Our path is to pursue with steadiness what is right, turning neither to right nor left for the intrigues or popular delusions of the day
Thomas Jefferson
We woke on our rest day feeling unaccountably recovered from our ordeal. There was a list of chores to do including locating a laundry, and we struck lucky with a laundrette where they could do a turnaround service wash for us. So we were free to focus on finding forward accommodation, catching up with blog-writing, and sorting route-maps for the next tranche of stages.
Pontremoli old town was a set of narrow labyrinthine streets,
where the eye was drawn to look upwards to the light and onwards to whatever was at the end of the street — the ancient bell tower in the main piazza,
or the massive medieval bulk of the medieval walls.
But there was a new town too, reached by a humpback bridge, which however many times we crossed it was always populated with friendly people.
It was a short but sweet interlude in this particular part of northern Tuscany — and there would be more to explore here: the museum of the prehistoric sculptural figures, for example, and the local cuisine based on chestnut flour — and at this time of year on the porcini mushrooms that collectors were bringing into the specialist shops and which were perfuming the air in the streets outside.
We got going just after seven, out into the streets of a little city where the sun was just turning the sky above the narrow streets to a blush yellow,
and where lorries and vans were arriving in the piazza to set out their stalls for market day. Stephen looked wistfully at the veg stalls and the cheese and meat stalls, and wished he could cram it all into his rucksack.
The route took us out over the southernmost bridge,
through a part of Pontremoli that was, shall we say, past its best. Buildings that were beyond dilapidated and just starting to rot on the outside. Lord knows what they looked like inside.
These had been magnificent old palaces once upon a time, housing wealthy families, and, more recently, the communal library — the books must have all been disintegrating with dampness.
The path also had slid into ruin, taking us round the back of a crumbling church complex and through a dank alley,
closed off for reasons of safety.
We gave it a go, and I appreciated the attempts of nature to wrest back control,
but we were definitively blocked by a very recently padlocked gate.
The trouble was that the alternative was to walk along the very dangerous main road. We managed a few kilometres of it, but it was very unpleasant.
So it was with a huge sense of relief when, without incident, we reached the place wherethe path took a fairly long detour off the road, into the misty, early morning countryside.
Here was peace, calm and easy walking.
Behind the village wooded hills rose to the mountains,
a reverse sense of the territory to our last walk, coming down off the Pass
The Francigena then left the quiet villages of the road, taking us along a path that at first might have been an old railway line with steep-sided walls, then a cobbled slope, sometimes slippery.
A crew from the council was out with strimmers and brush-cutters doing a massive amount of clearing work all along a woodland path for about 2 kms. They’d been at it for three days, they said, and in places were yet properly to get the brash off the path — whips of bramble and false acacia thorns.
The pedestrian path joined with the bike route here — an easy walk for us but very testing for those on wheels, who would certainly have dealt with several punctures and would probably have ended up carrying their bikes if they could.
The wooded hills disgorged us out into the river valley, giving us a distance to appreciate splendid views back out to the mountains across meadows still covered in early morning dew.
The valley was filled with plant nurseries, market gardens, an enormous equestrian centre, and smaller-scale farms where huge forks of hay were being fed to indoor cows.
And all of a sudden, we had done 10 km and arrived at our planned bar stop in Filattiera for second breakfast, although what we had not planned was the beautiful view out of the window was the 12th century Romanesque Church of Santo Stefano.
It had been fully restored inside, and the iconography felt well suited to the cool, spare space.
The real thrill about the church, though, were the five Copper and Iron Age stele, dating from between the fourth to the first millennium BC. They had all been discovered locally and were on display here. We were so pleased to see them, having missed the museum in town.
The church had been built on a pre-existing sacred site, quite obliterating the original cult. Some of the stele had been used as building materials for the new church.
The best preserved of the sculptures was of a warrior, with spears, daggers and other weapons hanging from his belt, and legs pointing improbably sideways.
Another similar warrior statue was on display outside, exposed to the elements, as well as one with the form (apparently!) of a woman.
Having had our fill of culture, we felt we could skip the climb up to San Giorgio Alto, a mediaeval village requiring a long climb and then an immediately descent. We rationalised this thinking of our knees, and by the fact that I had had less than five hours sleep last night. We had 32 km to do today, and needed to go steady about it.
