Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow

As we were walk­ing to our hotel on Fri­day night, we passed the munic­i­pal garage and saw a num­ber of jovial city work­ers turn­ing on and warm­ing up the snow plow for the first time this fall. “It’s still tired,” one of them told Andrew, “and needs to wake up.” This did not bode well for Saturday’s weather. The pre­dic­tion was only for cold with a mix of rain and snow, but you can prob­a­bly trust Swiss moun­tain men to know when snow is coming.

And they were right! We woke up Sat­ur­day morn­ing in Bivio to five inches of snow on the ground and more com­ing down. We couldn’t even see the moun­tains loom­ing over­head through the bliz­zard. The streets were clear, of course!

Well, if that’s what it was like in Bivio, it was cer­tainly not going to be hos­pitable far­ther up, so we resigned our­selves to a third day in a row skip­ping dis­tance trav­eled by foot. Andrew was par­tic­u­larly dis­ap­pointed to lose the chance to tra­verse an alpine pass the old-fashioned way. Sep­ti­mer has been a piv­otal trad­ing point since the Roman era, and Bivio got its start as a town first as a horse and mule exchange stop. It also has an inter­est­ing ecu­meni­cal his­tory: dur­ing the Ref­or­ma­tion and up till the early 17th cen­tury, Catholics and Protes­tants co-existed peace­fully, even shar­ing the same his­toric St. Gall church. Then some Cap­puchin monks came and preached against the Ref­or­ma­tion; even­tu­ally the Protes­tants got so mad about it that they tied up one of the lead­ing priests to a mule and left him at the pass. Some time later a Protes­tant pas­tor came with fer­ver­ous teach­ing of his own, and the Catholic res­i­dents drove him out of town with shov­els and pitch­forks. Today Bivio appears to have reverted to peace­ful coexistence.

Any­way, it was back on the bus for us. Quite a sight to behold: all that snow com­ing down, climb­ing way up and way down hair­pin turns. It took some seri­ous effort of mind not to be over­come with ver­tigo look­ing out the win­dow. I’d cer­tainly never expe­ri­enced any­thing like it before. The vil­lages were tucked deep down in valleys—they must get only brief bursts of sun in the winter—and had more hand-hewn log cab­ins than we’d seen yet. The roofs were all cov­ered with 1½” thick slabs of rocks serv­ing as shin­gles; they must weigh a ton but to all appear­ances are immov­able even in win­ter storms.

The bus also took us across our final bor­der cross­ing (well, bar­ring Vat­i­can City) into Italy—a quick zip through both patrols, not so much as a pause, much less pass­port con­trol. We were deliv­ered to our des­ti­na­tion at Chi­avenna, a small town of about 3000 right at the base of moun­tains, also way deep down in a val­ley carved up the side with the most amaz­ing switch­backs: you could see the toy-sized cars wind­ing their way back and forth up the slope. Every­one going through Sep­ti­mer would have stopped here, and there’s even an Augus­tin­ian pri­ory (a city brochure said the cur­rent build­ing was erected in the Napoleonic era, but we have a hard time believ­ing there wasn’t a pri­ory there before—even the street it’s on is named Via delle Agos­tini­ane). The old­est part of the city, except the churches, was rebuilt after a fire in 1486. So—in our ongo­ing quest to see those things that Luther might have seen—he prob­a­bly saw the city some­thing like it appears today.

The inclement weather’s change of our plans meant that we arrived in Chi­avenna a day ahead of sched­ule. The B&B we’d hoped to stay in was full, but the owner said his friend who also owns a B&B had a room free for the night, so he took us there. It turns out that this friend, Ste­fano, is the one man in all of Chi­avenna who not only knows who Mar­tin Luther is but actu­ally loves his stuff! And Emanuela told us about a vis­it­ing Ital­ian Jesuit who gave a three-hour pro­gram at their church about Luther—a pos­i­tive account, from the sounds of it. Prov­i­dence has a mar­velous sense of humor.

We hit it off so well with Ste­fano and his fam­ily that they invited us for a late din­ner with them. Emanuela his wife made an enor­mous bowl full of gnoc­chetti di Chi­avenna, the local spe­cialty (lit­tle potato dumplings smoth­ered in cheese and but­ter). Three of their kids and a neigh­bor were there too, and it was just the sort of thing you’d hope for—a big, cheer­ful, noisy Ital­ian fam­ily. It was also quite a lin­guis­tic mish­mosh. Prob­a­bly the great­est impres­sion Chi­avenna made on us when we first arrived was our sud­den loss of lin­guis­tic com­pe­tence. We both can make our way all right in Ger­man (it’s cer­tainly improved in the last month!) and all four coun­tries so far have been ger­manophone, a great ben­e­fit in those impromptu cof­fee invi­ta­tions. At Ste­fano and Emanuela’s table, we were Amer­i­cans and Ital­ians speak­ing a blend of Ger­man, French, and Spanish—each per­son knew a dif­fer­ent amount of each tongue—and at some point it got hard to tell which was which at any given moment. Plus the fact that Ital­ian is so sim­i­lar to French and Span­ish that we could pick up a decent amount of what they were say­ing to each other. But it does make your brain feel scram­bled by the end.

Today we look for­ward to resum­ing our pilgrimage—on foot!

cindy camp says:
September 26, 2010 at 8:04 pm
Your ven­ture is amaz­ing. The pic­tures fill like I am there. Thank you so much for shar­ing such a mean­ing­ful walk for all the right rea­sons. If you are ever near this area, it would nice to meet you. You are in my prayers , and have great respect for what you are accom­plish­ing.
Love and Peace, Cindy
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