The Road to Hell

Come in sulla cerchia tonda Monteriggion di torri si corona –

Dante, Inferno, Canto XXXI

After an absolutely delicious restaurant meal last night, it felt unreasonable to get going this morning. So it was with relief that we were able to follow the Francigena straight out of the door and past a pink and grey restaurant looking serene in the early morning light,

and let the steep terracotta brick path take us down to the low city,

and breakfast.

The city was getting going with different kinds of Saturday activities, a group bike ride for families for example.

But the Francigena was going to take us somewhere rather special: the Elsa river path. The Elsa river bubbles out of the ground at a constant temperature of 17° at a pool we were to visit later. Here, the water is palpably warmer than one might expect a river to be,

but the captivating thing about it is its extraordinary turquoise-green colour, caused by its highly mineralised nature: the limestone riverbed erodes and releases microscopic crystals of calcium carbonate, which reflect blue and green light.

The path wound along with the river, with frequent little paths leading off it right down to the water.

The limestone has been both eroded by the water and also built up by it,

creating natural pools of water of such an astonishing shade of turquoise that we could barely believe what we were seeing. The colour was strongest in the deepest parts,

and most tenuous in the cascades.

There were several sets of stepping stones to cross, created out of blocks of the ‘spongy’ stone,

and at times we had to pick our way over boulders and tree roots, scoured semi-clean by the river in spate.

I spent some time looking at the diversity of flora: the maidenhair ferns in particular, and the way their black stems arched out in sprays over the water.

Interpretation panels told us about the special fauna along the riverbank: Italian tree frogs, garden dormice, black-crowned night heron and dice snakes, meter-long water snakes that eat fish and are harmless to humans. We didn’t see any examples of any of them, but it was good to know they were around us, leading their hidden lives.

A competitor of the snakes and night heron was a fisherman, out on a Saturday trying to catch the big one (or perhaps just having a nice sit-down).

Kingfishers nest on the riverbank. I could never have imagined that with their turquoise plumage they might actually be camouflaged as they flew over the water.

Near the end of the first section of the river was the 10 meter high Diborrato waterfall,

which over time has carved out a circular pool ten meters deep.

The whole experience of walking alongside the water was absolutely spellbinding, and we positively dawdled.

We came up of the river path at a bridge created by direction of the Medici, and briefly stood in the middle watching the water cascading down a long artificial weir which must take a lot of the heat out of the water.

At the bottom another fisherman tried his luck, rather more actively than the last, in a quiet, deep pool.

We were bizarrely quite grateful for the short stretch of walk along the Via Cassia, the Roman road connecting the capital with Florence, because it gave our eyes and brains a break from the enchantment of the river.

We soon turned back in, though, behind a pilgrim who had joined at Lucca and was getting his bags transferred daily, who walked smartly straight past the square Roman thermal pool into which upwells one of the sources of the warm waters of the Elsa.

Archaeological excavation of the site has never been undertaken, but it is believed to date originally from the late Iron Age, around the late 8th century BC, and the stonework that is now visible is probably Etruscan-Roman work.

The water was shallow but almost perfectly limpid, with a faint greenish-turquoise tinge that we knew would intensify as it got deeper further downstream.

On the other side of the travertine blockwork wall the water was a vivid emerald, coloured by waterweed below the surface, and by the reflection of the trees.

Stephen ventured down the metal ladder to feel the temperature of the water in the bath,

which felt warmer than the air, and he said approximated to an extremely pleasant body temperature.

Even right by a busy public footpath, the once-sacred site felt numinous and special.

We thought we had it to ourselves, until we saw coming out of the undergrowth a coypu. Called a nutria in Italian, it is an invasive species native to South America. It looked odd — like an otter that had gone wrong in the making.

We enjoyed the next quiet section across ploughed and unploughed fields opening up on either side, because it allowed us to process some of what we had seen this morning.

We climbed up on a gravel track greeting the weekend gravel bikers out for their rides and were interested to see a very distinct chalky layer within the geological cross-section of the banks to the side of us — another form of limestone.

