Small town life

With a small town mentality, you makes a decision very early on as to whether you are going to do everything by the book or go your own way and just not care

Bjork

We had a thoroughly enjoyable evening in Camaiore. Every eatery was totally booked out, but we were standing at the doors to the pizzeria on the piazza when it opened and managed to persuade them to give us a couple of takeaway pizzas before any of their customers arrived. We tore them up and ate them in the piazza on our friendly bench, watching the evening getting going.

Afterwards, still with time in hand and feeling very relaxed, we fancied a glass of wine and went across the piazza to the friendliest-looking bar which was emptying out somewhat. It looked like the kind of place you went to get an aperitivo before going on somewhere else. They had one open bottle of wine, so we went for that. It turned out to be a Montepulciano at the perfect temperature, just the right amount. €3 a glass.

It was such a lovely evening! After all that I slept for 8 uninterrupted hours and woke feeling properly rested for what was quite an easy day’s walking to Lucca.

Once again we were going to miss the town festival — this one was focused on chilli peppers, and the poster provided an explanation for the otherwise baffling outsized models of chillies hanging from the streetlights.

On a Sunday morning the city was just starting to wake up, with a few older characters toddling off to the bar for coffee, the novelty here being that a significant number of then were women, and the waiter was being extremely patient with their sweary, endearingly unbalanced unpredictability. A fruit and veg stall and a bookstall setting out their wares by the roundabout just outside the city walls.

The road out of town was also nice and relaxed, lined with pollarded lime trees. There was almost no traffic, so having no pavement didn’t really matter.

The outskirts of Camaiore gave us a consolation athletics stadium in place of the amphitheatre that we missed out on in Luna, one of several smart sports grounds today (the other being g outside Lucca where Stephen took one look and starting talking sagely about padel — whi knows about that?)

And then it was really a matter of walking through little scattered communities in the Tuscan hills, admiring enormously the prize cactuses on display outside one house,

the laid outdoor table on the veranda outside another,

and the laundry slung inventively between olive trees in someone’s grove.

I loved this street-fronted house, making the very best of what it had. A little garden with seating, in miniature.

This was just small-town life, the opportunity to walk slowly through towns, villages and hamlets, seeing fragments of other people’s lives.

This autumnal chicken coop was covered with leaves, sunlight filtering through slant-wise to illuminate the strutting cockerel, and doves perched on the roof.

We walked along sunny woodland edges,

and darker, damper dog-walking territory (guess how we knew it was a favourite place to walk dogs?),

and were newly horrified with the amount of out-of-control bamboo that was taking over whole fields. Vastly taller than us and really quite environmentally menacing. I’m not sure how on earth one could eradicate it, now.

Most of the day was spent on roads. We had to walk a good deal on the edges of the Via Aurelia, where there was usually some sort of a verge (and we took care not to trample any of the many wild cyclamen).

The traffic was never heavy and it was mostly bikes we had to contend with. So many cyclists out on a fine-weather Sunday!

Early on, we hauled ourselves up the only hill of the day to the top of a col and tried to beat the cars with our shortcut.

The views back from the top were wonderful,

and as the sun came up it backlit the leaves and seedpods of the old man’s beard, each pappus like a tiny curled white feather.

The views forward were even better. There seemed to be an undefined change from one side of that hill to the next, and as we walked on the high-level road the views ahead shifted,

to pair olive trees with the cypresses that seem so iconically Tuscan.

But olive trees there were in abundance. Many of them were slung with nets — an intricate system making sure all the trees were covered and not a single olive got lost.

We saw another tree being harvested, but today it was a man on the ground with what can only be described as a long-handled olive tickler — there were soft wires on the end which vibrated and shivered the olives down into the net spread ready to receive them.

He was working all on his own today — usually there were two of them doing the job. They make enough oil for themselves and some to sell also, he said. It must be a terrific thing to taste the first drops of a year’s oil, I imagined. ‘It is!’ he said. ‘We had the first oil from this year’s pressing last night!’

We’d taken a sort of wrong turn a ways back which meant perhaps a little more distance but which meant that we avoided a) the second climb of the day and b) the inevitable awful descent therefrom. We had the advantage of meeting the olive tickler too, a dramatic gorge,

and a nice lunch stop on a handy wall in the shade where we could watch an escaped dog trot purposefully up and down the road on his adventures. We told one of the local householders about it and he made some enquiries, to no avail.

This was the second good deed of the day — the first was in the coffee-stop bar, where a sign suggested that we carry on the Neapolitan tradition of paying forward a coffee for the next person to come in.

We paid forward a coffee for the next pilgrim.

As well as the netted olive groves and the enterprising laundry-drying system we also saw cars being sheltered from falling leaves and, one presumes, guano, with a net slung between trees,

and we passed a strange camp a bit like that of the recluse, where there were all sorts of odd things hanging from trees, a number of bikes and car bumpers, for example.

Also enterprising was the range of flat things used to plug gaps in the side of a shed: old tin signs for aniseed liqueur, for example, and old wooden cupboard doors.

Sometimes these little places are mystifying -/ how did this car get into this compound — where it was totally fenced around with rusting wire panels? How long had it been there?

As with Camaiore the approach into Lucca was via the river Serchio. We crossed it at Ponte San Pietro, the bridge giving us a ringside view of the water and the gravel banks and cobbled islands.

Later on there was a weir, where I would just loved to have gone down to the water’s edge to sit down on the cobbled shore, and where I saw the beautiful sight of a kingfisher’s bright turquoise back, feathers shining in the sun, as he flew right along the length of the river.

The river section was a disappointment in that it was extraordinarily beautiful but mostly screened from view by a patch of land that was full of brambles, giant rush and creepers.

I did see a tiger moth caterpillar (known as a woolly bear), though,

and there was another plantation of poplars, which reminded me that Stephen had told me that to make the veneer for plywood, they stick the poplar trunks onto a vertical lathe on huge spindles and the trunks are unwound like a ribbon or you might say peeled, like an apple, yielding layers between 1.5mm and 2mm thick.

We saw some excellent graffiti on the way in to Lucca — one example wss today’s equivalent of the long-ago gangsta hiker comment,

And another was this important question asked by a sympathiser with the Italian communist party.

and the graffiti in part made up for the two pieces of questionable religious art for today:

The entrance into the medieval walled city of Lucca was through a defensible gate, through which cars can drive, the interior a cavernous guardroom complete with open fireplaces on either side large enough to burn huge logs in.

The gateway still had its slightly alarming portcullis,

and the gates themselves were massive, studded affairs, with heavy, complicated locks and bolts.

Safe inside, the city could live its peaceful existence,

which today means an enormous number of tourists flocking in the streets.

Although there seemed to have been those who hadn’t felt safe, even inside the town’s thick walls.

We made our way to a quiet part of town where the Pellegrinaio di San Davino was something of a haven, with a huge olive tree in its courtyard, hot showers and an opportunity to wash and dry clothes in the sun.

Most of the afternoon and evening was spent trying to help an elderly French pilgrim to make plans to stay in Rome and thence negotiate a complicated way home. The internet can be a piteously complicated landscape to navigate for the older generation. And Alain has had a number of awful shocks and scares on the Francigena. I hope he receives the Papal audience he is seeking.

Stats for the Day
Distance: 25.4 km
Time: 5hrs 31

Today’s herpetological spot