Northern Italy does the Somerset Levels

It’s tricky to make a truly great risotto, but it seems so simple that everyone tries. As a result, there are a lot of horrible risottos being served in restaurants around the globe. 

Bethany Turner, Hadley Beckett’s Next Dish

The beautifully clean hostel looked out over the plain and we had drunk in the views last night when we arrived. This morning the views were even better, veils of mist rising from the warm, moist earth, making me want to walk faster towards Tuscany.

I had managed a good night’s sleep, but Stephen had had to take his mattress out from the dormitory into the corridor to sleep to escape our companion’s snoring; even there he still needed earplugs.

We had declined the hostel breakfast in favour of the bar where we hoped to get good coffee, and we sat outside in Piverone’s little piazza and ate a typical Italian bar breakfast of sweet-filled croissant (very delicious, gives an immediate sugar high, nothing in there for long-term energy), and watched the provincial world go by.

The three men sitting at the next-door café table for their intense morning coffee called out across the piazza to the local policeman popping into the office before starting work arresting snoring pilgrims, and a little Piaggio rattled past with its flatbed full of boxes of courgette flowers. The Piverone school bus went past, and a chap with secateurs in a holster strapped to his hip joined the Greek chorus at the next door table.

After breakfast we were out into the countryside almost immediately.

Pearly dew was evaporating quickly in the sunlight, but in the shade the moisture still clung to every surface. It was a beautiful morning.

In the vineyards the grapes were all ripening at the same time,

and between the rows crates and water bottles had been placed ready for the day’s work, and haybales and a shaded seating area under the vines had been stocked with water for a later lunch break.

With the number of hectares to be picked, it was difficult to see how they were going to get through it all.

In the middle of the vineyards at Gesiùn we came across the ancient wayside ruined chapel of St Peter, a church included in the ‘Chiese a Porte Aperte’ experimental initiative which enables self-guided art and devotional tours round the churches of the Val d’Aosta and Piedmont area. You can download an app and follow QR codes and discover more, but that all sounded rather exhausting for itinerant walkers. We appreciated the chapel and its simplicity,

and especially the fragment of fresco dating from 1445-1448 believed to be by Maestro del chirurgo Domenico della Marca d’Ancona.

Along the flat, grassy farm track we spent a happy hour discussing agricultural economics and post-war farming practices, government control and the environment.

I had remarked how striking it was that although there were few hedgerows, there were masses of fruit-bearing or nut-bearing wayside trees: figs, chestnuts, walnuts, apples — Stephen had done his university dissertation on the effect of government directives during the Second World War on British agriculture, and he told me about an interview he had done with an elderly man who been in charge of implementing the policies in Hertfordshire. There was real recognition at the time of the importance of being able to feed an island nation without having to rely on American shipping, so this man had visited on a farm-by-farm basis, scrutinising their deployment of land resources and directing them for example to grub up hedges (risking prison if they did not comply), to use narrow spare plots of land for putting chickens on, or pigs, and so on.

I wondered what kind of harvest one would get out of a field full of hazel trees, and how long it would take to pick them all laboriously by hand.

Part of our discussion was about the effects of mechanisation and chemical fertilisation of the soil on productivity, and about the side effects of these on biodiversity. A good example would be the addition of nitrogen to a grass crop for grazing cattle, versus grazing them on a flower meadow.

Still talking we passed by Lake Viverone, its flat surface calm and clear and mirroring the sky,

and climbed up into the village, feeling the effect of the early morning heat. We decided to supplement the bar breakfast with a cheese and salami roll from the bakery/deli, and ate our rolls on a bench where there were more little rural vignettes to watch: a small tractor loaded with haybales passing by (filling the narrow street with diesel fumes), older women bicycling to the bakery, a Porsche hearse.

The villages and little towns fell under our feet, the path sometimes in the sun and sometimes in the shade of little woodlands. And the path continued flat which enabled us to continue our conversation about agricultural economics and the environment.

In Cavaglià was the most enormous church we have seen so far, dedicated to the archangel Michael, but also prominently trumpeting the bishop who ordered its construction. It had a pompous Italian Latin inscription on the façade, and was completely out of scale with the rest of the town, dwarfing the ancient bell tower and olive tree to its side. It was so big it wasn’t even possible to get it all into the photograph.

Just down the road was an auto repair shop, out of which sauntered Morgan the American bully who took a biscuit from my hand, wagged his tail, snuffled about and obediently sat for a photograph. I was stunned to see him out without a muzzle, and I believe him to be the first dangerous animal I have met on the Francigena. His owner knew about the ban in the UK and was completely unconcerned.

We had been struck by how much pilgrim accommodation has been advertised on this route so far. Just round the corner was a large courtyard tempting us in with the promise of a stamp for our credential, and here was a little pilgrim hostel being swept out after the pilgrims had left.