It was quick walking, which was a relief because although we had set out with plenty of time for our 1 o’clock rendezvous with David and Marco at Monteriggioni, our day’s end, we weren’t quite sure how long it was going to take us to get there.

Sylvie and Bruno were walking ahead of us on the gravel track. To one side was a newly-ploughed field in a warm chestnut brown colour we hadn’t seen before. Rich and rather glorious.

The soil was immensely fertile: further up a section had been planted with mouth-wateringly fresh-looking crops, cabbages, broccoli, kale, five different kinds of lettuces, courgette, and leeks.

A field on the other side had a long line of un-pulled leeks which had long ago gone to seed. Perhaps bolted in the summer heat? That would explain the late planting of all the other crops in the cooler autumn, taking advantage of this year’s unseasonable warmth.

We briefly caught up with Sylvie and Bruno, but unfortunately had to march on. It would have been nice to have chatted awhile with them. There is another chance tomorrow as we are all going to Siena.

We passed a couple with their daughter harvesting the olives on their smallholding. They had little hand rakes for combing the olives off the branches, and a small-scale version of the olive tickler.

But there was also a full-size olive tickler, vibrating away on the high branches so that the olives dropped off into the net.

The olives were bouncing all over the place, and the third person was definitely needed to collect them all up off the grass and throw them back in the net.

There were just enough olive trees and just enough grapevines for the small family to be self-sufficient, with other trees such as peach, and fig. It looked like an idyllic spot.

In fact, it really did feel a lovely part of Tuscany. More real than the ‘look at me’ showcasey parts. Liveable.

We climbed up past the old castle of Pietraio, now converted into swanky apartments,

and along a slightly overgrown panoramic track which might otherwise have given us views of yesterday‘s route.

At the eaves of the forest, we picked up Argo, who followed us for a good while into the trees, a shadowy lupine presence.

He sniffed intently at the wild boar tracks, of which we had seen quite a few today.

I retraced my steps to ask the man sitting in the garden whether he wanted to call the wolfdog back to him, but he said that Argo was happy snuffling about in the woods, and would return on his own. Argo (an apt name for a watch dog) seemed somewhat stiff in his joints, but rather sweetly made an effort to increase his pace to a trot as I walked smartly back to Stephen. He did turn round eventually, but while he was with us he was a comforting companion.

The path now took us through a forest of Quercus glauca on a path which was heavily outcropped with some kind of calcareous stone lumps.

We overtook a French couple with enormous rucksacks and two tin cups each strapped to the outside. We imagined a grand meet-up tomorrow of all the French-speaking couples on the way to Siena.

We however powered on to make our rendezvous with Marco and David. Out into ancient walled olive groves

where the calcareous stone lay littered around on the surface, and where we squabbled over whether we could see Colle or San Gimignano in the far distance and which section of the Apennines lay even further on the horizon.

Now on the wooded horizon rose the towers with which, as Dante said, Monteriggioni crowned herself. In Canto XXXI of his Inferno, his poetic persona peers through the gloom and thinks he sees the towers of Monteriggioni in the distance, rather as we were looking out over the ploughed russet earth under a blanket of thick cloud. Virgil shows his charge that in fact he is beholding three giants buried up to their navels in the central well of the Malebolge, but we really were looking at Monteriggioni’s perfect circlet of fourteen towers on its walls, which had proved impossible to breach in the bitter medieval wars between Florence and Siena.

We have discovered that some of the cyclists we had seen leaving Colle this morning had been setting out on the Gravel Val d’Elsa sportif, the longest route of which (starting at 6.30 this morning) was 180km with 3980m of climb. The riders streamed past us as we walked towards the hill town on the gravel track between the fields.

Even in the final forested section they still came, appropriating, in the wrong direction, the marked route of the Francigena.

Our final approach to the foot of the hill on which lay the town was frustrating: the town itself was completely hidden.

Our rendezvous was at the bottom of the hill, at the restaurant, and we arrived with ten minutes to spare.

We saved the cerchia tonda to the start of tomorrow. The Road to Hell, we discovered, was very beautiful, very interesting, and comes highly recommended.

Stats for the Day
Distance: 17.96km
Time: 3hrs 38
Shades of Turquoise: at least 50