Tag Archives: Travel

Day 22 – La Giustiniana to Rome. Well, all roads lead there, don’t they?

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Friday 5 June 2025 – Our last day of walking, then. 16km, eh? On roads through Rome’s suburbs? In 30°C heat? Have you taken leave of your senses?

For some reason, the 30° heat here has been, at least for me, more enervating than the 35-40° heat we encountered when we walked the Camino Francés. I was only two years younger then – can those two years have made such a dramatic difference to my tolerance for higher temperatures? Except that I haven’t done any cycling for those two years, I’d say my fitness now is about the same as it was then. But I’ve found the conditions for the last 100km, since Montefiascone, to be really quite oppressive. People we’ve talked to seemed to think it was unseasonably hot, too.

Anyway, the practical upshot of considering the lunacy of walking the final 16km was that Jane Made A Plan.  This is how the day unfolded.

Yes, it says “Walking” at the top, but I cannot tell a lie: we took the train. It was a short walk from the hotel to the local station, and a €1 (each) fare to get us to a station called Appiano, which offers a viewpoint of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, whence we walked into Vatican City to get our Testimonia.

The train ride provided one of those coincidences that leaven the weary flatness of life. We knew that the French couple we’d chatted to at Monte Gelato the day before yesterday (and then some more that evening in Campagnano, as it happened) were planning to take the train towards Rome because they, too, were finding the heat oppressive. Astonishingly, when we stepped onto the train – there they were! Same train, same carriage, same seating area – a very unlikely combination.  They got off a couple of stops before us so that they could walk through a nature reserve as part of their final day, whereas we wimped out and detrained a little nearer the final destination.

At Appiano, one can take a short walk along paths which include the cursed strada bianca

to a belvedere, offering this view:

The dome of St. Peter’s is clearly visible and you can make out the walls of Vatican City, too. From there, a path leads to a coffee bar

which, had we known it, was almost back at Appiano station. We refreshed ourselves with a coffee and then walked down the winding path that takes one towards St. Peter’s. By and large, the route was pretty much standard crowded-city-on-a-hot-sweaty-day, but there was some slightly classy graffiti to be seen.

Getting round the outside of the Vatican City walls

made us sharply aware of the contrast between the almost total solitariness of the countryside we’d traversed and the realities of life in a capital city, which is not only a pilgrimage destination but a popular tourist site. There was lots of traffic and noise, and tour groups everywhere;

tourist tat shops ubiqutious;

and, as for getting into St. Peter’s Square, where the entry is through the right-hand arch?

It looked daunting, but Jane did the sort of thing that wouldn’t have occurred to me and Asked The Way. Anyone who can show a credenziale can skip the line!

So we followed the gent in the dog collar and actually whizzed through. There was a security check, and I’m glad I’d decided to leave my penknife in my suitcase, but within a few minutes we were through and into St. Peter’s “Square”. There is a special entrance for pilgrims

which leads to its own security lane, past a selfie point

and towards the place where volunteers were awaiting us to give us our certificates. It was a bit of a zoo,

as lots of other things are on offer in that corridor, but we had a very warm welcome from the two volunteers who were providing testimonia and timbri. Having got these, it then transpired that we were free to enter the Basilica itself, with no further queuing!

Well, almost.

Just as we were about to mount the steps, another volunteer held us back and closed off access. He explained that it would only be for a few moments, but there were some special processional groups who were preparing to enter the Basilica, and they took priority, which is fair enough.

Actually, three processions went through, one of which sang as they went, which I thought was a nice touch. Meanwhile

we waited until the nice man let us through, when we charged into the Basilica!

Well, not really.

Here’s what it was like to get into the church.

I suppose it’s inevitable when you are at the centre of a global religion with 1.2 billion adherents that there will be crowds. Some of them might even be Catholics. Inside the Basilica, magnificence is in plentiful supply,

as are people.

There’s a slow and steady shuffle of punters, all waving cameras in the air and taking selfies. The place is extraordinary, but too big and too crowded to do it any kind of photographic justice. So we shuffled in and round and marvelled at the place and then shuffled out in search of refreshment. We caught a change in the Swiss Guard

passed a statue, the “Angels Unawares” boat by Canadian artist Timothy P. Schmalz, dedicated to the world’s migrants and refugees,

and tried to capture a photo of the arena outside

but it’s too big (is it always full of chairs, or is this for something special?) and I think that if I’d launched the drone there might have been comment. So we took a last view as we left St.Peter’s Basilica.

There’s a cafe nearby, but it seemed they didn’t want us to invade their privacy, and the streets nearby are loaded with eateries and drinkeries

which we thought would be crowded and probably expensive, so we decided that it might be better to head off to our hotel and see if we could check in.

