A Pilgrimage to Eternity

by Timothy Egan

  A cynical historian would say these people were illiterate peasants—rubes getting fleeced by relic dealers and hoax peddlers on a dubious journey of the soul. They’re walking to Rome, a once-in-a-lifetime odyssey to stay out of hell, following the imperatives of a pope whose primary motive is to fill the coffers of the church. Certainly, there is some truth to that. But I cannot look at distant wanderers along the same trail I’m now following and fail to feel some connection with them, knowing what the cynics could not. In jubilee years, such as 1300, two million people walked to Rome. Any day could be their last. About half were robbed—and many killed—along the way. They seldom had an idea what was beyond the next river or mountain range. I have a car with access to a map of every square mile on earth, and also, a blistered foot and scrapes along the side of a fast-moving vehicle. Who from the medieval days wouldn’t trade places with me? And among these silent pilgrims, the stony sojourners in the statuary of Fidenza’s cathedral, is an encouragement. The most prominent of the bas-reliefs is a depiction of Saint Peter, the fisherman whom Christ entrusted with building a faith. He was not fluid in Greek, was unlearned in theological law, and could be stubborn and skeptical—a pragmatic man of labor. The fingers of Peter, the mariner who met Christ at the Sea of Galilee, point in a southerly direction. His other hand holds a scroll with these words in Latin: I show you the way to Rome.

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  THE CINQUECENTO WHEEZES as we make our way up the Apennine foothills, ascending the third mountain range of the Via Francigena, after the Juras and the Alps. We took a right turn just before Parma, leaving the Po’s flatland for cleaner, crisper air. I’m pissed about banging up the car. I ordered all the insurance, but still, it’s weighing on me. It shouldn’t. Twenty years ago, when we lived in the heart of the Chianti Classico region, I came around a sharp turn in the hills and collided with a deer that sprang onto the roadway. Blood, flesh, and fur splattered all over the front windshield. The fender was badly mangled. The kids were freaked. I took the car back to the rental agency in Florence and showed two men what had happened. I spoke no Italian and relied on a book for basic translations.

  “I’ve been hit by venison,” I said, in a quickly cobbled attempt at a sentence. “What can I do?”

  The men started to laugh. One of them clapped me on the shoulder and explained. I should sauté up a little garlic in olive oil, maybe throw in some mushrooms, and open a bottle of good Chianti. It goes well with venison.

  We follow the trickling remnants of the Taro, as the V.F. does, gaining altitude. The river is depressingly dry, most of its wide, rock-strewn channel exposed and bleached by the sun. We pass pine forests, the first change in ecology in some time, thick chestnut trees, and a small town, Berceto, with a large trove of treasures and illustrated manuscripts on display in the nine-hundred-year-old church. Grateful pilgrims, happy to be alive at this perilous point in their journey, left behind little offerings in Berceto. Robbers lurked in the forest, lying in wait to ambush those struggling to get to the pass. In response, the woods were cleared on either side of the V.F., as wide as the arrows of predatory archers could fly.

  Passo della Cisa, at 3,415 feet above sea level, is the high point, a welcoming nub along the spine of Italy. From here on, every drop of rainfall is pulled toward the Ligurian Sea. We park the car, and I walk gingerly in my shower shoes toward a stairway above the pass that rises to a chapel of glacial stone and slate. Popcorn clouds are low and white on the horizon, the green and marbled Apennines spread out below. At the crest just ahead, a large, carved wooden portal is an invitation to carry on, to take those next steps to the next destination. Porta Toscana della Francigena, the gateway to northern Tuscany. It’s many steps to the top, and I take them slowly, as was intended by design.

