, serving a community of only fifty, the remaining Jewish citizens of Siena. After passing so many churches over the past almost 1,400 miles, visiting a fair number with Patrick, finding wonderful art in some and real comfort and meditative space in others, I thought it would be uplifting to experience my own tradition's places of worship. It wasn't uplifting at all. No person of the Jewish faith was permitted to work on the synagogue's restoration so the design and its implementation show no sense of the spiritual at all. It looks more like my childhood memories of my grandparents' late nineteenth century-era apartment on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn than a house of worship, a three dimensional plasterwork oval in the center of the ceiling, white on gray, a few plaster thunderbolts radiating across the ovoid's perimeter. The contrast between "church" and "synagogue" was way too stark, especially for one like me whose conception is that if there is a singular motivating force behind the infinite, He-She-It cannot possibly care in which tradition one honors it, whether it be a tradition of religion, the personally spiritual, or science. To be clear, in my conception, a science like cosmology is also a spiritual enterprise: dedicating one's life to the mysteries of the infinite, the secrets of creation.

Or the mood might have been for another reason. I know I was feeling the loneliness of waking on one's forty-sixth wedding anniversary, missing the one I should have been waking next to, cuddled in on a cooler, Northern California summer-is-winter morning where lingering against bare flesh brings a warmth that has nothing to do with physical temperature but everything to do with the only real meaningfulness of existence, the love of one whose life is symbiotically entwined with your own.

But I know that it was also the feeling I get every year approximately midway through these walks, when the thought arises of what a ridiculous conception it is for an almost sixty seven year old to trod hundreds or thousands of miles from some indistinct point A to another point B, no matter how celebrated, beautiful, and storied cities they may be. In the dead midway, there is no conception of Rome, only an objective to get there. I get this way every year at one point or another.

From Lucca to Altopascio to San Miniato Alto to Gambassi Terme to San Gimignano to Monteriggioni to Siena, the most recent steps of my journey, I've been suffering through temperatures in the high eighties and low nineties Fahrenheit. But I have also been thrilled by the actuality of the kind of Tuscan landscapes one readily imagines, the ochers, yellows, browns, and greens of dust filtered sunlight on hills, fields, and farmsteads. I've also engaged in meditations that come to mind unbidden, one in particular en route to San Gimignano that I need some time to unravel. Yet this morning in Siena I was in a foul mood. 

The day improved, lightened by a smiling, young, bright-spirited Chiara, the guide on a walking tour Patrick and I took this morning. We decided to spend an extra day in Siena and Chiara expertly maneuvered seven German tourists and two pellegrini-cum-tourists through the Duomo and gave us background on works by Michelangelo, Donatello, Bernini, and others, escorted us through the medieval heart of Siena, and let us in on particulars and secrets of the current day Palio.

I felt even better after getting a shave at the shop of one Giuseppe Castigleone and better still when during an evening passeggiata I discovered that one of the hole-in-the wall restaurants I had passed while searching for Giuseppe's place, a short narrow restaurant that earlier in the day seemed more appropriate for a donner/kebob shop or a take away pizza place, had set tables on the street and was in fact an absolutely authentic osteria serving food da casa, all home made. It is hard to escape tourists in Siena, and there certainly were some of those strolling along the street, but here the primary foot traffic was Sienese returning home from work or taking places at the numerous other shops that transformed themselves into local eating haunts in the early evening.

By dinner's end, I was in a reasonably good frame of mind, until I climbed the fifty-seven steps back to my airless room for another restless night's sleep.

 

 

Credi nei fantasmi? No, non ci credo . . . ma . . .

Dear friends: I am having problems posting pictures to my blog. If I can solve the problem I will update and republish this post. Thanks for understanding.

I've been thinking a lot about ghosts. 

For starters, my wonderfully emphatic and kind professor of Italian often asks whether we believe in them in order to illustrate the use of ci in place of ne with the verb credere. 

Well, I don't believe in the corporeal kind, except perhaps the one I saw on a United flight from somewhere to San Francisco almost thirty years ago. From what I know of his corporeal self, some sort of help was likely required to get him to his final destination and cruising at 35,000 feet or so certainly would have got him a good part of the way there.  On balance I think he made it.

The night I made it to Pontremoli in the northwest corner of la Toscana, the small city where I ended last year's walk and where I would begin this year's, I spent the night at the former monastery of the brothers capucine. After getting settled, meeting my friend Patrick at the station, and dining at Taverna all'Occa Bianca, I settled in for a restless sleep. Some time way before dawn I felt an impish little presence bouncing up and down on my knees. I told him to stop, which he did, and leave, which, at the time, I thought he had. Was it an old capucine or a jet-lagged stupor?  Don't know, but read on. 

