Tag Archives: Woodland

Day 18 – Capranica to Sutri – Short but engaging walk and destination

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Sunday 1 June 2025 – I’m not a fan of counting steps as a way of monitoring one’s health, but since I use a Garmin activity monitor and since Garmin Connect, its app, displays a step count if I want one, I take a look now and then. The thing about Garmin Connect is that if one exceeds the step count goal it sets for you one day, it doesn’t pat you on the back, or anything; it simply increases the goal for the morrow. So, this morning, I saw that my goal was

(a) as high as it’s ever been and (b) unlikely to be met, since we only had maybe 8km to go.

The earliest that Francesco could be persuaded to provide breakfast was 8am, but since we only had a short walk in front of us to get to Sutri, our destination for the day, we thought (correctly, as it turned out) that it wouldn’t be an issue.  Francesco served us a good breakfast, with hot bread rolls and excellent hot croissants, to fortify us for our journey.  Before we left, he showed us an interesting feature of the excellent property he runs – Etruscan caves underneath it.

By toiling up yesterday to the B&B, we had done practically all of the climbing that today would entail (until later on – keep reading), so I wasn’t too fussed when we started out on a strada bianca, particularly since it was fairly shady.

In any case, we soon turned off on to another much shadier path

that led to the most engaging part of the day’s walk – a trail largely following a stream through Etruscan woods. For the most part it was lovely, although there were a couple of places where a bit of care was needed.

A shady path
Some steps to help
A bit of a barrier
A waterfall and disused water wheel
Rickety rackety bridge no. 1
Rickety rackety bridge no. 2
Evidence that a lot of work had been necessary to clear fallen trees
A tight squeeze between boulders
Ricket rackety bridge no. 3
And…emerge blinking into the sunshine

Amazingly, in the mud along the trail we saw evidence that lunatic mountain bikers had followed the same path… Anyhoo, it was then a short walk until we saw Sutri,

which, you will note, is somewhat higher than we were.  Yes, we had to climb up into the town.

Quite a long way up, actually,

but it led us to a small old town which, like them all, is a bit scruffy, but has many charming corners.

An ancient communal Lavatoio, now repurposed as a fountain

We were quite early – it was only 10.30am – so we found our way to our B&B, the enticingly but inexplicably named Notti d’Oriente (what did we do before Google Maps, eh?) where, as we had hoped, someone was hosing the place down from the previous day’s occupants; she was kind enough to furnish us with keys, a place to put our backpacks and a timbro, and we got out of her way by going for a walk. Obviously. Sutri has an attractive central square which, it being Sunday morning, had an agreeable buzz about it,

and there are some handsome corners as you walk around.

Jane had a plan (natch) which took us to the Duomo,

whose imposing interior has some great ceiling work.

We also looked in on a much humbler church, that dedicated to St. Croce.

This church gave us the opportunity to light a candle to Martin, and also to see a statue

and a likeness

of possibly Jane’s favourite saint, St. Jude Thaddeus, an Apostle and the patron saint of lost causes.

Outside the Old Town and somewhat to the south of it is the Ancient Town. The Old Town is mainly medieval, but the Ancient Town goes back to Etruscan and Roman times. The walk down takes you past a viewpoint of some Etruscan tombs

which you can get closer to as you walk through the park,

and muse on the ancient Etruscan storage cabinet therein.

In this park are several ancient objects of interest: the remains of a Roman amphitheatre, carved out of the ubiquitous volcanic tuff;

the renaissance Villa Savorelli, 15th century, with associated church of Madonna del Monte (quirk of the eyebrows, here);

and a church of the Madonna del Parto. This latter is very interesting historically. It is believed to have originally been Etruscan tombs, which the Romans then used as a Mithraeum, before it was converted to a Christian church in the 13th Century. We had quickly to dash off to get a ticket (€5 each) in order to be allowed in, for a maximum of seven minutes, with a small group. The interior is fascinating,

something not immediately obvious from the picture above; but on the walls and in one place on the ceiling are some original frescoes.

whose fragility is what sets the seven-minute limit for any group visit.

Well, after that, there was nothing for it but to find some lunch; unfortunately the recommended Il Localetto was not open for Sunday lunch but we ended up on a terrace outside the restaurant Il Anfiteatro, which has a fine view of the Etruscan tombs but not of the amphitheatre; it also has no gin, or even Campari for a spritz, but the food was decent, and fortified us sufficiently for a walk back up to the town square for a gelato or two.

We had A Moment when we arrived back at our B&B: there was Jane’s suitcase; but mine was not beside it. This had all the hallmarks of a catastrophe, as our supply of Twining’s finest Earl Grey is being transported around Italy in my baggage.  However, S-cape’s team were paying attention to their WhatsApp feed when Jane got on their, erm, case, and my bag and the all-important teabags arrived within 20 minutes; relief and tea all round.