  I think of the butterfly effect of not properly taping my toes in the Alps. It is said that the fluttering of a monarch’s wings in one continent can set off atmospheric events in another, a chain reaction, starting with the slight pressure on surrounding molecules and ending with the convulsion of heavy air that leads to a hurricane. It’s a theory. Had I taken the right precaution, I would never have needed the car, never have gotten lost in the Dark Age warren of Fidenza, never have scraped the side. I’d be walking, as I’m struggling to do now, beneath the portal to Tuscany. It’s impossible not to see a message here: Take the time and care to let the Via Francigena reveal itself, respect the pace, and have one ear attuned to the elements, another to the groans of your body. What did Father John of Flavigny say? Listen.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE WAY OUT OF A LABYRINTH

  The drop from the pass leads to the first sniff of Mediterranean air. Hairpin turns reverse through the forest, in and out of early-fall canopy, down, down until we pick up the River Magra, another pallid stream sucked dry by Lucifer’s heat. We’re in the Lunigiana, northern Tuscany. It should come with its own glorious soundtrack. We drop anchor at the base of a well-fortified town, Pontremoli, where pilgrims once coiled behind castle walls and burrowed into darkened sleeping quarters. Here, they could atone for their sins, forgive their enemies, write up a last will in anticipation of not making it home. They already would have made arrangements for spouses to remarry. Pontremoli means Trembling Bridge; the span we cross on foot lives up to it, as twisty in places as a piece of licorice. Yet it stands.

  Also upright, for going on nine hundred years, is a column inside Saint Peter’s in the town proper. The church was nearly destroyed by aerial bombing during World War II. A labyrinth, one of the oldest in Italy, is carved onto this pillar of resistant sandstone. Ah, the mysteries of the Catholic Church, embedded like so many clues along one of the oldest religious highways in the world. Who knows how many weary eyes have stared into that circular maze, wondering if they would ever get to the center? And why did it withstand the destruction, when nearly everything around it crumbled?

  I trace a way in with my fingers, going to the left as you’re supposed to do. I’d seen a similar one in Piacenza, with this inscription: “The labyrinth represents the world, wide for those who enter, but very tight for those who want to get out.” I think of it as an abstract road sign, truth in the telling that many dead ends and false starts still lie ahead. And here it is, just as we cross a milestone: only 300 miles to Rome.

  Every other shop window is a tease for testaroli, the oldest pasta in Europe, its origins dating perhaps to the Neolithic age. Sophie is salivating at a chance to experience the best food relic on the Via Francigena. But before lunch, we clamber up a narrow path to the thousand-year-old castle, an immense hulk looming over the valley. At the entrance is a large room for the ancient ones who turned this ground when Rome was but a shepherd’s path. They left behind statues the size of tombstones, flat on the front, depicting men and women who appear to be a species unknown to the family of hominids. The bodies are legless, the heads are somewhat oval, like footballs, or—excuse the pop cultural reference—Stewie, the wry toddler with the British accent in Family Guy.

  These figures are a mystery, which adds to the aura of a stretch of the Via Francigena stocked with riddles. The male type holds a dagger and has no penis. The woman has breasts barely larger than chocolate chips. Hundreds of these Stele Statues were scattered around the valley in farm fields, or buried beneath the sea. Now they have a rightful place here, on display as native Italians, not unlike our Anasazi in the American Southwest.

  I have a question, which the museum caretaker cannot answer: Were the souls of these pre-Christians doomed? The teaching on the “unlearned,” as theologians put it, is a muddle. Augustine said they were condemned, having had the misfortune of being born before Christ, and that the only way into heaven was through professed love of the Lord. This is clearly not something he thought through. Or if he did, he settled on a conclusion of cruelty. But as with other punitive theories put forth by Augustine, his view was later soldered into church doctrine. Another
long-held idea put our pagan ancestors in a holding pattern in something akin to purgatory, the delayed-flight lounge from which they were finally freed by the risen Jesus. The most humane of the suppositions says that people who lived good lives, even if they worshipped a tree trunk, would have desired baptism had it been available, and therefore can be granted a pass into heaven. God saves all people—not only Christians. That seems to be the current view of the church, post the 1960s reforms of Vatican II.

  More than any place I’ve seen on the trail, even Laon in France, this three-thousand-year-old town has managed to lock time into place. Here it’s the year 1226, when Frederick II came storming through. Rather than rape and pillage, this Holy Roman Emperor declared Pontremoli a free city. Wine, property rights, and a clean conscience for all! Every August, his arrival is reenacted before thousands of people who come to wear scratchy tunics, eat testaroli, and try to figure out how to operate a catapult. Pontremoli has lost half its population over the last eighty years. Our longing for all things medieval is what keeps it alive.

