THE ITALIAN CAMINO

Have you walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain and you feel ready for a similar experience? Consider the Via Francigena, a much less busy 1 700 km pilgrimage that ends in Rome, Italy.

Acar next to me hoots impatiently. My hiking buddy Gerhard, whom I met just more than a week ago on the first day of my pilgrimage, is standing there, puzzling over a map of Rome. It’s not even 9 am and his face is already red from exertion. How is it possible that such an amazing walk could end like this? It’s day nine on the Via Francigena; I began my pilgrimage in the tiny Tuscan commune of Radicofani just over a week ago. Now, after crossing rivers and mountains, sometimes in pouring rain, Gerhard and I find ourselves on the outskirts of Rome, rather flustered. It’s Palm Sunday (the Sunday before Easter Weekend) and Rome is uncommonly busy. We have to decide on a route to take to walk to the Vatican, where the Via Francigena officially ends. But everywhere we look there are just snarls of traffic.

Via what?

After I walked the final 329 km of the Camino de Santiago in Spain in September last year, I happened to read that Italy has a similar pilgrimage route – the Via Francigena. And up until this last moment, every step has been unforgettable. If you want to do a pilgrimage with some harder hiking to clear the mind, the Via Francigena is for you. Whereas the whole Camino de Santiago is roughly 900 km (from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France to Finisterre on the west coast of Spain), the Via Francigena is a tough 1 700 km from Canterbury in England, through France, Switzerland and the north of Italy, to the Vatican in Rome. You can follow various routes – you probably know the expression “all roads lead to Rome” – but the official route is the one followed by a cleric called Sigeric in the 10th century. He had recently been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury and he walked to the Vatican to receive his pallium (an ecclesiastical vestment) from the pope. Sigeric kept a record of his trip over 90 stages, and many people still follow his route. In fact, in some places, modern pilgrims walk on the same paving that Sigeric treaded more than a thousand years ago!