Musings on Lombardy

The happy prospect of fin­ish­ing by lunchtime today after a mere 16.4 km inspired us to get out of bed not too long after the alarm went off, aided shortly after­ward by the church bells ring­ing 7. (We were extremely relieved to dis­cover that the sen­si­ble Chris­tians in Italy don’t ring the hours through the night so you can actu­ally sleep if you’re near the church, unlike cer­tain other Chris­tians north of the Alps we could men­tion.) At the bak­ery a help­ful clerk guided us through our break­fast pur­chases and proudly bestowed on us the 10% pil­grim discount.

It was a pleas­ant enough morning’s walk, with a pale sun behind the fog and lots of dew on the grass. Although most every­thing is still green, there is a def­i­nite autum­nal field about the coun­try­side. The rice and corn har­vests con­tin­ued, and we noticed the pome­gran­ates and per­sim­mons ripen­ing on the trees.

Though this area is as agri­cul­tural as Bavaria, we couldn’t help but notice how very dif­fer­ent it looks here. South­ern Ger­many is tidy, bristling with order, cheer­ful in a prin­ci­pled way, shiny and well-tended and lush with flow­ers. This part of Lom­bardy is, well, weedy. Shabby and neglected-looking. We saw two old manor houses with huge grounds on the verge of falling down; liv­ing among the ruins of many dif­fer­ent cen­turies seems to be the stan­dard. For all that, there are lots of peo­ple around bustling about their busi­ness, pop­ping into the local café for an espresso and talk­ing up a storm.

We wonder—with no way of ver­i­fy­ing it—whether the houses are bright and shiny on the inside, and that the dif­fer­ence is only on the out­side. We know that some places delib­er­ately neglect the pub­lic and out­side spaces on pur­pose, for safety or just for pref­er­ence, and maybe it’s like that here. It doesn’t seem to be poverty that’s the cause of it. The locals we’ve stayed with have said that con­tem­po­rary Ital­ians are very mate­ri­ally ori­ented and rather too inter­ested in money and things—though what­ever they’re invest­ing in, it’s not the facades and gar­dens of their homes. One way or another, it’s cer­tainly a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence to be walk­ing through here from the first half of our journey.

It was very nice to fin­ish up as planned at lunchtime in Orio Litta today. We caught up on var­i­ous things, spent lots of time with our day, explored a tiny gro­cery store, and enjoyed cook­ing for real for a change. Our pil­grim hos­tel is rather exotic tonight, a brick tower in the mid­dle of town with halls extend­ing in either direc­tion, and an unsealed beam-and-tile roof on the top floor that gives lit­tle glimpses of the stars. Too bad we’ll sleep through most of our time here!