I’m sorry, I don’t know if this is a blog post or a series of diary entries….. But, once upon a time in Tuscany……

Written on the 12^th October….

It was good to walk from Lucca to Altopascio. The last time, as well as taking a different route, we spent the night in the pilgrim accommodation, which we ended up not being able to book this time.

Last time we got there on a Saturday just in time to get to the public library before it shut. Why? That was where we could get the key to out place for the evening.

As we didn’t get to stay in the pilgrim place, we rented a room nearby and went to the restaurant we visited the first time, which was just as good as before (despite the fact that Alison’s preferred dish which included Lambs liver, was not available as it is a winter dish and we are not yet in winter…).

The special thing about the route out of Lucca is that it is not predominantly rural. So, you get the chance to see several different aspects of how the locals live their lives. If you have been an attentive pilgrim since the Great St Bernard Pass, you will have been doing just that each day, but this day is very much one for people and life style watching.

Rather than countryside, you walk along local suburban and small town/village streets. You hear their radios and watch them do domestic things; hanging out the washing, cutting the grass, attending gardens and allotments and bringing back produce, chatting and shopping, chewing the fat at the local cafes, parks and shops, picking up children/grandchildren and so on. As well as seeing their homes and all their public spaces, where the take kids and dogs for walks and a load more besides. We also went through some small industrial zones where people are doing things, making things, selling and buying, transporting and so on. Not to mention going past schools, medical centres, hospitals and public services…

And some pilgrims want to bypass this because it is boring, or, rather, not rural enough or not pretty enough. So, when you go for a touristic walk, for a trek or once in a lifetime tour of another country and the theme is traveling through the countryside, it is perfectly understandable that you might interpret this sort of walking as unattractive, but I would plead that guide book writers steer them towards seeing it in a really positive way rather than just advising them which bus to take to avoid the boring bits. I can also understand the commercial view that might be taken by guide book publishers but feel they need to allow their guides the flexibility to explain to people why they might choose not to skip the “boring bits”.

I also feel that you, as a pilgrim, need to be present in such places. This is not a “you should walk every centimetre or you are not an “authentic pilgrim” but rather, you are a pilgrim and being seen walking the route is as valuable to those you walk past as it is to you and this probably applies more in the places where fewer people choose to walk….

So, our walk was really rich in people and experiences and we said a lot of hellos and answered a number of questions, too. Our stops in bars were great with so many people to engage with and so much to see and share. It was an al round good day (and there were some pretty bits, too.

It is Thursday, the 13^th of October and we have just walked from Altopascio to San Miniato, which is a venerable hill top town with a cathedral perched on a piazza that looks out across the landscape far below and a series of really interesting buildings relating to its religious past. Last time we were here we stayed in the pilgrim accommodation and were advised to go to a certain pizzeria where they did a very good, and cheap pilgrim’s menu. It was a cold, damp and dark Sunday evening and we set off, like some fellow pilgrims to find the place. We, like all of the other pilgrims arrived and were promptly sent away again as the restaurant was fully booked for a special party. Like the others we headed back along the street searching for another place. Each place was now full (the last tables being taken up by earlier pilgrims and tourists.

Our last chance was to follow a couple who had been ahead of us and had been turned away from the restaurant we were approaching. They had been directed to somewhere else, so we hoped this place would be OK for us, too.

We ended climbing the stairs to the piazza where the Cathedral is and up to the restaurant of the posh hotel facing the church. The couple got a table, then so did we. We were the last un-booked ones let in. the place was buzzing. Sunday night and the restaurant was mainly filled with family groups: parents and grand parents presiding over tables with bored teenagers lounging in their seats, excited children trying to join in conversations or concentrating on scribbling on the table clothes as toddlers kept on running around and general joining in the chaos.

For us, the service was not good. Our table was obviously in the wrong place where waiters and waitresses didn’t go or look at (a function of it being the table the last people in get). The food was excellent but I had asked for a starter and main course and Alison had wanted a main and a dessert. They brought her main with my starter and disappeared, then they took a very long time to deliver my main. Despite complaining, and finally getting apologies, etc, it was a less than satisfactory experience.

So, we couldn’t get into the pilgrim place here and decided to re-calibrate things by booking into the hotel and eating there – ensuring both good food and that we got the proper service this time.

The official distance was 29 kms, so we knew it would be a long (but quite lovely) day so we were looking forward to a little pampering. The walk turned out to be well over 31 kms and, as we climbed up the steep route to the town we could see the cathedral up at the next level and decided to climb a steep set of stairs and go straight to our night stop rather than winding up the streets to the top, Elated, we arrived at the dizzy heights of the Piazza and admired the Cathedral, turned and admired the hotel then headed purposefully to its reception.

Then Alison looked at the name of the hotel and said, “But that’s not the name of the hotel we’ve booked!”

Gutted, we looked at the booking and put the hotel in to Google which proceeded to tell us it was still more than fifteen minutes’ walk away! That’s what you get when you book places when you are tired!