Our accommodation was the Dharma Style, which is near the central station, so it was straightforward to get to on the Metro. Our room was, indeed, available, but our bags hadn’t yet arrived (probably stuck in some ghastly traffic jam somewhere). So we headed out into the street where there was immediately a restaurant that was thronged with people. We decided to lunch there, even though it showed pictures of the food, and enjoyed a good lunch (including gin!) before retiring to the hotel to rest and recuperate for the rigours of the journey home.

For tomorrow we go from Rome to home, or that’s our plan; we’ve yet to see what BA’s plan for us is, but we’re sanguine that we will have a joyful homecoming having walked 394.47km of the Via Francigena and nearly 100km of related sightseeing.

As an experience, it’s been significantly different from walking the Camino in Spain, which after a moment’s thought would be bleedin’ obvious: hundreds of thousands of pilgrims a year enables and sustains an infrastructure that hundreds of pilgrims a year can’t. The walking here in Italy has been tougher than almost all of the Camino paths, and some of the scenery more spectacular as a result. The heat towards the end made the experience somewhat more trying than I would have liked; and I am looking forward to getting back to a country which serves hot coffee in large cups; but we’ve enjoyed this big adventure and all the small adventures that have gone to make it the experience it has been.  We have plans for some other long walks, and you can rest assured that I will use these pages to rabbit on about them; I hope you will stay in touch to read the result.

 

 

 

Day 20 – Monterosi to Campagnano – Hotting up towards Rome

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Tuesday 3 June 2025 – We had some 16km to cover today, and the weather forecast asserted that it would be a degree hotter than yesterday, at around 29°C. Jane had established that our destination hotel had a restaurant that would be open for lunch and had requested a late booking, 3pm. This meant we had a relaxed schedule for the walk, but we were still keen to get out reasonably early. We had been given a couple of tokens for breakfast at a bar just round the corner,

so we started off fuelled by just coffee and croissants. We were a couple of hundred metres away from the official Via Francigena route, and to get there, we passed the humble church of San Giuseppe that was closed when we passed it yesterday,

but which was open today,

so we lit a candle for Martin before starting out on the Via.  Just outside the town there’s another reference to the Via Cassia with a distance marker on it

similar in principle but very different in execution from the one we’d seen outside Sutri.  We had actually walked upon the original Via Cassia for a kilometre or so outside Montefiascone (the well-preserved actual Roman road; you remember, don’t you? ‘Course you do!) and it seems that the Vias Francigena and Cassia are very often close to each other and occasionally coincide.  The “modern” Cassia is the SS2 road; the original one started from Rome’s Ponte Milvio, a historic bridge and reference point for Roman roads (now evidently only 39.93km away) and headed towards Florence and beyond.

Much of today’s walk was, frankly, unremarkable, along tarmac, strada bianca or rough track. There was occasional shade and/or a breeze, which offered relief from the heat, and at least there no steep gradients to tackle. Well, almost none (keep reading). Some distractions along the way:

Horses in the fields

Evidence that some people had too much time on their hands

A chap sawing logs whilst still being very much awake

Someone’s going to be nice and warm this winter

Mystery object of the today. Probably was a barn, once, but Mother Nature is gradually taking over

Sheep. Well, you take your distractions where you can, don’t you?

At the start of the day, we walked among the ubiquitous hazel nut tree orchards. But after a while, the landscape changed into an open and more generally arable aspect.

Just after halfway, we came to distraction of greater pith and moment – the  waterfalls of Ice Cream Mountain! No, really.

This took the form of an engaging little trail beside the cascades

including a floating bridge

which was really weird to walk over. The stream once fed a water mill, the Mola di Monte Gelato.

It was a pleasant oasis of shade as well as a sight of some interest.

The cascades were, I suppose, quite substantial by local standards, but nothing that an Icelander would have made a foss about, of course. The site is a cool and shady oasis, markedly different from the rest of the landscape, and was probably named “Icy Hill”, using the word “gelato” before ice cream was invented and took over the word.

Importantly, this site also featured that rarest of phenomena, a coffee stop!

It was delightful to have a break, and this gave us a chance to chat to a couple of French pellegrinos, originally from Versailles, who had been walking the Via, two weeks at a time, all the way from Wissant (or possibly Wisques), in northern France, so they were on the verge of completing a multi-year project when they headed into Rome on the same day as us.

For a stretch, the arable land around the continuing trail changed to plantations.  On the one side we had what we (well, PlantNet) thought were sour cherry trees

and, on the other, butternut trees (whatever they are).

Someone with slightly too much time on their hands had decorated some roadside trees.

Then we got to just outside Campagnano, which, you’ll recall, is at the end of the Sutri – Campagnano official “leg” which we were covering in two days.

