Excavation

The archaeologist’s spade
delves into dwellings
vacancied long ago,

unearthing evidence
of life-ways no one
would dream of leading now,

concerning which he has not much
to say that he can prove:
the lucky man!

Knowledge may have its purposes,
but guessing is always
more fun than knowing.

We do know that Man,
from fear or affection,
has always graved His dead.

W H Auden, ‘Archaeology’

In the half light of the Vetralla morning I took especial care to heed both the warning of Stephen and of a sign displayed in a shop window which told me not to trip,

which wasn’t easy on the uneven cobbles.

I walked up the road to my bar of choice with Rasmus, a tiny Pomeranian who weighs half as much as our cat, and his owner.

At the bar I met Michael, an Australian who’s been visiting his daughter in North Italy and is finishing off his holiday with a quick pilgrimage down to Rome. We walked up the road together before Michael stopped to phone his wife back home in Queensland.

On the Francigena out of Vetralla the town has commissioned another couple of sets of wall art for pilgrims. The first, in an underpass, seemed a conceptual effort to speak to the narrative and artistic response to the experience of walking the Francigena,

whilst the second, perhaps artistically more skilled but no less of a strange commission, showed highly romanticised scenes of Canterbury, Vetralla and Rome, with pairs of (young!) pilgrims entering into or emerging from wooded natural landscapes portrayed with a 17th-century aesthetic, in which the pilgrims take the part of the peasant figures.

I wondered how many pilgrims have a picture of it on their camera roll.

The Bosco Montefoligno is a long oak wood on the slopes of a high hill, where every year in May the mayor of Vetralla re-enacts a ceremony to marry two oak trees (decorated with flowers and a veil), a festival with its roots in the granting by Pope Eugenio IV to the community of rights over the forest. If the ceremony is not performed, the rights could revert to the Municipio.

There was no festival now in October, but the forest was a pleasant place to be.

I walked for a while with Leonello, out on his daily constitutional. He was a lovely companion. We discussed the many benefits of walking. Much as he likes this daily practice, he couldn’t quite fathom why anyone would want to walk to Rome from such a long way away.

We met a man out collecting firewood in a battered old Fiat guarded by his Mariama sheepdog, a dog so huge he almost didn’t fit on the passenger seat.

We didn’t chat long to him, as he started ranting about how corrupt the cardinals and Pope were. And how mafioso, and how they were stealing everybody’s documents.

We carried on, slightly alarmed by the encounter. We’d been really enjoying our conversation, and felt that he had knocked us somewhat off course. Leonello eventually came to the end of his daily constitutional, and turned back to go home.

The wood briefly opened out into a wide meadow,

where dew drenched the grasses and wildflowers.

I wasn’t alone for long though, because Michael caught me up. He was a fantastic character to walk with, he with his dodgy knee and me with mine, we walked pretty much at the same pace, through the last of the long wood.

The conversation was flowing so well that we took the wrong turning a couple of times through lack of proper attention to the path.

However, in my defence, listening to someone talking about their experiences fishing off the Australian coast cost while whales are migrating is genuinely fascinating!

The path took us along a Roman road of which only scattered boulders remained,

and along lines of oaks and chestnuts. Oaks don’t really grow in Australia so I showed Michael the acorns, and an oak gall. Extraordinary how chemical suppressants secreted by the larvae developing inside the egg can induce the cells of the host oak to take a form completely antithetical to the one they were originally programmed do.

I also (briefly) picked up a different kind of gall: shiny, maroon, sticky and rather off-putting. This turned out to be the gall of the Andricus dentimitratus wasp — a new one on me.

The light this morning was beautiful, shining through the oaks and chestnuts,

as we picked our way through plantation paths to the Towers of Orlando, the ‘Roland’ of the 10th century ‘Song of’ and Charlemagne’s favourite paladin, who was supposed to have loved resting in the shade of huge oaks.

The towers are in fact two Roman funerary monuments plus an old Christian bell tower, emerging from the hazel plantation like some kind of Close Encounter.

Still visible on the walls were large niches where portraits of the ancestors would have been inserted.

The circular tower would have been covered in slabs of the peppery peperino rock from yesterday, today’s local variety of which had much larger inclusions.

We thrashed our way on the path through at-times quite thickly-wooded hazels,

and waded though chestnut cases,

past nameless and commentaryless Roman ruins.

