the via francigena

Throughout the Middle Ages, travellers to Rome from Britain and much of France followed a route known as the Via Francigena (Fran-CHEE-jay-na). The Via diverged, for the most part, from the itinerary of the modern traveller to Italy. Scroll down a list of its stopping places and you'll find names like Aosta, Ivrea, Vercelli, Pavia, Pontremoli, Pietrasanta, Viterbo... hardly the top of any tourist's wish list. Yet in their day, they were places of great importance and still now they sport their medieval (not to mention Roman and Etruscan) treasures of art, architecture and urbanism.

Though a constant stream of pilgrims, merchants, conquerors, ecclesiastics, vagrants and migrant workers tromped the Via, only one voyager left behind a record: Sigeric, who visited Saint Peter's seat in 989 to be made Archbishop of Canterbury and took note of the stops on his return trip from Rome. (He did well to make it back to England; one of his predecessors froze to death in the Alps.) It is Sigeric's itinerary that provided the basis for the brand spanking new Via Francigena, launched in 2007. The "new" Via is modeled very much on the Camino de Santiago. It is a project that had been in the works forever (it was supposed to be ready for Rome's 2000 Jubilee), but finally took flight thanks to the personal intervention of ex-Prime Minister Romano Prodi, who had done the Camino by bike and insisted that Italy deserved its own pilgrim way.

It's a stupendous journey - 1900 km to Rome from Canterbury; 900 from the Alps. It crosses geographical, linguistic, cultural and (importantly, for this is Italy) culinary divides. It is a journey through time, through history, a journey of the spirit... The question is, will it fly?

The Camino de Santiago is in many ways an organic growth, the fruit of the unbidden work of countless hands and feet, an event that assembled itself. The Via Francigena, by contrast, bears all the trappings of a "tourism initiative," a pilgrimage by decree, dreamed up and presided over by a classic EU bureaucracy. Do the people on the ground - I mean, the Italian people - have any interest in this thing? Enough to make it work?

It's been a couple of years now that I've been mulling over whether to go for a long walk on the Via Francigena, so I finally went to Italy last fall to take a look. I didn't have time at my disposal for walking, so I scouted instead, following the route as closely as I could by train and bus. I knew that would rob some suspense and surprises from the eventual foot journey. On the other hand, it meant I could gather bags and bags of research material - books, maps and brochures, not to mention a couple nice bottles of red - without worrying about my knees giving way beneath me.

Will I go back? Well, duh. It's only a question of when. In the meantime, I'll be putting up some Via Francigena photos and blogs in the weeks to come, so stay tuned.

For anyone wanting a detailed, up-to-the-moment account of conditions on the Italian pilgrimage front, order yourself a copy of An Italian Odyssey by Neville Tencer and Julie Burk - though it's hard to say whether the book is more likely to lure you onto the Via with its delicious descriptions of cities, landscapes and meals, or scare you off with its portraits of sketchy lodgings, unmarked paths, wrong-pointing signs and places that can't be found even with GPS devices.

Neville and Julie's Via sounds lonely compared to the Camino. They encounter precious few pilgrims along the way, though happily they do meet their fair share of helpful, outgoing Italians. Nonetheless, the story speeds along from episode to episode and is over too soon. The couple take turns with the telling, which offers an often-amusing synoptic view. They have some very useful tips for sleeping and eating (especially eating) and a wonderful description of a visit to a rice farm. There are also lovely photographs and whimsical hand-drawn maps. My only complaint is that Julie and Neville's misfortunes of the road keep prodding them into full-on, gasket-blowing slanging matches. I felt a little like the kid in the back seat listening to Dad and Mom fight (Would you two just pipe down and let me enjoy the ride?) Fortunately, all is sorted out by the magic of Siena, and we get to enjoy Tuscany and Lazio to the fullest.

You'll find more information, including some dynamite photographs, on the Italian Odyssey Facebook page. You can also read an interview with Julie and Neville on Anna-Marie Krahn's website. Enjoy!

moja droga do santiago...

Which, apparently, means "My Way to Santiago." In Polish.

Of course the Poles are great pilgrims, setting out on foot each year, especially in August, from all parts of the country to visit the monastery of Jasna Gora, home to the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, the "Queen of Poland." (In a previous blog, I talked about how this tradition has recently been transplanted to Ontario.)

The research for Virgin Trails, my book about the veneration of the Virgin Mary, didn't take me as far afield as Poland, but the Poles were so good as to come and find me. Polish publisher Sic! released the first foreign edition of All the Good Pilgrims last fall: Moja Droga do Santiago: opowiesc pielgrzyma-agnostyka. (The subtitle means "stories of an agnostic pilgrim." Fair enough.) The cover is gorgeous, the publisher has a very cool logo, and the book is available from various online sellers for a mere 39 zloty. (I know! That's pretty hard to beat!) So if there's a special Pole in your life who happens to be between books...

