Grape Must and Whiffs of Vinegar

It was a har­row­ing exit from town. I remain aston­ished at what is con­sid­ered a legit­i­mate hik­ing route on the Via Fran­ci­gena. The Alpine club routes are great, but the highways-with-no-shoulder are a night­mare. On the other hand, fear for our lives kept us mov­ing fast, so we shot 5 km out of town in no time to our turnoff into the hills.

Orig­i­nally we thought we’d have to cut off a bit from today’s pro­posed stage of 33 km, but the first third or so was in a val­ley so we made fast progress (and even man­aged to read a lit­tle more Dante—very close to the low­est pit of hell by now). Even after that the ascent and descent was much more gen­tle and evenly spaced, no steep climbs or dizzy­ing trips down­ward, and cor­re­spond­ingly no early after­noon exhaus­tion. The biggest chal­lenge was the enor­mous mud pud­dles caused by the 4-wheeled crea­tures that take the back roads. It was very handy to have our poles to bal­ance our creep­ing around the edges through the pricker bushes.

The vil­lages were espe­cially cute today, tiny stone clus­ters, smaller on the inside than the out­side. You’d walk down the main street and see 2-storey build­ings; then down an out­door stair­case, around the cor­ner, and real­ize that the build­ings were actu­ally 4 or 5 storeys tall, built into the hill. Lizards tiny and large alike ran along the rocks—some up to 6 inches tall and bright green—as did the sin­gle most enor­mous slug ever seen, 5 inches at a minimum.

We also began to rec­og­nize what the whiff of vine­gar meant. One town had every base­ment door open and a sharp reek ema­nat­ing out of them: it was the new wine. In assorted gar­dens we found the grape must, all skins and seeds, dumped on the earth and still fer­ment­ing. Every­one in the coun­try seemed busy work­ing on the grapes and trans­port­ing cas­kets of wine.

After about 31 km, we were on the out­skirts of Aulla, our day’s desina­tion. Once again we were thrown on the high­way with­out side­walk or shoul­der. We went aways along it and then spot­ted our crew’s camper parked in a gro­cery store lot. Hav­ing had it with tak­ing our life into our hands, we hopped a ride the last 3 km into town. This time there was no nearby park­ing place, so we have made it up mov­ing back and forth between camper and pil­grim hostel.

We also met there another pil­grim for the very first time on this whole pil­grim­age! Mario has been work­ing his way to Rome since Mt. Geneva in Switzer­land. He’s a Catholic but as it turns out he knew of Mar­tin Luther and thought he was a great man with much to offer all Chris­t­ian churches. Are we prov­i­den­tially meet­ing the hand­ful of Ital­ians who are fans of Luther, or is there a grow­ing inter­est in the reformer in this most unlikely of places?