Flat, Flatter, Flattened

‘YOU MUST WIN! Or I will break your heads!’

From The Little World of Don Camillo

We had 30 km to go today so we tried to make a really quick exit. We weren’t early enough to walk with Laura, who left promptly at 6:30. We had breakfast in the well-stocked little kitchen on overnight oats and plums, which we hoped would set us up well for the hot slog ahead.

Santhià was a strange little town. The main drag was slick and modern and travertine-tiled, but the outskirts were dilapidated and and abandoned. There were so many buildings standing empty.

One of these was the old Royal Carabinieri building, which must’ve been standing empty at least since they stopped being ‘royal’ in 2000.

There was a more recent monument to losses in a Covid memorial fountain, tucked in a corner behind the church, which was quite moving.

Leaving the town over the railway bridge, we were immediately swallowed up by the rice fields.

Behind us lowering clouds suggested rain in the mountains, but in front of us of the sun, already risen but mercifully still hidden behind a cloud bank, lit up the sky with glowing apricot hues, matched on the ground by the acres of yellow-pink ripening rice.

It was at the same time monotonous and also immersively beautiful.

The cultivation method here was much easier to understand, especially after we had seen the postcard of the flooded field. We could see that the fields themselves were planted lower than the path we were on, so we could quite understand how it would be possible to open the sluice gates and flood the entire field for the planting season.

The stalks come up in little clumps, so we wondered whether that was because they planted a few grains of rice in each hole, or whether, like papyrus, the parent plant sent out lots of little stalks.

Easier to see perhaps when the field has been harvested. They leave quite a lot of stalk cut; we wondered what they did with the stubble. Did they plough it back in?

We passed an enormous farmyard that two dogs were eager to tell us was no business of ours, but inside there was the thudding clunks of machinery (‘the clanking sound of a farmer mending a combine,’ said my farming expert).

There were gleaming silver modern silos, and old abandoned farm houses.

Out of one gigantic farmyard came a young man smoking a cigarette, his T-shirt straining at his belly. ‘Are you harvesting rice?’ I asked. ‘No, we’re not farmers,’ he replied. One could only imagine what he and the driver of the car that he let out of the gate were doing in a huge, empty warehouse-like building in this huge, empty landscape.

The occasional rush still flowered in the ditches,

and the border of the path was sometimes thick with purslane. A delicious wayside salad — tart, this early in the morning.

Battalions of tiny frogs out foraging by the side of the path where the mosquitoes lay in wait leaped hastily into the ditches at our approach, like the grasshoppers had done up in the mountains. When I stopped to try and photograph them, I could hear the angry whine of disturbed mosquitoes, so we hurried on.

Other sounds were more pleasant: four lapwings over a maize field, and large birds about the size of swans, flying in long v-shaped lines, honking to each other.

There were no trees anywhere. Just the monotony of the rice fields. There was the occasional Francigena sign out in the fields, and when we were on short road sections, the occasional sign suggesting you could buy rice direct from the producer.

I could’ve spent a lot of time studying the ditches, which I thought (Reader, this will not surprise you) were fascinating; I tried to count the plant species, but there were dozens and I couldn’t keep the count of them all in my head. Some of the ditches were really lush, especially those with gently flowing water,

and the underwater ecosystem was as interesting as the plant life on the banks.

Entry into the village of Saint Germano Vercellese after 8km took us through a veritable ghost town. The atmosphere was really quite creepy, starting with a dismal rough concrete underpass and then proceeding into streets which just looked utterly derelict. Cars parked outside the ramshackle apartment building and refuse bins put out showed that they were inhabited.  But it looked like a pretty miserable existence.

We eventually found the bar in the main piazza, where the bar owner would only accept cash and asked us to leave our walking poles outside so as not to damage the mirror-like surface of his floor.

We sat outside with the long-awaited coffee, and wondered how anyone could scratch a living out here. By the till was a rack of monthly magazines for sale, one of which was called Patrimonio, the Magazine of Private Banking. What an extraordinary title to sell in a place like this.