Patrick and I headed out early for breakfast at the same taverna in which we had enjoyed a selection of regional specialities the night before. I had asked the padrone where we might get an early breakfast, and he said he'd open up for us by around seven. Over a cappuccino and a cornetto, I engaged him in a conversation about whether his family was from Pontremoli, how long he'd had the taverna, and other questions of the sort I like to engage those friendly or polite enough to suffer through my barely comprehensible Italian. Coloro che non provano, non imparano. Those who don't try, don't learn. 

Il padrone asked about our walk. We spoke about it at some length. When I asked to pay, he offered his hand in a friendly shake and said "Buon cammino." That's it: breakfast at the cost of a congenial conversation. Perhaps he thought acting kindly to a couple of pellegrini might bring on some future intercession for his own benefit. No telling what kind of ghosts he may have been trying to assuage. 

But there is that other kind of ghost, non-corporeal, neither friendly nor antagonistic, the felt presence of things past. All those who have visited Italy have likely sensed it. It is there in the presence of ruins, remains, refurbishments and repurposing like the mixed martial arts class held in the piazza fronting the church and monastery of San Francesco the other night in Lucca, or in the traditions like the evening passeggiata updated with incessant texting iPhones and youngsters in tow twirling fidget spinners, or in Nonna's traditional cooking adapted with Quinoa or with a special note on the menu to sufferers of celiac disease as to which dishes migh be most suitable to their condition.

Traveling by foot at three miles an hour, though, provides different kinds of opportunities to ponder these ghosts. From Pontremoli to Aulla to Sarzana to Massa to Camaiore to Lucca, the starting and end points of my first five days of walking, and all the small cities, villages, clumps of houses, hill towns and farmsteads in between, the interplay between old and new is everywhere. Many of the ospedali that welcomed and cared for pilgrims as long ago as five hundred, a thousand or fifteen hundred years ago are gone except for their stone outlines on the ground or are standing in some state of ruin. Others, though, are still welcoming pilgrims, providing a friendly reception, a hot shower, a clean bed (bring your own sleep sack, of course, no linens provided) and a meal – breakfast and/or dinner. 

Some are in the same structures that welcomed pilgrims long ago and others in repurposed church annexes or monasteries, or old palazzi left to the governance of civic authorities. Today, many still open their doors only to credentialed pilgrims, but others take vacationers as well. WIFI is almost everywhere and if it is not, the pilgrim frequently will opt for another ospedale, even another town to stop in. How else to do FaceTime with one's better half left at home?

In the countryside one gets to talk with people, simple and unaffected, in the kindest meanings of those words. A wave and a step forward initiates a conversation. I see that wave and cross the road to be greeted with a tooth-gapped smile and a glimmer of gold as the smile broadens further. The padrone of a small house and plot of land, can of wasp spray in his shirt pocket as he exits his croft, is so anxious to converse. He proudly places his fists on his hips, arms akimbo, when I call him by that title. He asks the usual questions. I ask him about the frequency of pilgrims: many, though for him that might be one or two a day. We spoke about his place and his work. I offered my name, first and last, and a handshake. In return he offers me his hand and his name: Sergio, Sergio Lucchese. A Lucchese, in the region of Lucca? Not a surprise but what does it say? His name is not a vocation as many names are. Somewhere, there was a break in official lineage, the father unknown or unwilling to give his name, so the name of the predominant regional power was taken. Another ghost story, standing right in front of me and offering to share a beer. Grazie, no. Devo andare dieci kilometri piú. Ten more KM to walk. So he insisted on giving me a 1.5 liter bottler of water and I could do nothing more than accept and carry the additional 3.3 pounds with me, though I already had plenty of water to see me to Lucca.

By about noon on our first day of walking, I was really feeling the effects of the jet-lag and my disturbed sleep the night before. I needed a nap. We spotted a restaurant on the outskirts of Filetto, across from a glade of chestnut trees. Outside the eatery was a sign for a pranzo lavoro, a working man's lunch, usually a sign for a hearty meal at a good price. We entered but both opted for a wonderfully fresh insalata mista for which the chef came out to ask if we might want some radicchio in our salad, his hands full of just picked and washed leaves still dripping wet, some garden dirt stubbornly clinging to them. After lunch, I crossed into the woods where a few picnic tables had been placed. Stretching out on a bench, I dozed for half an hour in that selva oscura, the same dark woods that are said to have been the inspiration for the opening of Dante's "Divine Comedy," until that little imp once again bounced me awake. It's the last I saw of that little ghost, but I continue to enjoy those other fantasmi  I encounter every day of my walk.