Also more frequent (though I don’t think the two phenomena are at all correlated!) were the cemeteries and mausoleums. We saw three in an hour and fifteen minutes of walking.

Italian cemeteries have such a different character to our UK ones: these are like cities of the dead, with high walls and tombs shaped like little houses, recalling the ancient prehistoric tombs of the Etruscans, and the Lycian tombs we have seen in Turkey.

The Italians print pictures of their loved ones on tiles and put them on the front of the loculi, the burial niches holding the ashes, the better to preserve their memory.

There was a stretch where on one side of the road was a tragic vineyard, all the vines dead, and on the other a dried up field of maize, with rustly, papery dead cobs and leaves,

In this valley of death we started to meet dozens of walkers coming in the opposite direction in ones, twos, bigger groups. All Italian. They were all doing a different walk — the Camino di Oropa. The hostel manager told us later that it was a really popular walk locally; Italians tend to do walks nearer home, he said, whereas the foreigners travel a long way.

The Francigena here coincides with several walking routes. Hostel accommodation has an 8am chucking out time, so in on particular stretch of land we met all the walkers in quick succession coming in the other direction on the road. And there were so many! The first we met were two girls just about to start university, on their first 25 km day. The last couple who passed us when we were almost at Santhià joked that they’d been really lazy and only just started (a very long bar breakfast, maybe one of those with Prosecco on the menu?)

The intersection of the routes explained this sign, where Rome and Canterbury share space with other pilgrim destinations,

Shortly after surviving the field of death, we started to see dragonflies everywhere. Mostly a small yellow darter type an inch and a half long with a broad body.

And we also noticed there was a new crop being cultivated. Stephen suddenly realised what it was: “Rice!”

And indeed it was. Each curving head with its ripening cargo of rice grains, and its community of yellow, short-bodied dragonflies.

The fields were fairly yellow and we wondered whether this was because the fields were dry, or because the rice were ripening.

There were irrigation canals running along the side of each, filled with fast-flowing water, creating a vividly green strip alongside the path with lush grass, late flowers, dragonflies and dozens of clouded yellow butterflies.

There were sluice gates leading off from the channels, all closed. Stephen theorised that they opened them to flood the fields completely.

It turned out that he was right: the hostel manager later showed us a postcard illustrating the four seasons of rice cultivation, with the whole field flooded in spring, the green plants growing in the summer, and the yellowing plants in the early autumn, all ready to harvest. I hope over the next few days we’ll see this final process.

The rice fields came to an end (there will be many, many more!), and we were back amongst maize fields, still green, or already harvested.

The north of Italy is the home of polenta (made from maize flour), as well as risotto (made from rice) The fields were vast, featureless and very flat, as was our path. These are the days that many Francigena pilgrims skip.

But not us. We are as you know, walking this Pilgrimage of Hope to raise money for Plant Your Future, a charity which supports farming families in the western arc of the Peruvian Amazon to earn sustainable incomes from regrowing native rainforest trees on their plots of land, and practising sustainable agroforestry. All equipment, seeds, training and ongoing technical support are provided, and the charity has now built a seed bank in addition to the tree nurseries where the thousands of saplings are raised (providing work for local women), and the farmer schools where training is given and where the farming families can share experiences and best practice. If you feel you are able to donate to our JustGiving page, we would be so glad of your support! Because we are walking every step of the way to Rome.

We found a beautiful bench to pause on, in the shade of a walnut tree by a fast flowing irrigation channel (with no danger of breeding mosquitoes), to enable us to go the last few kilometres into the town of Santhià.

These last few kilometres were flat and mostly dreary,

so that every departure from the monotony was appreciated.

Stephen commented that this was the first time we had arrived in a village or town where we were not above or below it, and the fact that the town of Santhià was on the same level meant that we couldn’t see it until we actually arrived.

The hostel office is staffed by maths and economics teacher Mario — a warm and welcoming volunteer who manages this hub of accommodation and information for walkers of all the various local intersecting routes. He showed us all the various stamps — about eight of them! Carol from France (who lives a few miles from Arras where Stephen paused his pilgrimage last year) arrived at the same time as us.

She is sharing a room with Laura from America, whom we had met briefly in Chatillon, but we were lucky enough to be given a dormitory to ourselves — I had telephoned on the way (Reader, come closer for I need to whisper this) to ask for the love of God could we not share a room with The Snoring Pilgrim? Mario, Saint of the Francigena, agreed to shuffle the accommodation around.

And our room has air conditioning! What a treat!

Stats for the Day
Distance: 23.22km
Elevation: a risible (see what I did there?) 199m
Insect bite tally: me 9, Stephen 16

Prize for the most vine-covered house of the day:

Runner up (points deducted for unkemptness, but we appreciated the Romeo and Juliet attempt)

Highly Commended