We emerged finally from the hectares of hazelnuts

into a welcome contrast of umbrella pines,

and overtook Corinna, who was going to be staying in the same place tonight.

Michael and I parted ways in Capranico, a town supposedly founded by 8th century goatherds fleeing Lombard persecution. I ate my packed lunch in the first restful park I came to, just outside the walls where I figured there would be more space.

When I put the empty container in the ‘smart bin’, it played a snatch the Hallelujah Chorus at me from a speaker in the chute. Something of a surprise.

Capranica was light and bright, spacious outside its medieval walls.

Inside it was narrower, but everywhere people had made an effort to grow plants in their outdoor spaces. It seemed like an unwritten rule of the community.

Outside the walls the benches were crammed with old men grousing about foreigners, inside the walls were young people — this lot were musicians,

sitting outside a disturbing, overdone church that a woman spruiked me to go into, to get a stamp (which I didn’t) and write a message in their visitors book (which I did although I am seriously beginning to question the point of these).

What was disturbing was the human skull on a cloth behind glass in a frescoed niche and surmounted by a questionable Madonna and child.

I walked down to the tip of the rock on which the town clung to, through greened streets,

and a feast for the eyes with a tiny piazza simply filled with pot plants.

I hadn’t really paid much attention to the map, but now I saw that the road (was it a road? It had been but surely this was now a pedestrian pathway) did a u-turn on a sharp bend, twisting downwards.

Lower down, buildings were cut into the rock underneath the houses above.

What a construction.

And then it was just down and down a knee-busting, steep, cobbled switch-back slope until I reached the very bottom, and looked rather shakily back up to see where I’d come from.

There was a group of us now. Michael wss walking with Livia,

and I had hooked up again with Sylvie and Bruno. We climbed initially,

and then plunged downwards into the Fosso Mazzano wood — a rich, damp, mossy mix of deciduous trees, much hazel and even more chestnuts.

was so glad that we were walking this woodland stretch today rather than under the darker skies of yesterday.

A green light filtered through as we crossed and recrossed the stream at the bottom of the Fosso,

wondering at the bouldery path,

which at times felt like an assault course.

There was large-scale wonder: caves and formations of tuff with frequent (damp!) picnic benches and tables,

and equal wonder on a small scale too, if you looked amongst the mosses,

and leaf-litter.

It was an enchanted few kilometres.

But we all eventually emerged,

out onto the road with Sutri before us. It was a parting of the ways, as Sylvie and Bruno went left to climb up into town to go to our accommodation for the afternoon, and Michael and Livia turned right with me — and eventually with Americans Nikki and Michael — to visit the Etruscan Archaeological Park.

We schlepped through an overgrown path that did not seem to be taking us to any park at all. We had to literally crawl under a half-fallen tree, thrash our way through a nettle and bramble path and had almost given up when we emerged into an open space (which we could have got to perfectly easily like all the other tourists via the road) in front of a freestanding tufa hill at the bottom of which Etruscans had, in the 9th century BC, carved elaborate tombs.

These were of different kinds of tombs: niches, connected by mysterious cuniculi tunnels,

arched tombs,

and chamber tombs, larger structures cut deep into the rock.

Sixty-four tombs were extant, completely surrounding the huge tufa rock, except for a gigantic elliptical amphitheater, also carved entirely out of the tufa, the subject of heated debate as to whether it is Roman or Etruscan work.

After the short days of the recent stages, this one was shaping up to be 27km in length. There remained the climb up into the city through the Franceta gate, named for the pilgrims that have used it for centuries as their exit on the road to Rome.

The keystone block on the arch bears the emblem of Sutri, Saturn on a horse, with a lion, rampant on a smaller oval beneath it.

The drawbridge grooves are still visible,

and the massive inner blocks are of Roman date, carved from peperita.

Like Capranica, the lower parts of the city are tufa, huge blocks or simply excavated bedrock, centuries-old constructions still in use. These sections are porous and damp, but the houses above them are dry enough.

With the possible exception of this 19th century stuccoed palazzo next door to our pilgrim apartment, which looks like it won’t last another winter.

Stats for the Day
Distance: 27.41km
Time: 6hrs 8
Tombs: enough for all the legions of the dead

Beetle of the Day
The Devil’s Coach Horse (Ocypus olens)