The Ribollita Trail

This time it was a fog-free morn­ing. In fact it was a per­fectly clear, very cold morn­ing, the kind that sharp­ens your senses as you walk along. The whole tan and brown land­scape lay before us, just turn­ing orange and golden as the sun rose over the hills. (The fun thing about early morn­ing walk­ing in the hills is that you get to see the sun rise and set sev­eral times in rapid suc­ces­sion). It was quite a lot of up and down but never too far one way or the other, and plenty of flat stretches in between. We said our usual morn­ing prayers and fin­ished up the Pur­ga­to­rio.

Later in the morn­ing we passed a short stretch on the highway—a high­way with a gen­er­ous shoul­der and mer­ci­fully wide lanes, I might add—when, ran­domly it seemed, a dri­ver com­ing toward us pulled over, parked, and hopped out hail­ing us. It turns out that Mas­si­m­il­iano is the pres­i­dent of the con­fra­ter­nity of Via Fran­ci­gena pil­grims in Lazio, the province of Italy that Rome is in and that we’ll enter tomor­row. He rec­og­nized us by all the tell­tale signs of pil­grim­hood: walk­ing poles, back­packs, and silly hats, and told us time and again how “for­tu­nati” we were to be spot­ted by him because he had in his hands, hot off the presses, the lat­est edi­tion of two trail guides for the north­ern half of Lazio. He gave us copies of each while ply­ing us with advice in exu­ber­ant Ital­ian gen­er­ously pep­pered with French and Eng­lish; we responded in a pid­gin of our own, and all was fairly mutu­ally intel­li­gi­ble. He him­self has marked and painted a num­ber of the way­posts and he assured us we’d have no trou­ble find­ing the path all the way to St. Peter’s.

Shortly after that we started the uphill seg­ment of our day’s track, giv­ing a wide berth en route to some very ded­i­cated sheep­dogs, and stopped briefly to have lunch with a good view of the vis­tas behind us. Then we made our way up the last 5 km, steadily but not too steeply ascend­ing the whole way, to Radicó­fani, which is—you guessed it—a Tus­can hill­top town, and hap­pily a rel­a­tively untouristed one again. We went all the way to the top where we found the church of San Pietro, as well as Ginny and Zeke explor­ing the neigh­bor­hood, so we checked into our hos­tel, which is a par­tic­u­larly big and beau­ti­ful one, if stone-cold. Of course, it’s made of stone, so why shouldn’t it be?

We’d arrived mid-afternoon so we were headed back down the camper to work on din­ner when who should find us again but the very same Mas­si­m­il­iano. This time he had a new gift—a radi­antly reflec­tive yel­low vest. He warned us of crazy dri­vers and that, it seems, it is tech­ni­cally ille­gal for pedes­tri­ans to walk along the high­ways. (Which makes us won­der yet again why they route the Via Fran­ci­gena along them.) And the police will arrest us if they catch us with­out the reflec­tive vests on. (Though we have had plenty of police cars drive past us and they have never expressed the slight­est inter­est in us.) Nev­er­the­less, any­thing to warn the dri­vers seems like a good idea to us, so we grate­fully accepted the gift. He also gave us a lit­tle metal square stamped with a sym­bol of the Via Fran­ci­gena, to put by our front door when we get back home. And some more advice on safety, track­ing, and what to do when we arrive in the holy city.

The evening’s project, since we had a lit­tle more time, was to try a recipe out of the lit­tle book of Tus­can cook­ing that Ginny picked up for me: the homey vegetable-and-bread stew called ribol­lita. We’d tried it twice before in restau­rants, and we found it both won­drously healthy and very heart­en­ing for cold autumn evenings. A pil­grim­age is def­i­nitely not pri­mar­ily a gus­ta­tory adven­ture, but this par­tic­u­lar attempt was a rous­ing suc­cess. It’ll be a keeper for when we all go back home.

Speak­ing of which, exactly one week from today we arrive in Rome! Many thanks to all of you who have kept up with us so faith­fully in the last 63 days—we’re down to the home stretch now.

paul sailhamer says:
October 29, 2010 at 9:16 pm
i too have been trav­el­ing this last week and am only now catch­ing up with your jour­ney. i have read and viewed every day so far!
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