It was a steep climb in very hot conditions. But we made it, and then walked right through the old town, admiring some handsome corners as we went towards our hotel, the Albergo Bernigni.

It turned out that we had arrived some 20 minutes before check-in time. So, what was a pair of hot and thirsty pellegrini to do that could possibly pass that time agreeably, particularly bearing in mind that the hotel bar had gin?

Jane’s original online booking for a 3pm lunch had obviously stumbled at the interface between internet and reality, and the lass behind the bar suggested that 2pm would be a better option, so we had time to hose ourselves down and dress in non-sweaty clothes before quite a nice lunch.  I had meatballs as a starter and chicken thigh with stir-fried vegetables for a main course – an agreeable difference from the traditional pasta-followed-by-a-hunk-of-meat pattern of Italian restaurant meals of which, I have to say, I’m beginning to tire. And that was it for the action of the day; Campagnano didn’t appear to feature anything worth straying from the hotel to see.

Tomorrow, we have a long walk – around 25km – and the forecast is for it to be even hotter than today – perhaps 30°C. Plan A is, therefore, to start out really early and thus, we hope, avoid the worst of the heat of the day. It will be the last really long walk of our journey, which started from Lucca just over three weeks ago, so wish us luck, eh?

Day 19 – Sutri to Monterosi – Short walk and very relaxed day

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Monday 2 June 2025 – We had something of a planning conundrum to work through today. Our accommodation, La Casa Di Sofia, in Monterosi, decribed itself as a collection of holiday apartments rather than a B&B or hotel. That wasn’t important; the significant datum was that check-in time was 4pm. Yet we had only some 12km to go (this is sort of a half-leg en route to Campagnano, you remember, yes you do). If we timed our departure to arrive there at 4pm, we’d be walking through the hottest part of the day; yet we still had to have our bags ready to collect at 8am. Bloody tricky, this pilgrim lark, innit?

In the end, we put our bags out for collection, supplemented some of the goodies available in the kitchenette with our own fruit (and, of course, a mug of Twining’s finest Earl Grey) and, having set out, immediately stopped in the central square for a coffee and croissant. Jane, ever the planner, had established that there was a small lake en route to our destination with, on its shores, a restaurant which would be open for lunch until 3pm, leaving a 30-minute walk to Sofia’s gaff. She (Jane, not Sofia) booked us a 2pm table there with the hope in our hearts that we could have a glass of something cold (but probs not g&t, boo!) should we arrive early. In the meantime, the lake might provide somewhere to rest and relax if we were really early.

The plan worked perfectly.

It was aided somewhat by the weather; forecast temperature was a positively parky 27°C, and for most of the walk we headed into a lovely cooling breeze, so the walk never descended into the tedious trudging that we’d suffered on some of the previous days.

As we walked down through Sutri, we passed a nice little scene

which had been ruined the day before because a car was parked there, so it was nice to capture that as a farewell image.

Our S-cape app suggested two routes for the day. One was shorter, but included a “dangerous” section; the other avoided that but was some 3km longer. As is well-established by this blog, we laugh in the face of danger, provided it’s safe to do so, and also we are lazy tykes prefer to take the efficient option where we can.  So, at the parting of the ways between the two routes,

we ignored them both, actually, and went neither left nor right, but straight on because there were some Etruscan tombs noted on the map. And so there were.

Having seen these, we rejoined the “dangerous” route, which simply led along a tarmac road. Part of our gamble was that today was “Republic Day” in Italy, commemorating the date when the country decided to bin its constitutional monarchy and become a republic. Some businesses and schools would be closed, and so the traffic, we hoped, would be lighter than a normal Monday rush hour, should such a thing exist in rural Italy. Granted, the road was narrow and what traffic there was wasn’t hanging about, but by being on the correct side of the road for each bend we ensured that we survived unscathed, as did the (we think American) pellegrina we encountered who was also going our way.

The pellegrino count for the day was the highest yet. The track was positively rammed!

We were overtaken by four French pilgrims and we also saw, but never caught up with, a fifth person

which gave us the grand total of six pilgrims! All in one day!

Except for the fact that it grazed the modern Via Cassia,

the route was unremarkable – sometimes grassy, sometimes strada bianca, sometimes strada bruna, but almost always through the inevitable orchards of hazel nut trees. We wondered if there was a parallel with the ubiquitous sunflower crops seen on the Meseta in Spain; initial research seems to support the assertion that sunflowers are also a monoculture, but have less of an impact because the crop can be rotated with cereals and routinely uses less in the way of chemicals. There’s less criticism of it as a result.

A ripple of excitement was caused by this sign at about the half-way stage:

I think that one might infer from this that one could get a cup of coffee at this establishment, don’t you? Turns out you can’t unless you stay there. Bastards.

