Italian Rain is Just as Wet as German Rain

Last night we had a pow­wow and this morn­ing we made the final exec­u­tive deci­sion to skip ahead a day on our sched­ule. Look­ing to our planned route we real­ized, from our errors in the Alps, that we had not bud­geted enough time for the Apen­nines. We fig­ured it was bet­ter to lose one day of farm­land and sidewalk-less town edges to gain more time in the moun­tains. Plus the extra day means that next week we can break up a planned day of 42 km (!!). We thought way back when that it would be good to do a day as Luther did it. Now that seems rather less appeal­ing, and we did man­age 39 km one day early on).

Roger also pointed out that our route is much less direct than the one that Luther fol­lowed, since the Via Fran­ci­gena tries to avoid main roads that are almost always the most direct route (and even then we find our­selves run­ning across clover­leaf inter­sec­tions lead­ing on and off the “super­strada”). And, in yet another one of those strange con­trasts between then and now, Luther wouldn’t have crossed the Apen­nines but gone all the way around them through Bologna to the east. We decided to forego that attempt at his­tor­i­cal re-creation because there’s just plain nowhere to walk. We’ll meet up with his foot­steps again in Florence.

Though this was, we think, a good deci­sion, it did not pay off imme­di­ately into a good day. I’ve found long-forgotten com­fort recently in that Sun­day School song “This is the Day,” but hon­estly it was hard to rejoice and be glad in it today. For one thing, there was rain, lots of it, all day long. It wasn’t as cold as in Bavaria in August, but it was every bit as wet. Plus the clouds sat so low on the ground that the first beau­ti­ful views we should have been see­ing in the foothills were shrouded in mist, which can be beau­ti­ful but doesn’t offer a lot of variety.

Then there was the mud. It was thick, clay-ey, and gluey. It usu­ally appeared on the uphill tracks (mak­ing us regret, for the very first time, that we weren’t walk­ing on asphalt) and so much would stick to our shoes that it would start climb­ing up the sides of our feet, catch­ing twigs and weeds and peb­bles, and adding about a pound of weight to each foot. We couldn’t even knock or smear it off—we ended up using the ends of our poles basi­cally to peel it off. Need­less to say it both slowed us down and was pretty gross to deal with.

The minor high­lights of the day were chiefly smells. We had lunch in a huge hay shel­ter with a cleared space in the mid­dle, out of the rain, and hay always smells won­der­ful. Once we walked along a lit­tle stream and I smelled the mint grow­ing, then found it and picked some of the leaves to sniff (not to be con­fused, how­ever, with net­tles, which look a lot like mint and have, unfor­tu­nately, fig­ured out how to cross the Alps, along with slugs). There was some kind of cypress trees that had a pow­er­ful cit­rusy scent like tan­ger­ines, and I did take a moment once to stop and smell the roses, also very lovely.

The only par­tic­u­larly pilgrim-y expe­ri­ence of the day was walk­ing past a huge lone tree in a field and notic­ing a note­book in a plas­tic case tied to it with a rosary. It was labelled “Wandering’s Book” and invited pil­grims to leave a mes­sage. We were only the sec­ond peo­ple to do so (the book started in Sep­tem­ber of this year).

We slogged in to Siviz­zano around 7 p.m. this evening, weary and foot­sore (pruney around the toes, too, after hav­ing wet feet all day). Roger and Ginny had a big pan of spaghetti with meat sauce ready for us, which we just about inhaled, and then we drove on a few km to a camp­ground in Bar­done. Tomor­row we’ll get up quite early and get dropped off again in Sivizzano—we have under 30 km to go, but about 1150 m to climb.