Then went Christopher to this river, and made there his habitacle for him, and bare a great pole in his hand instead of a staff, by which he sustained him in the water, and bare over all manner of people without ceasing. And there he abode, thus doing, many days.
The Story of St Christopher, ‘The Golden Legend’
The hostel was perfect in all respects but one, and that was the mosquitoes. Although they were small, they gave nasty bites and I counted about 14 or 15 when I got up this morning, after a really not very good night’s sleep. Hey ho!
All the pilgrims needed to make a smart exit this morning in order to meet the 8.30 boat crossing over the river Po which was to be today’s stand-out excitement. It was a 4 km road walk to get to the landing. Stephen found a mocha pot and ground coffee in the minuscule but immaculately appointed kitchen, so we were well caffeinated by the time we set off, dripping with bite cream, sunscreen, and deet.
On the edge of town rose the vast 17-18th century palace of Litta Carini. It was hard to gauge the scale of it, except by looking at the palace-sized pavilions at the entrance.
From the back it was even more impressive, its commanding presence rising on brick-lined embankment walls looking out over the plain that had been reclaimed from marsh by the Benedictines in the 800s. One could imagine it appearing as a moated castle at certain times of the year, during the flooding season.
The Francigena signage led out along the road, but primed by Laura we took a grass path shortcut — a nice route— which followed the course of a small river through the fields.
This early in the morning it felt properly bucolic.
I remarked that it felt like a mixture of walking through the East Anglian Fenlands and the Somerset Levels,
but if you turned in the other direction where there were no drains, there was a distinct feeling of being in the American Midwest. Vast skies, stretches of golden crops, huge farm houses in the distance, and pylons.
Occasionally a light breeze brought us great wafts of warm rice, a surprisingly beguiling scent. There were also drifts of toadflax, fairly glowing in the early morning sun.
And then we had arrived at the banks of the Po River — the vast waterway swelled by the drainage of every single river we have seen since we crossed the Saint Bernard Pass. The glacier meltwaters, the mountain streams, the drains and ditches across this extensive plain — all reach their apotheosis in this river, which now would take the waters to the sea.
Gradually, the pilgrims congregated, and sat around on the benches near the small pontoon,
where a half sunken boat did not fill us with confidence!
But never mind, since the pilgrim sign here showed us all walking on water. We waited for the miracle.
The miracle arrived in the person of Danielo, chugging towards us in his river taxi.
He has been plying the waters of the Po transporting pilgrims for almost 30 years, and over this time has ferried 16,000 of us across the river from Lombardy into Emilia Romagna, our fourth Italian region, most recently in his boat (bought for him by one of the neighbouring villages), aptly named the Cristoforo Colombo.
It was a terrifically convivial experience.
I asked how deep the water was here, and Danielo said it varied hugely depending on the rains.
Right now it was about 2 m deep. Danielo was vociferously of the opinion that the river was being ruined by ‘cretinous environmentalists’ (that’s a direct quote) who wouldn’t let anyone dredge the river. The Po, he said, was silting up unforgivably. On the northern bank it was all sand, now. ‘The river is practically dead. No one comes here anymore, only me.’
On the surface, however, it was beautiful, and the passage across the river was breezy and delightfully cool in the early morning.
On the other side there wasn’t such a nice pontoon or jetty. Danielo piloted the boat into a scummy channel choked with rubbish, and we had to carefully step out onto uneven rocks and climb up the riverbank.
Danielo invited us to his house, and we followed him like overburdened ducklings as he stomped ahead with his big bamboo staff.
Here they are widening the river, and even this early in the morning lorries were arriving, or leaving with excavated material that they were taking away. We had to avoid the path and walk in a ditch.
Danielo invited us all to his house, where he held court in his courtyard, appropriately enough,
and we gathered round to hear his stories.
We queued for him to stamp and date our credentials, with a heavy stamp which is his and his alone,
and to sign his aged Book of Pilgrims,
and hear all about the history of the pilgrim crossing. I was thrilled to have met this larger-than-life person, full of anecdotes and bonhomie. He was 75 in 2017, so I wonder how long he will be able to carry on doing this work, and whether there is anyone to follow him?
In many ways Emilio Romagna looked pretty much the same as Lombardy,
except the rice fields disappeared, to be replaced by pomodoriculture. And indeed, we were walking through a wasteland where tomatoes had been industrially harvested, leaving red and yellow-green lines of discarded crop on the ground.
The fields were punctuated with neatly-stored irrigation paraphernalia, heavy duty hoses, and huge cubic water bowsers, awaiting the next season’s planting.
