Fluvial Taxi to Emilia-Romagna

Last night after our post was pub­lished we heard a bang­ing on the door of our tower hos­tel. Andrew went down to see who it was and it turned out to be—the mayor! He makes a point of greet­ing all the pil­grims per­son­ally. We got our stamps and signed the guest book and he told us that we are the first Luther­ans he’s ever met!

This morn­ing we made our way out of town and through assorted fields full of corn or lying fal­low, with bril­liant blue­birds and sub­tler herons, along a levee until we came to the land­ing for the Tran­si­tum Padi, or Po River Cross­ing. There was a tall brick col­umn mark­ing it, recent of ori­gin but declar­ing the cross­ing site itself to be of ven­er­a­ble age. Right at 10 our fer­ry­man Danilo arrived, as we’d arranged the day before, in the “taxi flu­viale,” along with his com­pan­ion, a cute mutt named Bilbo. In we hopped and off he went. It was a cold and windy ride: I felt like my cheeks were rip­pling from the sheer force of the air flow­ing over them, though it was only my hair that ended up in total dis­ar­ray. We docked on the other side, this one marked with a col­umn con­tain­ing a stone with a foot­print on it—left there, it is said, by Sigeric the Seri­ous who first recorded the stops on the Via Fran­ci­gena. The fer­ry­man took us to his house, had us sign the guest­book and gave us a stamp, and then sent us on our way for our first steps in the province of Emilia-Romagna.

It was pretty flat and agri­cul­tural as on the other side of the Po. One lit­tle town had a very nice house in pos­ses­sion of the Knights Tem­plar. We saw fields full of toma­toes in the process of being har­vested; but it’s not a very effi­cient har­vest, with maybe 1/3 of the toma­toes left behind on the ground—I hope they get col­lected later or gleaned by some­one! We kept at our Dante until the coun­try roads gave out and we had to walk along the mir­a­cle mile(s) lead­ing into Piacenza—complete with McDonald’s, Block­buster Video, Burger King, and no end of kebab shops. The cen­ter of town was almost com­pletely silent and boarded up (it being Sun­day) and not par­tic­u­larly spiffy.

At the far end of town we stopped at the parish of San Laz­zaro. The mayor in Orio Litta had told us about a pil­grim hos­tel asso­ci­ated with the parish not in listed in the guide­books. We found the priest who gave us the key (we told him we didn’t speak any Ital­ian; he said not to worry, he speaks Ital­ian per­fectly) and the infor­ma­tion about the place. It was another kilo­me­ter and a half to the hos­tel, a tiny brick build­ing next door to a tiny brick church with a lovely mosaic of St. Peter hold­ing the keys to the king­dom in the lin­tel over the door. The hos­tel has three lev­els, six beds, and one wash­ing machine. It will go to good use tonight.

Sarah Palmer says:
October 3, 2010 at 8:30 pm
I did like Sigeric the Seri­ous: do you think there was a Fridolin the Friv­o­lous? I was most impressed by the casual way in which you con­sider 16 km an easy half-day walk — I imag­ine you regarded dis­tances a lit­tle dif­fer­ently 42 days ago. Con­grat­u­la­tions on your sta­mina and your inex­haustable blog; Zeke told me after church last Sun­day that the early snow had thwarted your plans for walk­ing over a pass — he was look­ing for­ward to being with you and I’m glad that you man­aged to meet up in the end. In Stras­bourg today our thoughts and prayers were with you. I’m glad that pil­grims still get perks.
With best wishes– Sarah Palmer, St. Alban’s Strasoburg.
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