So, that was our Sweep round Sutri

and, for such a small place, it was very interesting.

We’ve taken a couple of days to complete the “official” leg of the Via which gets one from Vetralla to Sutri; and the next couple of days will be dedicated to covering one more.  The leg is from Sutri to Campagnano and is around 25km; but we will cover just a dozen or so of them tomorrow and rest up in Monterosi before pressing on to Campagnano. As far as we can tell, the breakfast here is entirely self-service out of the kitchenette, so we have the option of starting out really early to avoid the heat of the day. Join us in due course to see whether this is what we actually did.

Day 17 – Vetralla to Capranica – a hot walk, but a good one

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Saturday 31 May 2025 – Because the day was forecast to be a hot one, we were keen to get off early, despite the shortish 17km official distance of today’s walk, so an 0700 breakfast time was welcome. The breakfast was a good one, with prepared fruit to go with yoghurt and some nicely fresh bread; we were able to eat it sitting outside. Well fortified, we set off at 7.45am into a day which was already quite warm.

We skirted the edge of the old town of Vetralla as we went, and, although I was sniffy in my post yesterday about the “enchanted city” schtick, in the morning light I was better able to admire the relief work that accompanied the slogan.

We passed a building that either is or was a cinema

and exited Vetralla via a subway under the main road.

We passed a Benedictine monastery

but were unable to look in, as there was a service going on at the time.

The Via Francigena and pilgrim references and artworks are beginning to proliferate by this stage of the route, unsurprisingly, I suppose.  We passed a mural depicting rather unrealistically joyful scenes along the route,

with, beside it, a related artwork listing all the stopping places between Canterbury and Rome.

Opposite this artwork was a bench with an inscription I didn’t understand.

I amused myself by deciding that it was Italian for “Give me your fat arse”, which goes to demonstrate my state of mind at the time. Other curiosities on the route included this rather ritzily decorated house

and a lavatoio, the Italian version of what in Galician Spain would be called a lavadoiro – a public place to wash one’s clothes.  This wasn’t the first one we’d passed in Italy, but it was the first to show evidence of recent use.

By this stage we’d covered some 4km and we passed that most rare and precious thing on the Via Francigena – a bar. It bills itself, rather optimistically as “the best bar in the world”.  However, just as photographers say that the best camera is the one you have with you, the best bar is one that you’re passing, so we had a swift coffee there. And then the trail took us off the road and into woodland – lovely, shady woodland.

The sign says “The wood doesn’t need man – man needs the wood”

In the depths of the woods, the birdsong was positively deafening

and absolutely uplifting. It being a Saturday morning, there were others around, mainly chaps walking their dogs. We passed a mystery object

which I would have dismissed as a disused construction, given the extent to which Mother Nature has reasserted herself on it; but there was the sound of machinery and a TV aerial in evidence, and we have no idea what the building was for. We also came across another Sassogrosso bench,

by an info board bidding us a farewell from Vetralla.

I later looked up the Sassogrosso reference. The inscription translates as “Donated by the Big Rock”. Sasso Grosso is the name given to a particular volcanic rock formation and it has also lent its name to a local association, who, we assume, had provided the very handy resting place.  Sasso Grosso is near a place called Tre Croci, which we would have passed yesterday, had we not opted for the alternative Via. It’s surprisingly difficult to find pictures of the rock formation. This is the most credible one I could locate, via the Facebook Group Vetralla: Museo Diffuso.

Photo via Andrea Natali on Facebook – Vetralla: Museo Diffuso

Near the seat was a rather nicely executed cross on a tree – made from bicycle chain.

At this point, we were passed by a pellegrino who had passed us earlier, but who had clearly been distracted by something, as his natural pace was faster than ours. He turned out to be French, and had started his journey in Calais, so had covered over 1,000km, although he had had to take six weeks off for a foot injury. He then walked on into the distance.

We did the “pass and then get passed” a couple of times over the rest of the day.

After emerging from the (lovely, shady) woodland, we entered a section which was dominated by hazel nut orchards.

After seeing a previous orchard, Jane wondered if what was being grown was filberts. We never clearly established whether this was the case, but in her research Jane read that the hazel nut monoculture in this part of Italy (centred around Viterbo, principally) is raising some serious environmental concerns, to do with biodiversity, soil depletion, economic dependence on the monoculture and more.  And one thing struck us, as we walked through and past orchard after orchard:

the silence. There was no birdsong at all.  Later we came across a stretch of path with woodland on the left and hazel nut trees on the right.

and the birds were yelling their fool heads off on the left and there was nothing from the right – a stark contrast. Companies like Ferrero are at the root of the expansion trend (“Ambassador, you spoil the environment”?) and at least some of these extensive orchards belonged to one company.

