Press Articles
07/04/2008
Step up for Europe's top treks
Here are the continent’s finest blister-free walks. We begin in Tuscany, with Vincent Crump’s pilgrimage to Siena
Published in the Sunday Times, April 6 2008
The sign outside the chapel in Monteriggioni reads: “Pilgrims: special offer.” I’m intrigued. What can this mean?
Leda, the smiley lady in the Tuscany tourist office next door, explains that the offer is a dormitory bed for £12 a night (£18 if you want blankets). It’s available to people who’ve got an official pilgrim’s ID card and have walked 1,070 miles - from Kent. I’ve done seven-and-a-bit miles, and I can’t even show her a blister.
It’s almost exactly 1,000 years since Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury jotted down his exploits on the Via Francigena - the first written record of the ancient pilgrim road to Rome. Last year, the trail got a new lease of life, or at least some new signposts, and wayfarers are again huffing up the hill into Monteriggioni, a village disguised as a castle, ringed with walls and watchtowers like something from Le Morte d’Arthur. But Leda, for one, seems slightly unconvinced by their noble goal.
“These people who come, I think they are big people. Courageous. Some are religious, others do it just for their soul. But all of them speak English, not Italian. Italians take the bus.”
Me, my sympathies lie somewhere in between. Yes, I’m travelling on foot, but for four days only, across the time-warp Tuscan hills that separate San Gimignano and Siena. It’s the most meticulously medieval chunk of the pilgrim path, the section with the prettiest scenery and the biggest food. The nice folks at the walking-holiday company ATG Oxford are ensuring that I suffer as little physical deprivation as humanly possible: providing idiot-proof route directions, moving on my bags and arranging comfy cribs at the end of the trail. Tonight, for example, instead of sackcloth, ashes and optional scratchy blankets, I’ve got Egyptian cotton, minibar Heineken and a dip in the swimming pool at the Hotel Monteriggioni. At an average of 10 miles a day, I’m not so much trekking, more trickling.
Even so, the trip comes with a satisfying spirit of adventure - a sense of journey-making that you just don’t get from circular walks. As for ye olde atmosphere, that comes easy - it is soaked into the pinkish stones of every fortified farmhouse and tumbledown barn I pass at the wayside.
I set off two mornings ago from San Gimignano, the textbook Tuscan hill town, with 13th-century skyscrapers, a frescoed duomo and museums devoted to a classic trio of medieval pursuits: civic pride, sacred art and torture. It’s a sensational place to start, and I spend so long admiring blood-soaked baby-stabbings and eyeball-gougings (and that’s just at the cathedral), it’s 11.30am before I’m ready to hit the trail.
Soon, though, bellicose architecture gives way to absolute serenity, and my walk stretches before me like a long and especially enjoyable Italian lunch. In Archbishop Sigeric’s day, thousands trod the road to Rome – not just pilgrims, but traders – and the warlike abbeys, manors and forts that now ornament the route were built to police the trail. Travelling was risky, as brigands preyed on the Via Francigena; those caught would be impaled on forks, part warning, part waymarker. Today, though, as Leda said, nobody walks in Italy except tourists. I even see a shepherd rounding up his flock by car. The path is mine alone.
ATG Oxford’s route plays hide-and-seek with the original pilgrim path, dodging 20th-century tarmac in favour of Tuscany’s famed strade bianche, glittery gravel roads that swerve like snail trails across a strangely orderly landscape tessellated with marching grapevines, tidy olive groves and lollipop lines of cypress trees. There’s the odd moment of authentic pilgrim-type incident - a rolling-up of trouser legs to ford the stony stream at Molino di Aiano; an impromptu plunge into the reedy waters of a ruined Roman bathhouse at Gracciano - but mostly the walking is pleasingly uneventful, a warm, sun-kissed hug of hills and vineyards and pine-scent rising from under my boots on the forest floor. Lizards crinkle in the oak leaves, startled pheasants b-doingggg out of bushes and, every so often, a spectral monk on a faded fingerpost beckons me onward. It’s not long before my heart beats in time with my footsteps.
At lunchtime, there is wild-boar panini from my day pack and a slab of panforte, the essential ingredient of any pilgrim’s picnic: a spicy, nutty Sienese honey cake that has been sustaining travellers here since crusader times. The evenings bring mamma-made meals at down-home Tuscan restaurants, which means peasant grub such as ribollita, a cabbage broth they should serve by the slice, and pici, hardcore spaghetti, as thick as your thumb, typically slathered in peppery pecorino sauce. All sluiced down with so much Chianti Gallo Nero that I start to worry less about blisters than gout.
By the time I lug my Friar Tuck paunch up the steep knoll to the gates of Monteriggioni, at the end of day three, I’ve torn myself a hiking staff from the hedgerow and acquired three stray dogs, who have been following for more than a mile now, having befriended me near Ebbio. I’m rather pleased with them: they add an extra frisson of epicness to the whole endeavour. With my retinue of curs, my Gap hoodie and my all-natural tonsure, I fancy I’m starting to look a bit ecclesiastical myself.
Namechecked in Dante’s Inferno, Monteriggioni is storybook romantic. Its gothic battlements enclose one hotel, two restaurants, a gift shop selling suits of armour and 80 or so villagers. The only way it could be more redolent of medieval Italy is if ATG Oxford installed a complimentary damsel in a turret, for rescuing purposes.
The village was built by the Sienese in 1213 as a frontline stronghold in their wars against Florence. Nowadays, it is stormed every morning by the battalions of tourists who park their hire cars beneath the main gate – but I’m sneaking in via the silvery strada bianca that snakes up to the back door, in the late afternoon, when the ancient masonry is at its most golden. More than anywhere on my walk, I feel the ghosts of Sigeric and his brethren moving beside me here.
In their day, going on pilgrimage was the nearest thing to a holiday. For heathens like me, holidays are the nearest we’ll get to heaven. Sigeric walked to Rome to be consecrated by the Pope. Gazing back from the gates of Monteriggioni over the soft mountains and sloping olive groves I’ve crossed this week, it makes me wonder what kind of paradise he was hoping to upgrade to.
Vincent Crump travelled as a guest of ATG Oxford
The details: ATG Oxford (01865 315678, www.atg-oxford.com ) offers self-guided Tuscany & Siena walks from £355pp for four nights or £515pp for six, B&B, including three days’ walking (with optional circular walks), hotel accommodation, full route notes and baggage transfers, but not flights. Airlines flying to Pisa include British Airways (0844 493 0787, www.ba.com ), Ryanair (www.ryanair.com ), EasyJet (www.easyjet.com ), Jet2 (0871 226 1737, www.jet2.com ) and Thomsonfly (www.thomsonfly.com ). From there, use the excellent Italian train network (www.trenitalia.com ) to connect to your start and finish points. ATG can supply timetable info. Bologna is also an easy 90-minute drive from Florence. Fly there with BA from Gatwick.
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