The entire rest of the day into Pienza just took us along the endless road. After a while there was a tarmac walkway of recent construction, although at the start we were simply walking along the margins of a road along which thundered lorries loaded high with tomatoes. At least tractors gave us a wider berth.
Two by two the pilgrims dropped off to go and sit in cafés, until it was just us, the open road, and the tomato lorries. We also stopped off briefly at a café for another shot of coffee and a loo.
And the next few hours we just hacked along the main road into the city. It was a tiring day’s walking, but it was overcast and we said several times that at least it wasn’t sunny.
At first the pedestrian walkway took us alongside a nature reserve connected with the Trebbia river, although at this time of year, and this close to the edge of the park it was scrub land.
The road bridge looked to be about six times as wide as it needed to be for the volume of water passing under it. It had a sad and abandoned air about it. But you could clearly see from the debris that there had been quite significant floods, so presumably the water levels regularly range very widely.
Our road twisted under it, went back on itself, and then joined the main carriageway of the dual carriageway into Piacenza.
There was rocket (rucola) self-sown all along the filthy border of the highway, which would have been lovely to have picked if it had not been so dirty.
The view of the river upstream towards the rail bridge was slightly more aesthetically pleasing than the choked-up weir downstream,
but I wondered whether it didn’t have blue green algae growth in it. It seemed an unusual colour.
The outer city limits of Piacenza announced itself as a city dedicated to the support of children,
and to the promotion of world peace.
These two claims seemed egregiously grandiose; Once the bridge ended, we were simply in for an hour-long trudge along the road which started off with the usual car sales garages, and then morphed into a more mixed commercial offering.
It was tiring and dispiriting walking. Even when there was evidence of children being brought up, there was no evidence that this was a city that was thinking differently; here small children were being raised next to an arterial road, and dressed in clothes that must’ve been covered in particulate by being dried outside.
Eventually, we got into the historic centre of the city, and even though we still had an hour left to walk to the hostel, it was so peaceful not having to mentally and physically ward off the traffic.
The life of this city did not feel as though it were being lived on the streets, as in Pavia. Here the general city design was of enormous palaces, separated from the street by big carriage doors,
through which we got tantalising glimpses of gardens, apartments — the quiet, aristocratic spaces where (some!) people actually lived.
But the city had a nice feel about it. There were plenty of people getting about the city on bicycles,
many on their phones at the same time.
and there were thoughtful designs to some of the manholes, like this one, covered in tiny footprints of birds,
which reminded us of the huge bird’s feet prints we had seen this morning in the dried mud of the path on the approach to the river. We had wondered whether they belonged to egrets or ibises, or some other large water bird.
We were dead on our feet when we finally arrived in the city centre, after an hour and a quarter of slogging in from the outskirts. The streets were quite narrow, and there were not any benches that we could see to sit on; we eventually found a nice cool spot in the shade in front of a monumental church doorway,
where we could eat our lunch peacefully and gaze at our impressive view.
Thus fortified, it was a short five minutes to our hostel, the Ostello del Teatro,
which had been set up by Filippo, an actor and theatre director and general arts promoter. A man who makes things happen — and who, like Danielo, is a passionate support of rugby union. In fact, they used to play rugby together when they were younger.
The only people in the Ostello when we arrived with Anna and Ricardo, doing something very strange to shoes: they were attaching Doc Martins to heavy squares of wood with strong Velcro, and when that didn’t yield the desired results, with brackets and nails.
It transpired that Anna and Ricardo are Dancers in Residence here, and these boots were going to be worn for a really difficult experimental dance they are working on. They will have to do most of the dance moving on their hands. Inventively.
Our day was not done. We had decided to take a leaf out of Marieke’s book and extend today’s journey a little. It would mean that tomorrow we would have fewer than the 32 listed kilometres. She was heading another 7km on, and we thought we might as well so the same — and bus back for the night. We decided we deserved a little coffee and pastry to make sure we had the energy.
The exit from Piacenza was effectively worse than the way in, as it took us on a Strada Statale, with a narrow hard shoulder which then disappears to nothing. Too dangerous.
We were very glad when that section ended in a warehouse district, with one lot given over to training dogs for showing.
The only evidence (and it’s a stretch) for Piacenza working towards world peace that we saw all day was this small solar farm on the outskirts. Growing soya and corn underneath (giving the lie to those who say agricultural land should not be used for solar farming).
It was then a matter of minutes to catch the bus back to Piacenza and our hostel. Time to see to those bites…
Stats for the Day
Distance: 27.89km
Nasty bites: 15
Legendary personages of the Francigena encountered: 1