“Chim Cimina, chim Cimina chim chim cheroo. We’re harming the woods if we buy stuff from you”?

Amidst all this hazel nuttery we came across a tower,

which is actually (at least) two towers.

The towers are thought to be Roman tombs and a medieval bell tower; they’re referred to these days on maps as “The Towers of Orlando”.  The name “Orlando” is believed to be connected to the character from the Song of Roland, suggesting a connection to the legend of Orlando resting in these lands.  

Anyhoo….we trucked on along stade bianche past some lavish properties with wonderful trees

which provided some much-needed shade along the way; but we also noted places where trees (probably walnut trees) had been brutally cut down alongside some of the hazel nut orchards.

Bastards. We would have really appreciated the shade from these trees.

After about 16km, we came to the outskirts of Capranica

but it was not until a full kilometre later that we came across the first bar and an opportunity to rest, including an encounter with yet another unfamiliar brand of tonic.

Refreshed, we walked on, entering the old town of Capranica,

which is a very handsome area.

We looked in to the Duomo

which has a beautifully-decorated ceiling

but no candles, and also the Church of St. Mary,

which was really rather kitsch inside

but which did enable us to light a candle for Martin. We then carried on through the town, which involves going down

and down, to the point where any ambitions I might have had to try a drone shot were abandoned, as I wasn’t prepared to walk all the way back up to the best vantage point.

Given our reluctance to walk back up into the town and our need for some lunch, we decided to take a chance on a restaurant, Le Fontanelle, that was on our route to our accommodation and which Google said was open. It was open, and a strange little place it was, too. It had pictures of food as its menu, but beggars, choosers, that stuff, and it did appear to offer gin – in fact, they had the last knockings of a bottle of Xoriguer, one of our house gins at home. They had a strange, albeit tasty, idea of what a pizza was and Jane had a very clearly microwaved tortellini dish; but it kept the wolf from the door and meant we didn’t have to toil all the way back into the town.

What we did have to toil up, though, was the continuation of the Via,

which led sharply uphill and took us near our accommodation, Monticelli B&B. As usual, its gates were

locked, but Jane rang the bell and the very affable Francesco opened up to let us in (and his dog, Leon, out, at least for a short while). It’s a well-organised place

and we were soon ensconced with our very own kettle so that we could relax for the rest of the day accompanied by occasional doses of Twining’s finest Earl Grey.

The day was a pleasant one, and got us really quite close to Sutri, whither we must turn our faces tomorrow – it’s a walk of only 8km or so, so we’re not quite sure how the day will turn out. We could be arriving at our accommodation even before check-out time. My, what exciting, challenging times we do live in! Sutri appears to be quite an interesting place, so it might be worth your while to check back in to get our impressions of the place.

 

Day 6 – Too, The Woods!

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September 20th. I billed the start time of today as “relaxed” – 0830 – but things still seemed to be a bit rushed as we went for a (rather sparse) hotel breakfast and then dashed about getting ready, including me trying to remember which bits I needed to take with me in order to whizz the drone up at lunchtime and discard anything excess in the backpack (we’d been told that there was about a 300m ascent which, in the context of the week, isn’t much, but – still….) and so I wanted to carry the minimum I could.

So I discarded a heavy DSLR and a fairly heavy video camera, thinking, “Hah! that’ll make the backpack lighter!” However, there appears to be a discontinuity in the laws of physics around my backpack, which stubbornly insisted on being exactly as heavy as it had been all week with those things in it. Go figure.

Ominously, on this morning, we were transported by a pair of LandRovers instead of our usual comfy tour bus MPVs. Everything seemed OK for a few kilometres as we followed a (much more comfortable-looking) Mercedes people carrier and a couple of pickups up an (admittedly steep) road. I was beginning to think that the LandRovers were just theatre when all of a sudden we swung off a perfectly good road on to a narrow and rough gravel track – with passing places and potholes. Despite the best efforts of the lad driving our LandRover, all my teeth were just about still in place by the time we stopped and got out to start on our walk.

(in the photo above, you can see our high point – the lefter of the two saddles in the mountainsides).

So we started out, and entered – bliss! – shade for the uphill part of the walk.

The trees in the photo above are showing that they suffered some damage in the forest fires of June 2017, but not enough to kill them – though the hillsode was littered with the corpses of pines that didn’t make it; trees just cut down to make them safe and then abandoned because noone could figure out what to do with the trunks.

The track wound up

and up

enabling me to establish my place in the order of things, which is firmly at the back of any group going uphill. Every so often there was a decent view on offer.

and Željko explained some of the geography of the route. At one stage, he darted off the path and came back with a vast wild mushroom

which we actually ate later that day, over lunch (of which more later).

The walk wound down through some lovely beech forest (which, as well as being attractive

was in shade, so for a few short moments I actually enjoyed the walking instead of cursing uphill effort or downhill stones).