While we're on the topic, even tangentially, of the Virgin of Czestochowa, let me recommend the fascinating and idiosyncratic pilgrimage/quest memoir of American author China Galland, Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna.Galland's search for the feminine face of the divine takes her to some remarkable places, both without and within.

new web albums

Well look who it is, back already. I've got this lovely new blog, might as well use it, eh?

It's beyond my Neanderthal tech skills to add new albums to my website, so lately I've started uploading (downloading? outsourcing? inbreeding? I'm never going to get this computer lingo straight) photos to Picasa web albums. You just have to click here to see them.

Last night I was editing and captioning (in a sparse sort of way) the pictures I took in the fall of 2009, when I walked for eleven days along the camino/chemin from Le Puy to Figeac. For the most part, it's a country ramble through beautiful long stretches of nothing but you and the clouds and the hills and, yes, often the cows. You live on cheese and bread and wine and swear you've never lived better. Between Le Puy and Figeac, there is nothing that even remotely resembles a city, though in every village and hamlet, there is a magnificent little bakery and a charcuterie and even a cheap, clean place to sleep. Not that there was much demand for beds in October. There were three of us who started on the same day from Le Puy (unbeknownst to each other) and made it to Figeac (by which time we knew each other well), plus another eight or ten who were only walking for a week, or a day or two, or who mysteriously vanished between one sleepy hamlet and the next, never to be heard of again... We were definitely at the end of the season.

The part of the trip I remember best was the barren, stone-strewn highlands of Aubrac, where I felt like I could have been in Scotland. But there were pleasant walks through lush river valleys too, and some outrageously tiring climbs, and some real live forests. If I compared it to the Camino Frances in Spain, I'd say it was more natural, more strenuous, more solitary, and more varied in its landscape. The food? Oh, how to choose? The people? They were helpful, courteous, sometimes downright friendly - a living refutation of all those "snarky French" stereotypes. Surprisingly, one place where the Spanish Camino almost holds the edge is in church art and ornamentation. I'm not talking about the quality of the art, I mean that the roiling history of revolutions and wars of religion in this corner of France has left many a church wall stripped bare. Pleasing if you like austerity. A little sad if you were expecting medieval opulence.

Though if medieval opulence is your thing, there's always Conques, which takes your breath away and doesn't give it back. And the two treasure towns at the beginning and end of my little pilgrimage, Le Puy and Figeac, wonderful lively inhabited museums, unspoiled by tourism.

The photos don't begin to do justice to the beauty of these places. But go ahead and check them out anyway. You're welcome to look at my photos of Uruguay, Argentina and Chile too. Not that they have anything to do with my writing, but it's cold outside, why not let your mind travel to warm places?

a new year, a new look, and a new blog to check out: "Pilgrim Roads"

Yo. Anybody out there?

I venture back into the land of Blog. Last spring, my CRM (centre for random musings) was booted off my server and it's taken me ages to get things sorted out again. The layout of my relocated site was a hash, when I tried to update my home page I got nothing but error messages... I was not a happy blogger.

So imagine my delight when I shambled into the living room this morning, cranked up my computer, and encountered - this. A brave new look. Soothing colours, clean lines. Order. And how did this blogstoration take place? Who got me back on the blogtrack?

May I introduce the new star of web-based Camino writers, Anna-Marie Krahn. Since last fall, Anna-Marie has been producing entertaining and thought-provoking little essays based on her own Camino experiences, along with interviews with other pilgrims and, since the beginning of this year, a sort of Camino/pilgrimage news centre. It's an ambitious project that only shows signs of getting bigger and you'll find it at Pilgrim Roads.

Now, apart from being a fine writer, Anna-Marie has mean computer smarts and true Camino spirit. Cause when she saw what a shambles my blog had turned into, she got out her wrench, pulled on her hip-waders, and had it all patched up in (she claims) five minutes. Apparently all I owe her is a bottle of Rioja. Thanks, Anna-Marie.

And what about me? Any projects for this year? You bet. A walk on Italy's Via Francigena, the medieval road from northern Europe to Rome. I was there last fall for a first look and will have some photos up shortly on a Picasa web album.

What else? My latest short-story/essay appears in the Fall 2010 edition of Queen's Quarterly. It's called "(Charlie's) Angels of the Camino," and it's about one of those odd bounces of the ping-pong ball of history that occur so often on the Camino. If you can't get your hands on QQ, be patient. The story is going to be reprinted this summer in Reader's Digest. As close to Oprah as I ever hope to get.