We stomped off with google dictating our route and Alison really devastated by the mistake. It had been the only hotel available and as it was Hotel San Miniato  and was posh, it was automatically the one we were seeking (we had thought). We had fears that the route to the hotel would take us back down the hill to San Miniato Basso and I was saying that we didn’t have to walk all the way up the next day. I would get the hotel to book us a taxi for the morning…. Then we almost tripped over the hotel – it was nothing like as far away as Google had led us to believe. It was just at the other end of the hill-top town, which is not a very large place.

The hotel turned out to be lovely, quiet and with beautiful views, so we were fine, really. It was just a painful mistake – when you spend the day walking and think you know what you are heading to and it turns out not to be that place, at all, it plays on your tired spirits and grinds you down.

But, this evening we found a very nice restaurant near by and agreed we would have to come back again some time in the future to be a guest at the other hotel. Then we would enjoy a much better restaurant experience there, and be settled at the correct hotel.

Today is Friday 14^th of October and we have now reached Gambasse Therme after a walk of 25.5 kms (officially it is 24kms – go figure). Another small town perched on a high hill and we are in another room with a view.

Today we entered that part of the Tuscan countryside that just seems to roll on and on (yes, so does the path) with fabulous views around you and new ones at every new hill top. Last time we walked here the fields had all been ploughed and the heavy soil had dried from a deep brown to an almost silvery grey colour. It was like walking in a strange, alien landscape at times and I wrote, at the time, that we were looking over vistas that resembled a vast textured grey duvet that had been dented by child dropping toy farms and pretty houses onto it. The land was almost luxuriant in its folds and curves with brightly coloured villas perched on ridges and long lines of tall thin pine trees lining the roads to their gates and farms nestled in the depths below.

This time, there were quite a few fields that were still green, mainly with grass, and a number of the other fields had been recently ploughed so there was a huge patchwork of colours randomly distributed across the same landscape as before. Less stark but just as beautiful.

There were no places to stop and drop into a café along this route but there were some spots where a bench or two had been placed and where there might be a tap to refresh your water supply

We shared the path with a small number of pilgrims. One of our male French friends was mostly behind us and we walked on and off with an Italian mother and daughter who were walking with their dog, a Dutch chap and (possibly) a Scot stopped and said hello to us as we sat having lunch but they didn’t stay long enough to glean any information from them. Two young Americans told us about Charles, the Scot yesterday so the non-Dutch person might be him. When our paths cross again, we will find out.

Other pilgrims we expected to find today were another French couple from Nantes and Kelvin, our Canadian pilgrim who turned out to be a retired Mounty (Royal Mounted Canadian Policeman, in other words) who is quite a character. We walked to Lucca a few days ago and we know he is somewhere on the route but he does have a tendency to drop off the route to explore other places that take his interest, so who knows if our paths will cross again.

The thoughts of paths crossing led us to reflect on the various experiences we have had this time through France, Switzerland and Italy. In France there were a number of places we walked through where the forest paths had threads of spider webs across the way and were able to tell if anyone had been walking in front of us if these threads kept catching on our hair and faces.

We often see footprints in the soil of our paths and sometimes recognise the prints of fellow pilgrims (we’ve been doing this for years) and one French pilgrim we shared much of the Jura and Switzerland with (Robert from Northern France) and lost early in Northern Italy was our friend with the chariot. He attached a one wheeled trailer to his hip strap and pulled his pack behind him most of the way. On really bad bits of path he would hoist the frame onto his shoulders but mainly it went behind him and we could see the thin track of his wheel whenever he was ahead of us.

People with dogs are harder to spot as so many paths have dog walkers on them and more obscure paths often have hunters with dogs, but there were times when even these tracks were noticeable to us and these sorts of signs always helped us be aware of our own situation as we went along.

Soon all of those tracks will start to fade away…The next few days will sadly be our last on the Way.

We are, sort of, squeezing out the last few days by taking two short days before walking into Sienna. So we will stay tomorrow in San Gimignano, which is a beautiful small town perched on a high hill (what a surprise) and we might have time to explore some of the amazing towers there. The merchants there (and in a few other places) built look-out towers and ended up competing on who had the tallest and best tower. We passed through last time and only stopped briefly, so tomorrow is a new and better chance for us to explore.

The day after, we will walk to Colle Val d’Elsa and rest there for the night, we stopped there for a spot of lunch while sitting on a bench in the shade, then headed off without any further ado. So, we have a new place to explore before our final short day which will take us to Monteriggioni, which is another really  touristy place but really lovely. It is a village enclosed by a high crenelated wall so it looks like an amazing castle perched on the hill. Last time we stayed overnight in an old abbey building a few miles short of there (in Abbadia a Isola) and walked through it in the morning. As we climbed the hill towards Monterigggioni, I turned to look back and saw a great crenelated line of shadow projected onto the side of the hill below so I paused to take a picture. Pleased with my work I turned back and put the camera back in my pocket. As I did so a herd of red deer crossed the path right in front of us, some walking, some leaping as they went. The image is still burned in my memory – wonderful!

Then we head to Siena, a city we love There we will stop, visit St Catherine and take a deep breath and say a prayer or two.