  Frederick II is fascinating, another enigma. In church history, he served a term as the Antichrist for his constant challenges to the imperial curia. But he was also known as Stupor Mundi—the Wonder of the World. Instead of shedding blood while in the Holy Land during one of the Crusades, he peacefully divided Jerusalem, made alliances with Muslims, and enlisted “infidels” as personal bodyguards. Christian and Islamic sacred places would be under the care of their respective faiths. To the Knights Templar, this was traitorous; they tried to assassinate him under papal orders. In Sicily, he similarly reached out to an oppressed people, employing Jews in his inner circle. Another sin. One of his greatest reforms was getting rid of trial by ordeal, in which people were subjected to life-ending horrors as a way to prove guilt or innocence. So, a woman accused of adultery would be weighted down with stones and thrown in a river. If she floated back to the surface, she was set free. If a face survived a plunge into a vat of boiling oil, God was revealing his verdict. But as Frederick knew, gravity and 300 degrees were immutable laws. Today, Pope Francis would embrace Frederick for his reaching across religious lines and his progressive sense of justice. In his era, he was excommunicated four times by three popes.

  Lunch is at a trattoria on a cliff overlooking the halfhearted river. Everyone is eating testaroli, a workaday meal for five euros. We’ll have what they’re having. The pasta is made from a spongy flatcake—a batter of water, flour, salt, and a pinch of rosemary cooked on a testo, a hot skillet or terra-cotta. The big round is cut into diamond-shaped slices and smothered with a rich pesto sauce, topped by a dash of pecorino. The porous surface soaks up the Ligurian flavors—pine nuts, basil, garlic. Like the best Italian food, testaroli is simple, without fuss, the taste true to its ingredients. Our waiter tells us that only three farmers in this part of Italy grow the coarse grain used to make testaroli. The food was a staple of the Etruscans, and fuel for those fashioners of half-moon heads on stone. Through the centuries, through many overlords who introduced strange food, peasants never stopped eating it. And now testaroli is enjoying a renaissance, as people look to the attics of time for different flavor experiences.

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  DOWN THE VALLEY twenty miles is another labyrinth, this on a wall inside one of the oldest monasteries on the V.F., the Abbey of San Caprasio, founded in 884. The place still serves as a hostel. A welcoming priest, Father Giovanni Perini, invites us to have a look around. The artifacts from those who came this way over the centuries are the best I’ve seen. I’m taken by the shoes of pilgrims, like moccasins, remarkably thin-soled, and a cloak of someone who arrived not long after Sigeric left. A single lace binds the footwear. There’s a leather pouch, a walking stick, a rucksack, and a hollowed-out gourd to hold water. The sash at the beltline of the cloak is a rope.

  I ask Father Perini what kind of pilgrim stops over at his outpost.

  “They’re highly educated, for the most part. Women more than men. Many are not Catholic. They’re searching for something.”

  “What would that be?”

  “It’s not always clear.”

  The priest is about fifty years old and looks a bit like Jerry Seinfeld, with a brow of furrowed world-weariness. He opens his top shirt button and removes his Roman collar. It’s hot, inside and out. A homeless man with long fingernails and a bird’s nest of hair wanders in; he’s given a drink and some food. This is a place of hospitality, without vetting. Father Perini pours cold water for us. He glances at a beeping cell phone and lets it go.

  “They want to talk about their marriages. Their jobs. Their families. A woman who came through here last week told me walking the trail helped her make a big decision in her life. I don’t know what that was, but she said it was a big decision. My sense is that people who do the whole Via end up with a major change in how they live.”

  “What sort of change? They become more spiritual?”

  “Not necessarily. They learn how to think clearly.”

  “It’s not like they forgot.”

