We successfully walked the French route of the Camino de Santiago nearly two years ago.  The memories of tedious uphill slogging, being occasionally either fried or drenched and getting fed up with crowds of pilgrims punters on the final stretch have faded sufficiently that Jane and I have decided we should undertake another major slog pilgrimage route in The Foreign; the Via Francigena, in Italy.

When we Jane first came up with the idea, we thought that this was the pilgrimage route for another saint, Saint Francis of Assisi.

It isn’t. That one is the Via di Francesco, which is so obscure it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry! Its route runs a more northerly course through Umbria, passing through Assisi before eventually jinking south to end in Rome

The Via Francigena in its entirety runs from Canterbury in England, through France and Switzerland, to Rome, and then to Apulia, Italy, where there were ports of embarkation for the Holy Land. It gets its name from France: the route was first documented as the “Lombard Way”, and was first called the Iter Francorum (the “Frankish Route”) in the Itinerarium sancti Willibaldi of 725 (how can you tell that it does have a Wikipedia entry, eh?) .

We’re not walking all of it. Not, at least, on this occasion. Under the auspices of the excellent Walk The Camino who organised our Santiago excursion, we’re walking the section which runs from Lucca to Rome.

and it’s not on the straight and level, I can tell you.

It’s not quite as daunting as the Pyrenees crossing that the Camino Francés demands and overall it’s only (only!) half the distance, but we’re quietly confident that we’ll be much fitter if when we return home after the walk, which will take us about four weeks.

It would, of course, be madness to go to this area of Italy without visiting Florence (where I’ve never been) and Pisa, as well as spending a little time exploring Lucca. So we’ll do that before setting off from Altopascio, just up the road from Lucca. En route we’ll pass through Siena (if it hasn’t been burnt by the time we get there). We’ll also spend time in a place called Montefiascone, where I hope nominative determinism is at least temporarily on hold.

The photographic element will vary a little from the previous Camino routes we’ve walked, in that I will use a Proper Camera, rather than the phone, to take pictures.  It’s a long walk and I don’t want to lug a Big Camera all that way, so I will take a newly-acquired Sony RX100 VII, which, in a pocketable form factor, is the equivalent of my Nikon setup (24-200mm equivalent lens). It will be interesting to see whether it does the job or whether I go back to using my phone for speed and convenience. In theory, I’ll get better quality images from the Sony.

As is usual with these long walks Day One Is A Bastard (why do organisers always seem to set it up this way?) – 29 km, or 18 miles in the old money (the last time I plan to use it, by the way – everything henceforth will be metric). So: long. And not flat, either.

Therefore we thought we ought to have a bit of a practice. Everything round our way is rather flat, but at least we could simulate the distance via three excursions around the local roads and paths.

That was yesterday. We made it, though we were both footsore and weary by the end.

The rest of the journey will unfold in these pages, and we’d be delighted if you want to follow our progress. If you haven’t already subscribed to the pages, then all you need to do is to leave a comment somewhere and tick the box that says “keep me updated” and – lo! – you’ll be able to received e-mail updates as I write them.

Our journey starts on May 6th; see you then, I hope!