From Siena, we plan to go to Florence and then to Milan and finally to Paris where we will catch our Eurostar train home.

We are still a bit in denial but will get over it. Our French friend said to us earlier this afternoon that we should not worry about the 90 day rule. “What can they do to you? Nothing!” And I said it was too late now to try that, but the truth is that we feel the people in the EU have had enough rubbish attitudes from the UK and what might be acceptable flippancy from a fellow European will be seen as just another bit of UK arrogance and the ton of bricks dangling above our heads will fall. And no news from Britain is likely to change that….

Having written this, I am thinking the one bar on the WIFI indicator will not be enough to send this so I may have to wait until tomorrow.

Footnote, As we were leaving the restaurant this evening we stopped to chat to a pilgrim we had not met before who had been eating in the restaurant with a Dutch pilgrim we had met. He told us he was from Slovakia and I asked where. From the capital, he said. Ah, Bratislava, I know that city, I said. We chatted more and it turns out the University there I helped set up in the late eighties (when at the OU) is still going well. Which was a great thing to learn 😊Another path crossed, another story added to.

So, now it is the 15^th of October, it’s a Saturday night and we are in a room in San Gimignano, where the towers grew in great abundance. It is one of those places that are a miraculous survival from an earlier age bourn out of a devastating catastrophy. It was a really booming little city in the medieval period where the merchants, as I have said, competed with each other to build ever better, ever bigger look out towers and where the 14^th Century Cathedral walls are covered with murals that are real masterpieces. But then the plague came and the population was utterly decimated and the city never recovered and, as their neighbours regrew, rebuilt, modernised and expanded this place just remained a quiet backwater that was enough of a place to remain intact, but nothing much get rebuilt or renewed.

And now it is a place to come to and step into a mini time warp…. With lots of nice shops, bars, restaurants and museums, of course.

We stayed outside the town last time and so never had a proper chance to wander around, so it was a real pleasure to have a relaxed walk around and a five Euro visit to one of the artistic treasures from the 14^th century (the Cathedral).

We also bumped into our two Italian friends from Turin, who will go home (with their dog) tomorrow, and the four Spanish women we met yesterday, who have walked since Lucca with luggage transport support from a male friend, who are getting the train to Siena tomorrow then are heading home. We briefly said hello to our pilgrim friend from Les Mans this morning and hoped to catch him here but we have failed to spot each other today so will bump into him on the road tomorrow. Other pilgrims have been figures behind or before us in the landscape and we have enjoyed that at gives us a good feeling that we are not the only people on the road anymore.

Today’s path has been very beautiful with more rolling hills, some steep climbs to reveal vast vistas across the bigger valleys then more intimate but just as spectacular views across the more enclosed valleys nestling in the tangled series of hills and ridges along the path. We could see our destination from the very start but wound around the landscape in a lazy set of swoops and curves before we climbed to our destination.

Along the way were the classic Tuscan villas perched on hills with avenues of tall thin trees parading along each sloping ridge to the their gates and small towns perched on hills, basking in the Autumn sunlight above the patchwork of different greens from Olive groves, vineyards and grass covered or ploughed fields. We have also watched people begin the annual process of bringing in the olive harvest. I love this process. For some, it is a matter of combing the trees by hand with specially designed rakes (often into baskets), but mainly it is done by spreading our brightly covered plastic nets below the trees and then using mechanical devices to shake the branches and cause the olives to fall. We saw one group learning to do this who were massacring a tree with the shaker. It is a long pole with two multi-pronged forks that vibrated and the guy working it was ripping the twigs off the tree rather than shaking the olives off. This morning we saw a small group of people in a village laying out the nests. They were all quite old and they had a young man standing with the shaker, waiting to start. Then one of the older men told him to start on the first tree and he emphasised that he should go gently… very gently,,, so the young man did as requested  –  with very different results.

Also on the way here we met a man who was using a hand rake designed to harvest olives. We had met him before on our last walk – he is one of the Francigena’s characters. His house is on the Way and he takes in guests in his lovely house. He told us he knew that we were not Italians by our clothes and then, when we said we came from Britain, he told us that the town he comes from, just down the road was where an English king came eight hundred years ago to borrow money to fund a war. His entourage went away again with the money and with Europe’s first literary masterpiece. They later produced a version of it but it didn’t match the original which was, of course, The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. He asked us if we knew what he was doing. We said we did and he complained that harvesting olives was very hard work and he hoped that soon the English would start growing olives and he could buy them from us rather than growing them himself. Then wished us a good walk and turned away.

I think the WIFI here is actually OK. For the last few days we have been in places where the walls are so thick that it was OK to get enough WIFI to get your phone connected to the basics but not much more and standing in a cold stairwell proved not a good enough experience to warrant the effort of trying. Tonight, the once quiet back-water street has suddenly been transformed into a bustling little hub of young, noisy young people sitting in the two bars/restaurants – 10 pm seemed to be their starting point, so I will try to select a few photos and see if I can send this off rather than end up writing another addition to this now long blog. And here is a random selection of images from the last few days…