Under the Tuscan Fog

Mar­ion and Jonathan both joined us this morn­ing as we headed out along the levies from Ponte a Cap­pi­ano, accom­pa­nied by a swarm of mos­qui­tos, many of which were the black-and-white striped anophe­les mos­qui­tos that once upon a time car­ried malaria all across this part of Italy. In Dante’s time (late 1200s and early 1300s), the area around Flo­rence was a hor­ri­ble disease-festering swamp (so we learned from the intro­duc­tion to the Divine Com­edy), and—a fit­ting con­nec­tion with our own journey—Luther and his com­pan­ion came down with what was likely malaria a short dis­tance north of Flo­rence dur­ing their trip toward Rome. We are hop­ing not to relive that par­tic­u­lar aspect of his pilgrimage.

After a cou­ple of hours of good con­ver­sa­tion we arrived in San Mini­ato Basso (there’s an upper San Minato too, which is the older one with con­vent and var­i­ous tow­ers), where we enjoyed a last cof­fee with Jonathan and Mar­ion until our road crew came to pick them up and take them back to their own camper. Andrew and I then pro­ceeded onward, up and down rolling hills, finally off the high­ways and on farm tracks instead.

From what we could see of the coun­try­side it was quite lovely, though fog masked a good deal of it. There is a won­der­ful vari­ety of greens, the shim­mery gray-green of the olive trees, the bold dark green of the arborvi­tae ever­greens stand­ing like sol­diers at atten­tion, and the bright yellow-greens of grass and decid­u­ous trees. Here and there we saw cacti with fruit, and now the gar­dens sport huge patches of cardoon—Tuscany is the first place we’ve seen them grow­ing. Dill flour­ishes along­side bor­age on road­sides and in lawns. Sev­eral fields were planted with sorghum, which forms a big orange-red head of tiny beads on top of the stalk. We found a vol­un­teer olive tree in a for­est so we decided to test out the rumor that olives right off the tree are ined­i­bly bit­ter. It’s true!

The only real adven­ture in the day’s walk (bar­ring the usual car-dodging along strips of high­way) was in the last ten min­utes, when the Via Fran­ci­gena sud­denly gave out at a large fenced-in area with every imag­in­able warn­ing of hideous death posted all around. A power line was down, and the area inside was bull­dozed, though from the looks of it years had passed since any­thing had been done about it. Cast­ing around for solu­tions to the sud­den prob­lem we spied the track that pre­vi­ous pil­grims had appar­ently taken: they just climbed up the slope on one side and jumped the power line and fence alike. We did that, came to the other end of the fenced-in area, and were faced with even more sig­nif­i­cant bar­ri­ers. In the end the only thing to do was climb a gate a few feet taller than I am—some kind soul had torn a hole in the gate halfway up for a foothold—and shimmy over to the other side. Actu­ally, one of the most com­mon sights in Italy has been aban­doned con­struc­tion projects. Every­thing from apart­ment build­ings to bridges with arches jet­ting off either bank and a soli­tary sup­port in the mid­dle but noth­ing to con­nect them—and they always look as if they’d been given up on ages ago.

Once past this obsta­cle we met up with the grand­par­ents, child, and camper in the ham­let of Capi­ano. From there we drove to Castelfiorentino, where we repacked, took the boy, and headed into Flo­rence for 24 hours while Roger and Ginny set off for a camp­ground over­look­ing the city and a trip to an abbey rec­om­mended by a Bene­dic­tine friend for tomor­row. We didn’t see much of the famous city this evening beyond the imme­di­ate vicin­ity of the train sta­tion, but we did meet up with our friends Paul and Melissa—Paul hiked 700 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail in Ore­gon and Wash­ing­ton with Andrew a dozen years ago—who will be with us for the next few days. We have been richly blessed with com­pany lately!