This marked a change in landscape, actually; the environmentally dubious hazel nut trees gave way to the, erm, environmentally dubious golf courses.

There were a couple of courses and golf academies along the way, and I for one hadn’t expected this at all.

After about 10km, we came to the parting of the ways. We were within sight of Monterosi,

and the Via Francigena led straight on, but we took a side track (more wading through waist-high grass)

down to Lake Monterosi, a small but quiet lake.

To our joy, it had

a picnic table in the shade. It was about 11.30am by this stage, and we knew (or rather chose to believe Google) that the restaurant we’d booked on the opposite shore wouldn’t open until 12.30. So we simply settled down at the table and had a lovely quiet hour, enjoying the breeze and the nice temperature. There was a fountain there, called the Papa Leone fountain,

which had rather thoughtfully been supplemented with a bowl so that passing dog walkers could allow their pets to have a drink. It was only on looking this up on the internet that I realised that “Papa Leone” was one of the 14 various Pope Leos, though I can’t establish which one, or why this fountain has his monicker attached to it. (We got a possible clue later on – stick with this page, here). As well as dogs (we had one or two walkers come through), it provided refreshment for a couple of horses that were being ridden along the path.

After an hour or so, we thought we’d take ourselves off to the restaurant, Ristorante “La Terrazza sul Lago”, to see if we could have a glass of something whilst we waited for our lunch table.

On the way there we passed a war memorial, to those who had given their lives in battle.

As it turned out, we got to the restaurant at about 1pm, they welcomed us in and gave us a table on the terrace and served us a splendid lunch over the course of two and a half hours, so the timing was excellent. There was, of course, no gin, but at least they could provide Campari spritzes, which is almost as good; and the food was excellent.

It being Republic Day, it seemed that there was a general move afoot for hosting the less able members of families for a meal, which is rather lovely. There were a number of tables with elderly and seemingly infirm people as part of the party – you can see the wheelchair that was at the table behnd ours.

There was also a vignette unfolding at a table a couple away in front of me,

and I completely invented a story about it. On the left is grandson and son; on the right, grandad and daughter (or daughter-in-law). Although wearing dark glasses, I reckon the son was a gimlet-eyed organiser of things;

he took grandad to the loo a couple of times, and fixed something or other for the restaurant, for which they thanked him. From the way he walked, I suspected the grandad of being afflicted with Parkinsons Disease, and, from her body language, the daughter(-in-law) of not really wanting to be part of proceedings. I’m probably way wide of the mark, but it was fun to speculate, even though it was none of my business.

Lunch over, and knowing that we were in an apartment, it was imperative that we got some milk so that we could enjoy some of Twining’s finest Earl Grey later on. Google maps asserted that there was a Conad supermarket nearby, so we headed off in that direction, which took us past some horses

and basically along a short stretch of motorway

before a turn off to a small supermarket.

It was vast. It was so big that we went in the wrong entrance, and ended up in the “everything except food” bit.  We eventually found our way next door, where we could get some fruit and some milk. As well as a huge variety of food, that part of the operation also sold

bicycles. I have no idea why.

Completing the walk to our accommodation we passed a couple more things whose purpose I have no idea about.

Monterosi has no particular historical significance, so was not a place for sightseeing as such, but as we headed for Sofia’s gaff, I noted that some of the modern buildings had an architectural nod to the medieval external staircases we had seen in Viterbo.

It’s a cheerful-looking place, particularly in the sunshine.

We got to our accommodation, whose gate was, of course,

locked, but Jane whistled up someone to let us in and explain how it all worked, and we found ourselves nicely set up with a whole apartment with many of the mod cons, but particularly a kettle, to ourselves. The lady in charge explained that they didn’t offer a timbro but we could go back to “an art house” or a bar we’d passed earlier, the

Gorgeous Bar, where we could get one, so off we went.  We found the bar, of course. We had a glass of something cold there, and I watched the standard thing these days of two young chaps hanging out together and having a good old time in the local bar.

Having got our timbro there, we headed back, and Jane noticed a pilgrimmy-looking place,

called the Casa Dell’Artista – the “art house” that we’d heard about. It was closed, but due to open very shortly, so we waited a couple of minutes and sure enough a chap turned up on a bicycle, opened up the place and gave us not one but two timbri. He also explained that the house had special significance because a pope had stayed there at one stage. Was that, I subsequently wondered, the Pope Leo after whom the fountain was named? We may never know, but it’s my working hypothesis for now.

And so to tomorrow, when we complete the shin part of the current leg by getting to Campagnano.  It’s another shortish day, maybe around 15km, and has the very real prospect of a coffee stop half way along it, which is something to look forward to. Let’s hope it’s open, then.