Long Day, Little Excitement

For being a long day, it was fairly unevent­ful. We were up at 6 and out the door at 7:15, though it would have been even ear­lier if we hadn’t had such trou­ble find­ing the cor­rect exit from the con­vent! Siena was still and misty in the thin light of dawn. The south end was as free from sub­urbs and indus­try as the north, which made for a pleas­ant exit. After that it was just one round hill after another, up and down. Most of the hill­sides were plowed up with huge chunks of clay sit­ting immo­bile until the next crop gets sown. It was sur­pris­ingly rural; we could see far in every direc­tion and there were few houses any­where. Siena remained vis­i­ble for nearly 15 km—its two tow­ers are unmistakable.

The one notable event of the day was meet­ing our first other pil­grim on the trail, Hans from Switzer­land. He’s just retired and decided he needed to do some­thing for his health, so a walk to Rome was the win­ning idea. This is the off-season so it’s not sur­pris­ing we meet so few oth­ers, but even in the busy sea­son there’s nowhere near as many pil­grims as on the San­ti­ago trail. I sus­pect this is in part because of how poorly marked the Via Fran­ci­gena is; once we were clearly and cer­tainly pointed in what proved to be the wrong direc­tion alto­gether, adding an unnec­es­sary kilo­me­ter or more to our already long trek. Still, we were expect­ing 35 km and arrived, includ­ing detour, in Buon­con­vento after only 33.5 km. It’s amaz­ing what a gift that kind of thing can feel like.