And what comes down must go up
As Isaac Newton did not say
I don’t really know where to start with recounting yesterday’s stage. It was in retrospect I think the most exhausting day on the Francigena so far. By the end of the day I was so mentally and physically wiped out that if Stephen hadn’t been there to shop and cook, I would have just crawled into bed without showering or eating.
The effect of yesterday undoubtedly started with the fact that the Cisa hostel has no oven in its kitchen, so the food they provide is two sizeable panini each. These were delicious and temporarily filled us up, but did not provide sustainable energy to begin to fuel today’s walk. Similarly, the breakfast was typical Italian fare of dry crispbread, butter and jam — virtually worthless in nutritional or calorific terms.
There was a bar at the Pass, but it was closed on a Tuesday.
And none of small mountain hamlets we passed during the day had any food options available at all. We had dropped the nutritional organisational ball today, and carried no food with us, apart from some fruit and nut mix that normally would see us happily through a 23km day but which seemed not to touch the sides of our refuelling needs on this demanding day.
The second reason for the walk being so uniquely draining wasn’t that it was long — only 23 km — or that it involved a good deal of descent (after all, we had managed almost 2000 metres of descent on the day we dropped down off the Great Saint Bernard Pass), but that the descent was paired with physically demanding and mentally dispiriting ascents, and that the conditions underfoot consisted in the first half of the day of kilometres of steep drops of bedrock, loose rock and roots, overlaid with treacherous dry dust and leaves,
and in the second half of the day by hours of climbing up ancient cobbled track.
As well as being very unforgiving on ankles, knees and hips, so that by the end of the day we felt entirely bruised and battered, the level of concentration required, especially for the tricky downhill sections, meant that we spent great portions of the day in silent, isolated focus, covering the ground with a triple-slow pace of about 3.5km/h. Up at the Pass a signpost had indicated the descent would take 6 hrs 40 minutes, and by the time we had got down Pontremoli our watches had recorded our moving time as being 6hrs 41 minutes — right on the nail.
At the time I remember feeling that the day had no ‘shape’ to it: normally I can feel my experience of walking through the landscape organise itself into narrative form; however, in retrospect, after a good night’s sleep, the literal shape of the route could be discerned, and several thematic focuses also.
The first meaningful staging-post of the day was the pass itself, buried in a mountain cleft at 1041 metres, with an ‘Arrivederci Emilia-Romagna, home of Parmigiano Regiano’ sign on one side of the Regional border, and Tuscany announcing itself with a serene and silent mountainscape on the other.
Almost the first quarter of the route took us upwards, through beech forests, dark at times and fenced off from the rest of the world with barbed wire and signs flagging up that this was an area where efforts were being made to control African swine fever — the disease affecting Italian populations of wild boar that the hunter had mentioned yesterday. It seems that they are trying to manage it by depopulating the area of boar, as well as culling domestic pigs where cases are discovered. We remembered the dreadful outbreaks of foot and mouth disease in our agricultural county of Herefordshire.
There was a brief opening-out into the air as we walked out onto a grassy spine of rock which gave us views back to the Pass, with its church tower almost invisible in the distance,
down to the vehicles crawling along the faraway motorway and into the tunnels through the mountains,
and forward across the steep valleys we would need somehow to traverse over the course of the rest of the day.
We had gained 400m at the start of the day and now lost 700m in 7km, an unremitting 1:10 descent over loose rock, to which photos cannot do justice. In any case we were concentrating too hard to take many pictures.
We passed through a couple of villages on the way, the first two disturbingly half abandoned, vineyards and olive groves poorly tended and desperate-looking, suggesting the effortful labour of the last few elderly inhabitants. You could not help thinking that if you came back in a few years time the buildings would all be empty and they, together with the fields, would be slowly collapsing into ruins.
The nadir of the route profile came with what felt like a pointless loss of elevation to the valley floor where we crossed a swing bridge. I think we were both feeling quite bad-tempered by that point, knowing that we now faced 6km of climb.
A little respite was provided by a marginally traverse path where we walked through more successfully-tended groves of vines and olives,
along the top of a terrace wall covered in wild mint which, crushed underfoot as we passed, released a heady, rejuvenating scent into the butterfly-filled air.