There were a couple of leafhoppers on our table — we might have brought them in cadging a lift on our clothes or rucksacks,

and a mistrustful cat, fed freely by the owner, although it was a stray.

As I was heaving on my rucksack, four cackling ancient women each one tinier than the other who had parked their walking frames outside the café greeted me with a salacious ‘Bongiorno Signora, or is it Signorina?’ There was more excited cackling when I told them we were going to Rome from England. Robin had arrived and he agreed with Stephen that walking through the town had been an unsettling experience, and one could just expect Clint Eastwood to walk out of an alley.

On the way out of town, there were signs of a more prosperous local economy. There was the festival of rice that we had just missed,

and a dedication by the (ex-Royal) carabinieri on a wall plaque:

‘From the Risorgimento to Unity, amid uncertainty and confusion, blood and glory, Royal Face of the Nation; caught in the coils of mortal dust, of panting memories and anguished oblivion,  the Republic turned to us, looked upon us, and confided.

First, by duty and discipline, we fight with fervent ardour, of soul, body, and heart, for the Tricolor, paying it glory and honor.

Stars, Insignia, Epaulettes, and Flag are for us the vow and prayer of those who, in the shadow of the Armed Forces, take always refuge, trust, and hope.’

With the disintegrating Royal Carabinieri barracks from this morning in mind this had a nostalgic cadence to it.  If the detailing on the side of the smart, shiny new police cars was anything to go by, the modern Carabinieri see themselves as contemporary Zorros.

We wondered what it must feel like having you walk into a building from the Fascist era every time you needed to do anything at the town hall. This was a town with an unsettled relationship between past and present.

The exit from the village was pleasant enough, along a continuation of the Ivrea Navigation with chickens prospecting resourcefully along its banks.

But the field after the village smelled unpleasantly of urine, and we wondered whether they flushed out their sewage systems through the fields.

Then it was all turned to glory and amazement with the sight of great flocks of African sacred ibises and the occasional great egret.  A real surprise and a thrill.

Although an introduced species, they have become part of the local ecology. We saw a mess of feathers, delicate, plumy, downy, and what we assumed to be fox spoor.

We stopped halfway through the day’s walk in the shade of an enormous, seemingly abandoned rice processing plant,

where husks of hulled rice would have blown about over the cement floor under the chute, had there been a breath of wind.

Through the enormous front gates we could see, surprisingly, houses inside rather than the gigantic processing floor we were expecting.

Stephen had read about these semi-fortified farm houses, cascine a corte, in the guidebook this morning over coffee; Bertolucci’s celebrated film, 1900, showed the demise of a system of farming which since the 13th century had kept entire families of peasants practically captive inside these colossal courtyards, where they were born, lived, worked and died.

These gigantic walled farms were dotted about on the horizon, constituting a map of the landscape, since ‘road signs’ were in fact simply directional markers to individual cascine. Distances were deceptive, because the village that we had left two hours before seemed still fairly clear, although we knew it was 8 km away. The landscape was massive, and entirely ruled over by the fortress farm courts.

We wondered whether we could see different kinds of rice being grown, as some seemed to have much longer stalks than others. There were some flattened patches in a couple of the fields, and Stephen said that tall plants meant more risk of weather damage.

When trying to photograph this, I noticed pockmarks in the dried mud, and we wondered whether these were from the curved beaks of foraging ibis.

We came across a very unexpected shady couple of benches under trees.  It was definitely time to sit down and we snacked a little, rested,

and tried to figure out how on earth the deviation from the path worked, to avoid both the closure due to engineering works, and the dogs running loose that Mario had warned us about last night. The signage was so old it was disintegrating, and we spent ages trying to geolocate ourselves on an online map with very few features versus two paper maps, the one on a signpost and the one Mario had annotated for us, none of which quite agreed.

Feeling as though we could roughly rogues it out, we heaved on our packs and set off again.

