Update: Resting in Pavia

I still need more healthy rest to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have.

Ernest Hemingway

Well, we have reached our official rest day in the città antica of Pavia, planned weeks ago, although the lead up to it as it unfolded was not planned at all!

While we were sitting in hospital on Tuesday afternoon, we decided that we would get a train straight down to Pavia once I was discharged, and organise some extra Airbnb accommodation from Tuesday night to Friday morning so that I could rest and recuperate. This I did.

However. It transpired, once booked, that there wasn’t a self check-in and The Guy had to be there to let us in. They didn’t discharge me until gone 7pm from the hospital, and by then we would have got to Pavia so late that we would have had to pay more than £100 in late arrival fees!

So in the end (having paid for the night’s accommodation in Pavia) we were forced to get a hotel room in Vercelli — hard to come by, apparently, in the City of Rice. Another £140…

But we did eventually make it down to Pavia by train to the emergency Airbnb on Wednesday lunchtime, and I was looking forward to a long lie-down to let the stress and the shock leach out of my body. The plan was that on Thursday and Friday Stephen would walk and pick up the days we’d missed (Guest blog! Guest blog!) while I slept.

So he emptied his rucksack of pretty much everything except his water, and on Thursday morning he got the train back up the line. And I stayed in bed.

Reader, imagine my shock when in walked the cleaner. I don’t know who was more appalled, me or her.

It turns out that in my addled state on Thursday night I had booked only two and not three nights in this place — and the first night we hadn’t been able to use anyway and had to pay for the extra hotel room in Vercelli. And there was another guest coming that night. I had about ten minutes to exit the apartment, getting dressed and hauling not only my full rucksack, but a bag full of Stephen’s stuff as well, plus the extensive shopping we had done the night before.

Out onto the street I went, feeling like bursting into tears — but I channelled my walking friend Jane and went to the nearest café to order a cup of green tea to calm myself and gather my thoughts. There was a bit of a wobble when the mean, po-faced waiter told me to take my rucksack off the chair next to me because another customer might need it (Reader, the café was completely empty apart from myself).

After about half an hour of internet searching and having drawn a blank for one night’s accommodation that wasn’t ruinously expensive, Stephen sent me a photo of the Francigena accommodation list and I managed to book a night with the Ostello Santa Maria in Betlem, a kilometer and a half away on the other side of the Ticino river. I made it slowly over there with all the bags, and sat for a while looking at the Ponte Coperto, the covered bridge built last century in the ‘40s and ‘50s after the Allies had destroyed the 14th century original.

So this was our third night in different accommodation since my fall — not at all what I had intended, and not at all restful. In fact, very much the opposite.

The hostel was a place not only for itinerant pilgrims to stay for a night, but also for people down on their luck. A haven for those with nowhere else to go. We had to read the hostel rules on checking in, the first of which was that we were to bring no weapons into the hostel, and the last of which was that we should not steal others’ food. I felt the privilege of being wealthy pilgrims who, if we had chosen, could well have afforded another expensive night in a hotel. And we were lucky enough to be given our own, lockable 4-bed dormitory, just for the two of us.

I felt disoriented, not just because of the head injury (I had no concussion and no headaches or other symptoms — how lucky I had been), but also because we had been knocked right off course. Our day-to-day task, organisationally complicated it may be, is so straightforward compared to suddenly dropping into the life of a section of the city whose members struggle on a daily basis to secure the most basic stability for themselves. The bluff East Ender who insisted he was from Milan, looking in later life for a job with accommodation; the young Iraqi applying for a string of Master’s degrees so that he can have reason to stay in Italy. The nuns welcomed all, with no questions.

Stephen left again in the morning and I stayed as long as I felt comfortable, because I could not check into our original Airbnb in the city centre. Stephen had taken all his belongings to carry with him, so that I didn’t have to haul it all around the city again. I was by now pretty desperate for a proper lie-down in somewhere from where I wasn’t going to have to move again after just one night.

I went back to my bench by the river, and after an hour and a half there, reading quietly, pilgrims started to trickle in: Laura from America, whom we had first seen in Chatillon, and Carol from France, who had somehow struggled through a marsh and crawled under fallen trees but had not a mark on her. I had by chance chosen a bench right by the entry of the Francigena into the city. There was an immediate sense of reconnecting.

I texted Stephen to warn him about the marsh up ahead in which all signage disappeared, and the section where you had to clamber over and crawl under a series of fallen trees, just in time for him to divert onto a road and avoid the impediments.

