The Via Francigena

All roads lead to Rome

Commonplace, after Post-classical Latin

The seed of the idea of walking to Rome started to germinate in November last year when I was browsing the British Pilgrimage Society website looking for my next long-distance route.  My eye was caught by the mention of Rome, where I lived for two years in my twenties, and where I still have dear friends. I have done several long-distance walks now with family or friends at the journey’s end, and this struck me as apotheosis of such an endeavour.

It had been a theoretical possibility, though, until I off-handedly mentioned the route to my mother and brother in our group chat. A few hours later came a text from my brother saying they had been Discussing, and they had decided they would like to provide financial support for me to undertake it. I was absolutely stunned – moved almost to tears by their love and generosity.

Why then, I had then to honour it!  And so I find myself in the final stages of planning to set out on foot to walk to Rome at the end of March – and hoping that I (and more importantly my knees) can do their generosity full justice.

The Via Francigena is an ancient pilgrimage route from Canterbury Cathedral to the great basilica of St Peter in the Vatican City. It is one of many medieval routes to Rome, spiritual capital of Western Christianity, records of which journeys stretch back all the way to the late 6^th century.  The Francigena itself was recorded as having been travelled in the year 990 by Sigeric, Archbishop of Canterbury, as he journeyed to Rome and back to collect his pallium from the Pope.  Although documentary mentions of the route predate Sigeric’s journey by two or three hundred years, his is the first for which an itinerary has survived, in an 11^th century manuscript detailing town for town all the stages of his travels.  Sigeric’s 80-day itinerary was rediscovered and re-mapped, resurrected, as it were, and made an official Cultural Route for the 1000^th anniversary of his pilgrimage, with the intention to foster a sense of community across national borders, and to create a cartographic and experiential expression of a united Europe. In France the Via Francigena is designated as an official long-distance trail, the GR145.  The route is signposted (it remains to be seen how well!) and supported with a network of pilgrim accommodation options, of which I hope to avail myself.

The route entire stretches more than 2000km over five countries: the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Italy and the Vatican City.  It crosses the Channel between Dover and Calais, and the Alps by the Colle del Gran San Bernardo – where I fervently hope to see at least one enormous St Bernard dog with a legendary barrel of brandy tied to its collar.  Readers with finely-tuned geopolitical antennae will be shrieking at this point ‘but Sophie, at an average of 20km per diem [we need to accustom ourselves to Latin, since the Holy See uses it as its official language, even though its lingua franca and working language is Italian] this endeavour will take you 100 days, and that’s not including the one rest day per week that we insist you simply must take.  And you can’t stay in the EU more than 90 days in any one 6-month period.’

Indeed.  This is one of the many tragic consequences of Brexit. There is no way to circumvent this embuggerance; no pilgrim visa for which one might apply.  I thus have no choice but to divide my journey into two sections.

Pragmatically, I need to split the route at a convenient location for homeward travel. Sandy Brown, author of the three impeccable Cicerone guides to the Francigena, has divided the route into three, the first of which sections covers half the total distance, the 1089.8km from Canterbury all through France and into Switzerland, to Lausanne – whence a handy train could take me around Lake Geneva to the airport, and home, to wait out the six months before I can pick up the trail again.

But here another problem arises: the crossing of the St Bernard Pass.  At 2469m it is buried under meters of snow for many months of the year.  The road is open from early June, but the walking path remains closed until July, and is then only open until September.  By the time my six months are up and I can return to Europe, the Pass will once again be snowed shut.  My current plan is to make it to Lausanne and come home, but if I am walking well and the weather is cooperative, I do have enough EU days left to walk on for another 9 days over the Pass and down to Aosta, from where I can get a bus to Turin airport. All those decisions and details lie in the future; for now I am just focused on getting underway: Le Grand Départ, as the French have it.

In some ways this is a long walk like any other: yes it’s a very, very long way, but once the planning has been done, when one is on the path, these walks become much simpler. A series of single days, back to back.  Not impossible – and theoretically ‘well within my capabilities’, as my friend Jane would say.  But there are complexities about this walk that have been hard to get my head around, and there are plenty of residual worries that give me swooping feelings in my stomach when I try to get to grips with them.  When we walked Land’s End to John O’Groats we had every detail of accommodation locked down before we left. Previous pilgrims on the VF Facebook page say airily that here you simply need to phone to arrange accommodation a couple of days in advance. I will take this on trust (although I have got the first eight days arrangements sorted) but the task of ‘phoning to arrange’ is not so simple when one has to conduct the conversation with your invisible interlocutor IN FRENCH.  That’s another thing. The phone: my lifeline.  What happens if it gets stolen, or lost?  What about charging?  Data?  Knees?  What about food?  LECTOR (with derision): Don’t be absurd. France is the gastronomic capital of Europe. AUCTOR (with rising hysteria): But woman cannot walk on croissants alone!

I do know, though, that planning has its limits and I can’t solve problems before they occur – and when they do, that I have the resources to solve them.  But the biggest consolation is that I won’t be on my own for the first ten days in France.  Stephen will be with me.  I cannot hope that he will be my French expert – communication aspects of Forn Parts having always been my purview – but he IS my route-finding and mapping expert, so I won’t have to negotiate the transition from the thrice-blessed OS Mapping app to the dubious cartography of AllTrails and IGNRando entirely alone.  I have taken a belt-and-braces approach to mapping apps, and there is also a dedicated Via Francigena app with stage maps.  Sandy Brown’s comprehensive Cicerone guide comes with downloadable GPX files as well as with printed maps and detailed route descriptions, and there is a printed VF accommodation booklet which I have also furnished myself withal.  More than anything, it will just be lovely to have my walking partner with whom to share the decision-making, to get the first twelve days’ walking under my belt, and trouver mes pieds before striking out alone across the French interior:

Between the Channel and the Jura Mountains is a vast French countryside whose five themes are repeated with variations for 900 kilometres – fields, pastures, forests, rivers and villages. In the northern stretches the five themes are punctuated by memorials to the last century’s wars. Here the Via Francigena shines, because the itinerary crosses a once war-ravished land where the starry flag of the European Union proves that enemies can become friends. This part of the Via Francigena has human-made wonders too. Intricate cathedrals built in the Middle Ages stand tall at Canterbury, Laon and Reims, and are so full of light that you may wonder how anybody called the Middle Ages dark. [Sandy Brown, Walking the Via Francigena – Part 1]