Suddenly — somehow — I tripped and crashed to the ground on the path, hitting my head hard.

Stephen rushed up and released my rucksack, helping me prop myself up against it.  There was blood everywhere, pouring out from a gash in my forehead and Stephen wondered whether there was another in my hairline.

It was awful.  I had a gash in my knee too, and a bruised forearm and grazed hand. My phone had registered the hard fall and called the Italian emergency services so I had to explain to the woman on the phone that I had fallen but didn’t need assistance.  I mean I think I did but in the end it wasn’t needed anyway, because Stephen managed to clean all the wounds and apply field dressings, and just as he had finished, a car on the road ahead stopped and the driver shouted over the arnco to ask if we needed help.

This turned out to be Luigi, a rice farmer on his way home.  He turned his car around and drove us into the city in a matter of minutes and left us as we had asked at a pharmacy (where we thought they could apply butterfly stitches to my head wound).

A rice farmer!  This was our chance to get the answers to all our questions about rice cultivation. I will relay these rapidly as we didn’t have much time to chat as we were speeding to the pharmacy. They drill a single grain in at a time and then flood the field.  The single grain sprouts the whole bunch of stalks. There are many different kinds of rice grown — the taller stalked ones are old varieties and yes they are more likely to get weather damage. The shorter varieties are bred to better withstand the wind and heavy rain.

And then this kind, smiling Samaritan left us at the pharmacy door.

The pharmacy said they didn’t do any kind of treatments — we would have to go to pronto soccorso for that.  A&E in the nearby hospital.  But honestly I think they were just wanting to get us out of the door as they were closing for lunch. Stephen had to carry both rucksacks.

So we walked slowly to the hospital emergency department, and all things considered I think I was seen pretty quickly, having been triaged as the third of five grades of urgency. ‘Code Blue’.

Cutting to the chase, they glued my head wound and stitched up another gash they found in my hair line, and put a stitch in my knee. They x-rayed my knee (and found osteoarthritis — ‘welcome to the club,’ said my brother), and gave me a tetanus shot and also a CAT scan in a machine that sounded like an underground train was coming.

Stephen meanwhile was sitting in a corridor in another part of the forest, watching a woman sky high on drugs and alcohol ranting and raving with armed guards attending.

After six o’clock (some kind of magic hour) they let Stephen in and it was so lovely to see him.  He sat on a chair next to me for a while. We had eaten nothing all day — the breakfast overnight oats and the coffee had had to put in a long shift! But we were fine. Not a lot of appetite (and the nurses wouldn’t let me eat anyway). Then a patient needed the seat and Stephen had to stand for a bit.

This chap had been waiting perfectly quietly a trafficlight in his two-month-old car when a woman rear-ended him.  She’d also been brought in.

Dawning realisation on the part of Stephen. The driver was the same woman who had been raving in the waiting area. It was a miracle she could even open the car door, Stephen said, let alone actually drive a vehicle. Apparently the police has stopped her driving once already today!

So! Reader. Not the diversion we were expecting (I don’t recall the pharmacy or the hospital appearing on that scrappy map). We have decided to spend the next three days resting in Pavia, where we would have ended up on Friday and where we have rest day accommodation arranged. An Airbnb is booked. We also paid for tonight but couldn’t get there on the train as they discharged me too late from the hospital after it left! Our plan was to raw-dog it on Pavia station but the hospital wouldn’t let me.  They made us get a hotel room here and helped us find one with availability.)

And so I am writing this from a hotel room, aching all over and feeling a bit wobbly, but basically ok.  I think it’s the knee more than anything that will need to heal before I can get back on the road — the stitch pulls when I walk on it.

But for now — consider this blog renamed: http://www.headbuttingthelandscape.com!

Stats for the Day

Distance: 17.7km

Distance missed: circa 9km

Elevation: 31m

Stitches: only three, and I was very brave

See you soon! I’ll keep you posted.