Wild Plums and Tame Peaches

A fierce wind blew through last night, wash­ing away the pitter-patter of rain­drops on the roof of the camper. We woke up actu­ally able to see the scenery around us—and it was gor­geous! We are up in the Apen­nines now with great val­leys beneath us and lit­tle tiny stone villages.

We got dropped off again in Siviz­zano and worked our way back up the hills again, along a not-too-sticky path through the fields, ford­ing a cou­ple of streams and cross­ing one a real bridge. Before long we were away from towns and fields alto­gether, fol­low­ing for­est paths. It was truly lovely. Some­times old stone walls lined the way, sprout­ing pur­ple hare­bells and rose­bushes bare of every­thing but the bril­liant red rose hips. We found some ripe black­ber­ries and tiny wild plums only the size of a blue­berry. One moun­tain­top was all pines, with soft nee­dles under­foot and that whoosh­ing sound you get only in all-evergreen forests. A vil­lager chat­ted with us (inso­far as we chat in our strange pid­gin of Ital­ian, French, and Span­ish) and gave us peaches off his tree.

The path was also unusu­ally well-market, not only with stick­ers but with stone posts in the ground each sport­ing a ceramic frieze of Sigeric the Seri­ous. Between the off-road scenery and the mark­ing, our faith in the Via Fran­ci­gena has been restored. It’s amaz­ing what a dif­fer­ence it makes to get away from cars and cities—and even the few times we were on the roads, there were hardly any cars to speak of. Alto­gether it’s amaz­ing to me how much the dif­fi­culty of transportation-by-foot has come to dom­i­nate our pil­grim­age expe­ri­ence. Luther cer­tainly wouldn’t want to have avoided many roads and large towns! To us they’re the bane of our existence.

It was quite a lot uphill—and quite a lot down­hill, which is even slower going when it’s steep and slippery—but it made us that nice kind of tired from fresh air and chal­leng­ing exer­cise, not the manic exhaus­ta­tion of bat­tling city traf­fic and breath­ing the smoggy air. And it was no small mat­ter that there was no rain today!

Tonight we are stay­ing in a pil­grim hos­tel occu­py­ing an unused sem­i­nary, back from the days when every dio­cese was required to have its own school for train­ing priests. The facil­ity is quite enor­mous; we’re just stay­ing on one edge of it. Tomor­row it’s another 900 m up and even more down over 28 km, so it’s time for another solid 8½ hours of sleep to gear us up for the day ahead.