My Kind of Rainy Day

Rain was pre­dicted for the whole day today; twice I felt a few drops. My kind of rainy day!

The first two-thirds of our day’s walk were sim­i­larly dull to yesterday’s. Noth­ing but long, flat, straight side­walks along closed-up restau­rants and beach access points. Not exactly the visions of Tus­cany danc­ing in your head. The sea­son is over and the whole area has an aban­doned feel­ing about it. The only inter­rup­tion in the scenery was the occa­sional gra­tu­itous slab of mar­ble mas­querad­ing as sculp­ture. We made the best of the time by start­ing on Dante’s Pur­ga­tory, now that we’ve climbed out of the pit of hell, lit­er­ar­ily speak­ing any­way. We ate our ham and cheese sand­wiches on the beach, the gray sand merg­ing almost indis­tin­guish­ably into the gray sea and grey sky.

Beyond the city of Pietrasanta the trail got inter­est­ing again. We wound up through some hills, past a marble-carving fac­tory, along sec­ondary roads until we came to a little-used track lead­ing into the woods. Back when we started one of the peo­ple offi­cially involved with the Via Fran­ci­gena sent us new GPS tracks with a “solu­tion” to this sec­tion. The solu­tion would have taken us up 200 m, so we decided to stick with the orig­i­nal plan. Ha ha. Well, at least it was mem­o­rably inter­est­ing after all that bor­ing side­walk. We had a lively com­bi­na­tion of chest­nut husks, net­tles, mos­qui­toes, and a wide vari­ety of bram­bles (includ­ing a par­tic­u­larly sin­is­ter hang­ing kind, like a cur­tain with blades) to push our way through, hang­ing low so we had to crouch down. We kept at it until at last the trail petered out alto­gether in someone’s olive grove. The farmer was there so we asked him brightly, “Via Fran­ci­gena?” He just laughed at us and waved us on through the olives till we could pick up the road again. We fig­ure it gave Jed a chance to expe­ri­ence the whole range of the pil­grim­age experience.

The last sec­tion of the road included a canal, but it was pleas­antly more var­ied in scenery than our past canal expe­ri­ences have been.

As there is no pil­grim hos­tel in Camaiore, we called ahead for a hotel room, but this time we decided to put Roger and Ginny in it instead of ourselves—we fig­ured they could use a change from the inside of the camper. Hap­pily it turned out to be the most charm­ingly Ital­ian lit­tle albergo they could hope for, with fat golden cherubs painted on the head­board and Tiffany-style stained glass lamps. Some­times even the road crew deserves a night of luxury.