He had had an interesting couple of days himself. More fields of rice, but many that were still flooded, one with what must’ve been a flock of over 100 sacred ibis.

He told me tales of the Lamborghini tractors he’d seen: apparently Ferruccio Lamborghini had started out in 1948 making agricultural machinery out of discarded war materials and it was only when he had an argument with Enzo Ferrari did he begin making luxury cars in the early ‘60s. How he knows this I have no idea.

There was a massive Archimedes Screw — the very definition of ‘old school’ technology — an auger on a huge scale in action lifting water from one level of the canal to another.

He saw maize being processed, the cobs being loaded onto a series of huge, shaking grills, through which the sweetcorn fell, separating it from the cobs and the husks.

He passed through well-to-do places where good coffee was to be had, and frighteningly deprived villages. Areas where nothing seemed to be happening but fly-tipping (one low point was where a mower had ripped apart a black bin-liner of ‘disposable’ nappies), and where the signage was haphazard at best.

And so he walked into Pavia as we had intended, by which time Caterina had let me check in early so that I could at last lie down, in the fourth bed in as many days. It was a wonderful apartment right in the centre of this ancient university city, buzzing with life and energy.

The flat looked out over Piazza della Vittoria,

Seemingly the centre of the social and celebratory life of the city.

Our space above the melée though was calm, on the second floor leading off a courtyard full of plant-covered balconies,

a courtyard which was ancient and not exactly stable — out of the external elevator we were glad to turn right and not left, as the left-hand section was entirely supported by screw-jacks, all six floors of it.

Here we could eat decent food, wash our clothes. Stephen washed my hair for me. We planned the route-maps and the accommodation for the next section of the journey.

We could even watch the season finale of Ludwig

And today, our rest day, we could actually spend a little time wandering around the city.

Our first stop was to drop Stephen’s rucksack off at a cobblers for the disintegrating shoulder straps to be reinforced with some leather so that they didn’t snap en route. Then he bought himself another pair of shoes as his have started to go through the soles already, even though they were new when we started.

The Cathedral had to be visited: the great brick domed building at the end of our Piazza della Vittoria.

Inside, we gasped at the unexpected clean, light, uncluttered space, soaring volumes as broad as they were high.

The central cupola is at 97 metres, the fourth highest in Italy. It too had a clarity about it, unadorned with gold leaf, mosaics or frescos, despite its colossal weight of 20,000 tonnes.

In search of a stamp for our credentials we approached a giant of a man in an open-collared shirt with a dog-collar undone in the manner of a bow-tie at the end of a good party. He was the parish priest, a warm, open-minded and open-hearted Don Camillo who listens to choral music in the Anglican tradition to relax in the evenings, and who was delighted to show us round his church.

The church was a Renaissance plan, he said, begun in the late 15th century by Bramante, a first try at the kind of plan which would achieve its apotheosis in the great Basilica of St Peter in the Vatican. But the church was as yet unfinished, he said, as he pointed out the pillars of concrete which mirror the finished ones of travertine. We loved the modern suite of furniture on the design of which he had worked with the architect.

The modern pulpit was where he speaks from, he told us, the rough stone a reference to the Old Testament and the smooth to the new, the golden thread being the word of God which unites the two. In the roundel was a more ancient fragment of the twin medieval churches which had preceded the foundation of the Duomo.

The bishop’s chair, in a similar style, was a grand affair, the medieval fragment of which depicted an Angel positioned to look like it was at the bishop’s shoulder; his own chair was more modest but Stephen liked it more, as it recalled a classic chair by his favourite designer Gerrit Rietvelt.

We floated out of the Duomo clutching our stamped credentials feeling as though we had had a real treat, a real blessing, and on the way to collect the mended rucksack wandered through the university buildings.

Their corridors reminded me of the university in Siena where I had been briefly and uselessly enrolled (to give me my permission di soggiorno in 1988)

Cool and stately in even the hottest weather, smelling of faintly damp plaster (in even the hottest weather), but the yellow walls of these courtyards and corridors glowed warm and welcoming.

We just had a lovely day. I did really feel that I had rested, and my wounds were obviously healing well.

Tomorrow, Sunday, the plan is to walk the next stage but train it back at the end of the day, and we will start really early to beat as much of the heat as possible. We can cut short the day at an earlier station if I am feeling it’s too much.

For now I am really looking forward to getting back on the path (and perhaps even emerging from the rice fields?)