There were a few items of note on our way downhill to lunch. For example, evidence of some scientific experimentation being done to explore insect life which was beginning to affect the local pines,

some unusual rock formations,

which Željko referred to as “radiators”, because of the vertical grooves etched by erosion, and some mystery berries.

Željko referred to these as “Cornell berries” and offered them to people to taste. Jane had a bite and immediately condemned them as being too sharp, which meant that they would have turned my face inside-out, so I declined the opportunity. But it transpired that one can use them to make a liqueur, more of which later (again).

Nice as the woodland was, I beginning to get decidedly fed up with kilometer after kilometer of shambling downhill on an occasionally rocky track. So it was, on the face of it, wonderful when we stumbled across our lunch stop, which is a mountain hut called Ramića Dvori, run by a charming rogue chap called Mario, who specialises in serving a local-recipe bean soup. We knew about it, because we’d had to put in our orders the day before, and Željko asked us if anyone particularly wanted vegetarian bean soup. It didn’t take long for someone on the group to point out that bean soup should in and of itself just be vegetarian, and it turns out that this bean soup actually includes sausage and so is technically a stew. It is my hard and fast rule not to post photos of food, so you’ll have to imagine a kind of ragoût, ‘cos you won’t see a picture. It was delicious and by the time we got there, everyone was palpably starving.

I mentioned that I’d taken the drone with me, and I managed to get a couple of snaps of Mario and the terrace we were lunching on.

Mario was fascinated by the drone:

I mentioned “Cornell berries” earlier. Jane, having tasted (and spat out) one, thought that perhaps these were cornelian cherries. This thesis was confirmed as it turned out that Mario actually made some of the aforesaid liqueur (along with various other hooches of undoubtedly more suspicious provenance). On tasting, it seemed to be wonderful, so a few extra Kuna went Mario’s way so that we could buy a bottle of it. And the proof of the berries is on the label

It tastes lovely in the Croatian mountains – let’s hope the taste transfers seamlessly back to the UK, ‘cos otherwise that’s seven quid down the drain, or maybe saved for unwelcome guests.

Before we left, Mario insisted not only on singing us a song, accompanied by his accordion, but also dragged random passers-by into help him. Just goes to show what a charming rogue the man is.

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And so we departed and continued the long road down back to the Starigrad entrance to the Paklenica National Park.

To paraphrase Hoffnung, on the journey down we met a donkey coming up. Well, actually, I think it’s a mule, but that’s got the wrong number of syllabs. OK, there were other donkeys as well, I just didn’t get the photo of them.

This underlines that the only way to get to and from this mountainside is on the track we were walking – no roads, no cars. So, for example, Mario has to walk two hours down the track at least once a week during the tourist season, and load up his donkey(s) with the supplies necessary to keep himself, his helpers and his restaurant going. There’s dedication for you.

On the way, we passed other places where we could have stopped for lunch or for refreshment, but Ramića Dvori made up in charm what it lacked in menu variety. And anyway, it had beer – there’s nothing more important that that!

As we headed to the park’s exit, we passed (and were subsequently passed by) a mountain rescue team who had been out on a practice session which, sadly, had ended badly. And it became clear that we were in serious mountain climbing territory. There’s a particular face, called “Anića Kuk”, which features some serious climbs, including one in the global top 10 most difficult. Looking at the rock face, one can imagine this is so.

and all around us there were people climbing and practising.

By this stage, we had walked some 13 kilometres and, given an 8-seater bus to take the twelve of us back to the hotel, were offered a choice, for those not lucky enough to get in the first shift: carry on walking; or wait 20 minutes for the bus to come back. Reader, there were those in our group insane enough to volunteer to walk. Aged and wise as I am, I sometimes struggle to understand my fellow mortal. You can be sure that my sharp elbows got me on the first bus home.

After a shower and a rest, Jane and I decided to go for a stroll to explore the fleshpots of Starigrad Paklenica. This turned out to be a swiftly-executed task – it’s not a big place – but did involve seeing a nice sunset,

which set us up nicely for a couple of G&Ts before taking a well-deserved early night.

During the long, long stumble down 1,000m vertical, I decided that I’d had enough of walking in this heat. Uphill, which I hate anyway, is torture for me in 30° heat, and downhill on uneven, lumpy, stony paths had taken their toll on my knees, ankles and goodwill. Knowing that the next day’s walking was going to involve a 600m ascent in unbroken sunshine enabled my subconscious to come up with an excuse to stay at home – these blogs don’t write themselves, you know, and I was two days behind. So I resolved to use Day 7 to catch up with this blog. So the one about Day 7 – the final day’s walking – will actually be photographed and written by Jane. That, if anything, should be the tempter you need in order to keep you reading…..