We still had a decent climb up the next section of the route, though, on an old cobbled path,
leading up to a beautiful woodland section sharing the ridge with some well-kept mountain bike trails.
We felt miles away from civilisation here, and looking down into the steep valleys on either side of the ridge, wondered how many other stele lay buried in the undergrowth, perhaps never to be found again.
It felt deeply relaxing out here in the green, and we walked in silence for much of the time, quite content.
We crossed our first proper ford, with the scent of the first autumn bonfire in the air beyond it at the bottom of a long garden where there was a display of minute nativity scenes carved in walnut shells. These were on sale, and it was a pity they were covered with thick plastic and we couldn’t see them properly.
And then we plunged into a green tunnel through coppiced hazel between tumbled-down walls of moss-covered river cobbles.
I thought how much my father would have appreciated the use of the local stone for the dry stone walling — although frankly not easy to build lasting walls out of spherical cobbles.
We were keeping up a steady pace. Not the routemarch we had done over the Po Valley, and not the painfully slow up and down of the day before yesterday, but just a nice, sustainable, comfortable speed we could keep up all day— which was a good job because this is the longest of the days over next week or so.
The approach into the village of Filetto was a long avenue of ancient sweet chestnuts, perfectly ripe and falling from the trees,
and a Lamborghini tractor was mowing the herb-laden grass, releasing the most wonderful scents of mint and oregano into the air alongside the late summer scent of freshly-mown lawn.
The contrast of Filetto with the crumbling end of Pontremoli could not have been greater.
A stately gateway through the town walls perfectly framed the medieval arched main street and the bare mountain tops behind.
It was a whimsical place, half museum, with suits of armour standing outside buildings down alleys, charming chairs covered in spider plants, and saccharine aphorisms exhorting you for example to ‘be open to let this be the most beautiful day of your life’. All these embellishments were quite unnecessary because the street itself was lovely enough.
We crossed the river Bagnone over a high wooden bridge, where two orange-jacketed hunters were crouched with great concentration on the rocks by the water.
As we climbed the other side, we heard two shots: another hunter halfway up the hill said that a boar had been driven down to the river. I asked him whether the animals were sick, and he said no — they weren’t culling.
Our arrival into edge of the mediaeval hilltop village of Virgoletta we met a donkey, whose owner told me his name was the Italian equivalent of ‘little donkey’.
We ate lunch on a kindly–placed bench in the shade of a church portico. It was a good thing that Stephen had cooked up potatoes, onions, and spinach to put in our lunchboxes last night which had been left over from the sausage stew he had made, because the supermarket own brand tuna salad tins were horrible, tasting like baby food. I threw most of mine away.
While we were post-prandially sitting , Stephen almost dozing off in the sun, a new insect landed on the tape he puts alongside his knee for support. A ricaniidae plant hopper.
We were glad that straight after lunch we didn’t have to climb up into the walled borgo part of the village — we were content with seeing a modern plastic castle at the bottom instead,
even if there was no drinkable water to be had from the fountain.
To get from Virgoletta Borgo down to the river crossing beyond was a track where it was very clear there had been serious recent floods filling the path with flotsam and washing away the stabilising clay from around the cobbles. It was not an easy descent.
It was a good thing the water was so low at the river crossing, because the remains of what must have been a wooden bridge here was jammed into the banks, and nearby large tree trunks must have been carried by the river in spate.
More storm damage was visible as we began to climb the further slope out of the valley,
On a damp, weedy path with bedrock sections,
interspersed with patches where water cascading down the hill had taken parts of the path with it. In the shady dampness mosquitoes started to bite.
On the long rocky spur between Monte Roggiano and Monte Alin we walked along tracks amongst vegetation so thick the woodland seemed minimally touched by humans.
Five to ten feet off the path the undergrowth was impenetrable, with ropes of clematis, standing deadwood and, surprisingly, medlars.
The number of little bites we were getting was testament to the fact that in the damp woodland insect life was abundant. It felt as though we were in the middle of a remote jungle, and briefly emerging into the light by the immaculately-tended farmland around Sterpilla house felt like a strange (though beautiful) aberration.