There's more stuff to tell you about, but for now I thought it would be enough just to affirm that I am still living and hatching writing schemes. Here's to a new year full of strange and wondrous journeys.

some good camino reads

Here we are, well into January, as I sit down to my first blog of the year. Clearly I am not a born blogger. Yet I must rouse myself, for there is much to blog about!

Fr'instance? Well, for all of you with Chapters/Indigo Christmas gift cards burning holes in your pockets, I have some Camino reading to recommend. It's always a struggle for me to start into yet-another-book-about-the-road-to-Santiago, I have read so many, yet once the journey's underway they're awfully hard to put down, the good ones, anyway. Two recent reads that took me back to Spain in all the right ways are Guy Thatcher's A Journey of Days and Arthur Paul Boers' The Way is Made by Walking.

Guy's account is lively, frank and utterly unpretentious, beautifully illustrated with the author's colour photos, and topped off with a thoughtful epilogue, "Life's Lessons Relearned." It was when I read Guy's final note, "What Happened to...", where he tells of the further adventures of some of the pilgrims he met on the way, that I realized how much I had been drawn into his Camino. I really felt like I was reading about people I knew personally! As Guy made his journey at the age of seventy, his book will be especially affirming to those who wonder if they've still got it in them to hike across Spain.

As for Arthur's book, I wasn't sure initially how well I would connect with it. Arthur, after all, is an ordained Mennonite Church minister and his understanding of the Camino falls very much within a religious paradigm that I don't share. If, for Guy, the Camino is about "Life's Lessons Relearned," for Arthur, it's "Christ's Lessons Relearned." But Arthur tells his stories well (with preacherly skill?), and breaks the usual Camino-book mold by arranging his material thematically rather than chronologically. Before long I was drawing parallels between my journey and his own.

I suspect that whatever religious tradition you belong (or don't belong) to, the lessons of the Camino are pretty much the same. Arthur's topic headings include: trusting, solidarity, traveling light, unintended consequences, moving at the speed of life, providential encounters... The usual suspects. My favourite part is his elucidation of the concept of "focal living" with its "four affirmations":

There is no place I would rather be.
There is nothing I would rather do.
There is no one I would rather be with.
This I will remember well.

Many of us could have made those affirmations on the Camino.

One more literary note. Pilgrim-author Brandon Wilson's Along the Templar Trail has been awarded the 2009 Society of American Travel Writers' Award for Best Travel Book. Bravo, Brandon!

Till next time.....

home from walking in france

Just back from an amazing eleven-day, 240-kilometre walk along the Via Podiensis, the road from Le Puy, most venerable of the French pilgrim ways to Santiago. It's a wonderfully bucolic walk from Le Puy, pop. 20,000, to Figeac pop. 10,000, with the biggest town in between, Saugues, clocking in at 2000 inhabitants. You can go for hours without seeing a highway or a power line; what you will see (and hear and smell) is plenty of cows. The scenery is spectacular and ever-changing, though all those magnificent vistas come at the cost of a lot of ups and downs.

There was only a handful of us walking, ten or a dozen the first week, down to four by the end of the second, and many of the gites (equivalent to Spanish refugios), to say nothing of the cafes and bars, were already closed for the season. But we were always able to find a bed somewhere. The facilities were comfortable and clean, the ways clearly marked, the bread, cheese, meat, coffee, wine - all very French.

Many differences between the French way and the Camino Frances. Most of the people I met considered their journey a walking holiday rather than a pilgrimage, and there is no need to carry a credential or identify oneself as a pilgrim in order to stay in the gites (with a few exceptions). It's easy to buy groceries in France early in the morning, not so easy to find an open bar or restaurant at night. The churches are more likely to be open at any time of day here than in Spain, though most are surprisingly unornamented compared to Spanish churches, having been burned down or stripped bare during the Hundred Years' War, or the wars of religion, or the Revolution.... Lively history, France.

Lots to talk about! I'll save some for the next blog.

and one more thing

What? Me again already?

A couple important items I didn't mention in my last posting.

First, the fall meeting of the Canadian Company of Pilgrims, Toronto chapter, is coming up fast. Arthur Paul Boers, author of The Way is Made by Walking, is the featured speaker, while four other Canadian Camino authors, Sue Kenney, Jane Christmas, Guy Thatcher and yours truly, will be chatting up our wares as part of the halftime festivities. That's Saturday, November 7th, 1:30 at St. Matthew's United Church (more details at santiago.ca)

And what was the other thing? Oh yeah, the first foreign sale of All the Good Pilgrims. As of fall 2010, my Camino tales will be hitting bookstores in..... Poland!

So how do you say Buen Camino in Polish?