  “I can speak only about my country, and here’s the problem for Italians. Thirty years ago, everyone took a siesta in the afternoon. Rest. Relax. Sleep a little. Now everyone works, works, works all the time. It’s all about work and money, work and money. Lavoro e soldi! Lavoro e soldi! People don’t have time to think. Then they start walking on the Via Francigena. Now they have time. More time than ever in their life. They are not used to having time to think. They are out of practice. A lot of people on the Via, they won’t even go into a church. They say that they’re walking to practice mindfulness.” He stifles a chuckle. “Mindfulness. They used to call it living.”

  He invites us to observe the labyrinth. It’s traditional for pilgrims to follow the path with their fingers while praying. Chiseled in one corner of the maze are words attributed to Saint Paul: Sic currite ut comprehendatis—so run to comprehend. It’s a reminder that life is short, that there are far greater things than lavoro e soldi, so get on with the real search.

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  THE TRAIL TURNS SOUTHEAST near the coast, clinging to the base of the Apuan Alps, a side range. The sea is just ahead, turquoise and white-capped. The more diverting image is inland, in mountains of gleaming white. It’s not snow, but marble flanks that reflect the late-afternoon sunlight. These are the rock beds that provided the stone for the Pantheon and Trajan’s triumphal column in Rome, producing more marble than any other place on earth. Michelangelo came to these quarries overlooking the town of Carrara, a mile above the Mediterranean, at the height of the Renaissance. Carrara smells of white dust and decay, an old company town with a story. It barely stirs but for the buzz of cutting machines in the distance. The flanks overhead resemble ice blocks of a fresh-cleaved glacier.

  Most people look on this scene and see industry and maybe a kitchen remodel. Those who know their history are reminded that Rome’s luster was built on slave labor, all the broken human backs it took to move a mountainside. But it’s also the terroir of genius. Michelangelo’s brilliance was seeing emotion in hard rock, a moment in marble. Every block of stone “has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it,” he said. His slabs were slid downhill, lowered by cable to the water, then hauled by barge up the Arno to the master’s studio in Florence. He fashioned the David, the most exquisite human form ever sculpted, from Carrara rock. But my favorite is the Pietà, cut from a shank he called the “most perfect” he had ever worked on. In his hands, a marble chunk was transformed into a grieving mother holding a dead child, all life gone from the body of the slain Christ. Jesus is never more human than in his mortality. He’s not God. He’s not King of the Jews, or the Messiah. He’s Mary’s boy, flesh without soul, gone. The Pietà captures a duty that no mother ever wants—to put a son into a tomb, the same thing my sister went through. It is the only piece ever signed by Michelangelo.
He was twenty-four when he sculpted it.

  Along the shore, Carrara’s most valuable export is loaded onto ships, a million tons a year, for bathrooms in Las Vegas and showrooms in Saudi Arabia. We pass through this industrial stretch, the mountains to our left. The land softens and smooths before it flattens at the place where the Etruscans planted a city along the River Serchio. The exit to Lucca comes at the end of a long day. I’m tired. Sophie has some kick left in her. But as we pass through Lucca’s walls, under the V.F.-signed Porta San Donato, I’m a new man. Lucca is its own labyrinth, and all the dead ends are alluring. The way to see it is to throw aside any map and follow the most curious thing just ahead of you.

  Every city along the Via Francigena seems to have some trace of its old defensive walls. Lucca’s redbrick ramparts rose five hundred years ago to resist the Florentines, who never came. What was built for war would force Lucca inward, to make every square foot of the limited urban plat work as part of the whole. Lucca stands out because the walls are intact, encircling an entire city of nearly 90,000 people. Inside, the design of the Roman colony, its street plan, forum, square, and theater, are lively and much used, as intended. Remember what Churchill said: We shape our buildings, and thereafter, they shape us. Odoacer, the barbarian who crowned himself King of Italy after forcing the last Roman emperor of the West to abdicate, sacked this place. You would never know. Napoleon installed his sister Élisa Bonaparte, as the “Princess of Lucca.” By most accounts, she was a devoted and civic-minded ruler, helping to transform the top of the walls into a tree-shaded promenade.