The path connected the two villages of Groppodalosio and Casalina across a cobbled bridge built in 1572, a sign announcing it to be ‘one of the most suggestive places along the whole of the Italian Francigena’. In our crotchety opinion, a vastly overstated claim.
And then it was up and up on the unforgiving cobbles, with occasional temporary losses of height to negotiate mountain streams. On one I paused to apply Compeed to the places where the orthotic footbeds, ill-fitting in the boot version of my Altras with their wider toebox, had begun to rub raw patches.
I kept telling myself with each step that the climb was not interminable,
and of course it wasn’t. We emerged into the light again at a chapel with crosses and the final (cobbled) 450m descent of the day over 5km.
There were benches, on which we sat for awhile, and I switched my boots out for my trainers which relieved the pressure on the hotspots. The ankle support provided by the boots was undoubtedly the right decision to have made today, but I won’t be wearing them again unless I really have to!
After the swing bridge, the lowest point both literally and figuratively, one providential event occurred that quite saved the day.
Parked in a driveway in Groppodalosio was Sabbri, a Moroccan with a mobile mini supermarket.
It was quite by chance that we arrived in the hamlet to coincide exactly with his 20-minute weekly visit. ‘You are an angel sent from heaven,’ I told him as I bought two fat bread rolls, a ball of mozzarella, bresaola, a tomato and two bananas. ‘A very heavy angel,’ he said, laughing.
But he really was.
And the assembled rolls were miraculously delicious and sustaining.
We had had several encounters with other pilgrims during the course of the day. Skateboarding dude passed us at speed (at reckless speed, we thought — oh the folly of youth!), and twice in fact, as he took a wrong turn (tortoise and hare),
and we met up with Marta and Ines several times.
New acquaintances were Julie and Tom from Scotland, clearly exceptionally strong walkers since they had started out this morning from Berceto (where we had lunched yesterday while admiring the Lamborghinis), and also finding today hard going. Both they and Marta and Ines were able to refuel thanks to Sabbri and his providential van, and we sat on a shady wall, all unable quite to believe our good fortune.
In wildlife terms, today was also a good day. We startled a deer bounding away in the extraordinary gravity-defying manner of its kind, and a short while later I spotted a loose rock with an ootheca clinging to it.
An ootheca is an egg-case for praying mantises — an exciting find. I moved the rock to safety out of the path with a little wish for the safe hatching of the marvellous creatures.
I happened to be in front when we disturbed a snake. It had slithered its two-foot length under cover almost before I had time to notice its greenish body — I think probably a whip snake, not widely regarded as venomous, but known for biting furiously in defence, when toxins from a recently-discovered gland can cause neuromotor issues.
Up there with top wildlife spots was a dung beetle, unprepossessing in appearance yet remarkable in the skill with which it can form a pellet of dung larger than itself, and roll it across the rocky assault course of our path.
The funghi which provided the material for Pontremoli’s rest day photo essay were the major flora phenomenon of the day — we took note of the sign sternly warning that this was private land and funghi could only be picked after buying a permit — but there were one or two interesting other species, including, in the beach forest, European ginger (not, of course, the culinary plant, but rather having a rhizome with a slightly gingery scent).
And the forests of the second half of the day were majority sweet chestnut woods, and I picked up a couple of chestnuts to munch on.
On the final downward slope leading into Pontremoli we saw the first signs of a very early harvest of olives — normally a November phenomenon.
The approach into Pontremoli was across an unpromising bridge with the most colossal derelict building on the other side — things did not bode well for our rest day.
But the day was over. And we had walked all the way from Canterbury to Tuscany. However drained and wrung out we were, that was surely an achievement.
Stats for the Day
Distance: 23.12
Height lost: 1500 m
Height gained: a stupid 771 m
Average speed: a molluscan 3.2 km/h
Thank goodness your exhausting day gave you three good finds, in Sabbri, the ootheca and a dung beetle! I’m hoping you have a far easier day as you journey over the more gentle slopes of Tuscany. I was in Tuscany (Castelfalfi) for my grandson’s location wedding last year. The backdrop to the venue stretched across the beautiful Tuscany hills and at times it seemed that the view was so unreal, it could have been painted onto a huge blind that just might have been whisked upwards, to reveal perhaps nothing as picturesque. Have a good day dear Sophie and Stephen.