Three Interesting Sights, and Besides That Viterbo

We woke up to rain pound­ing on the roof of the camper. By the time we drove back to our drop-off point it had stopped, and we had about a two-hour reprieve before it really came down, soak­ing our pants, blow­ing our umbrel­las inside out, and chill­ing us through. My legs were aching from the last sev­eral days’ longer-than-usual walks, and I hadn’t slept well, so the whole expe­ri­ence made me crabby; but Andrew, being an extrem­ist by nature, found the weather exhil­a­rat­ing. So that was at least one of us enjoy­ing him­self dur­ing the storm.

But despite the rather unin­spir­ing mix of unused farm­land and aban­doned indus­try, we saw three inter­est­ing sights today. The first was a long stretch of real Roman road, the Via Cas­sia: 13 feet wide, with care­fully laid flag­stones fit­ted one to another, in pretty good shape after 2150 years! It ran right by houses and through ham­lets, still being used just like any other road.

The sec­ond inter­est­ing sight was in the mid­dle of fields in the mid­dle of nowhere, noth­ing to indi­cate any­thing of inter­est except the RVs parked all around it and the waft­ing odor of sul­fur: ther­mal springs. The area was paved and var­i­ous squat ugly tubes poured forth the almost-too-hot-to-touch water into lit­tle pools. Time and weather per­mit­ting, it would have been a nice place to stop and relax for awhile. But pil­grims only four days away from Rome don’t waste their time loung­ing in the baths.

Beyond the ther­mal springs we made our way through Viterbo (for our pur­poses inter­est­ing solely because the gen­eral vicar of the Augus­tin­ian order in Luther’s time was Giles of Viterbo). It has an impres­sive stretch of old city wall still stand­ing, but oth­er­wise is pretty drab and pos­i­tively shut down as if under orders, though it’s prob­a­bly just Mon­day being the day off. We did not regret the lack of time to inves­ti­gate the place more closely.

But right on the other side of Viterbo, our final stretch of road made for the third inter­est­ing sight of the day. The road ran through some­thing like a trench carved through the soft vol­canic stone, nar­row and windy, with rocks walls from 20 to 40 feet high and often get­ting nar­rower at the very top. It went on like that for sev­eral kilo­me­ters. We have no idea who thought it was worth the time and resources to carve a road like that, but there must have been a pretty good rea­son to go to all that trouble.

Although it was a fun place to walk, it was a nerve-wracking place to bring a camper, so after our crew’s first abortive attempt to col­lect us, we walked far­ther than orig­i­nally planned, crossed under the super­strada, waded through the all-time biggest mud pud­dle flanked by a bar­rier of briers and net­tles, and finally rejoined them on the far side… at least until it’s time to start walk­ing again tomorrow.