The paths at some time had been clearly laid. There were sections where there seemed to be a border on either side,
with stones laid edge up in the middle in a kind of vertical crazy paving style.
Our instinct was that this was a very old path that had been used by pilgrims for years — and in fact we later discovered that the extant paved surfaces that we could see did in fact date from the Middle Ages.
It is thought that the current long route through the remote woods replaced an old and precarious sheep track created to allow pilgrims to travel safely, and the construction method was supposed to withstand winter storms and subsidence when no one was making pilgrimage (as we know, they started with the sweet showers of April!), so that the path would still be usable the following season. The stonemasons placed squared stones firmly in the ground close together, to protect the soil from the heavy passage of travelers, carts, and horses in such a way that the pressure further compacted the soil. The sandstone blocks cut to shape by the stonecutters were likely quarried locally.
There were however, plenty of stretches of the long path where the careful mediaeval work had been completely obliterated over time, and in these parts the walking was quite tiring, but very much less so than the terrible descent from the Cisa Pass.
Even here we managed to keep a steady pace.
In the woods with us, alongside the many mosquitoes, were many mushroom hunters, in camouflage jackets and with specially-designed camouflage mushroom-picking rucksacks on their backs.
The woman almost hidden in this photo said she had not had good luck today, the mushroom
season being almost over.
There were also plenty of wild boar in the woods. The sides of the path almost all along the full length showed evidence of rooting activity.
Later in the evening we learned that here in Tuscany the boars pair up and have a maximum of six piglets in a litter. In Emilia-Romagnia, they apparently have bred the boar with Hungarian stock to increase the litter size to about twelve.
It was hot and humid in the long wood, and there was another bedratted descent to negotiate over sweaty cobbles,
down to an old stone bridge which looked as though it might not be long for this world.
Certainly the path to traverse to climb up from the bridge into a hamlet above it was collapsing, and we had to inch around the patch where the path was falling into the chasm and the handrail was just hanging over thin air.
Waiting to see whether we had made it was a tortoiseshell cat, enjoying the spectator sport of watching pilgrims topple off the edge.
When he saw we’d made it he came to congratulate us.
Our reward was now to exit into the open air, across rather marvellously secure modern cobbles,
where a beautiful breeze dried the sheen of sweat from our skin in seconds, and where we got clear and glorious views of the Apuan Apennines.
There was an entire bank of herbal mint in flower to walk past, and it was possibly our favourite part of the whole day.
The black bees were certainly enjoying it, as well as a crowd of tiny mint moths.
High, vibrantly-green meadows were crowned with Roman pines.
We loved this short section out in the open on the ridge, but had to descend again to get down into Aulla. This time the path had been positively excavated by water.
Here the ruts were about a meter and a half deep.
But once again we negotiated the damaged path successfully.
Aulla is a city filling a long valley. It started promisingly at the top of town with a medieval tower,
But then lapsed into an industrial zone which we managed to avoid by taking four kilometres of the Greenway, a bike and pedestrian path which ran alongside the road and protected us from it, and which, in its greener sections, still had marks of boar rooting activity right down into the heart of the city.
It carried us swiftly into town over the braided Taverone river.
We got an efficient and warm welcome from the volunteers at the Abbey of St Caprasio. The hostel was filled with of a new crop of pilgrims (because we took a rest day the ones we have met before have gone on ahead). There were a lovely couple of English pilgrims in our dormitory, and I enjoyed talking at length to personal trainer Paulette. Carole from France was here too, and Florian from Orio Litta also turned up, with Swiss Noemi.
Because it had been such a long day and because the kitchen here is quite small and there were many people wanting to use it, we went out for supper.
Stephen had found a brilliant little place just round the corner, he was able to taste some Tuscan cinghiale at last,
And it was the waiter Marco who told us about the Hungarian boars.
Tomorrow is a shorter but much lumpier day. I am considering taking my boots as my shoes felt like bedroom slippers on the tough rocks and cobbles today.
Stats for the Day
Distance: 33.4 km
Pace: 4.1 km/hr
Time: 8 hrs 8 mins
