A Pilgrimage to Eternity

by Timothy Egan

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  I’M GOING TO MISS the City of Popes. Not for the papal detritus, but for the many curiosities. You could traipse around Viterbo for days with only a vague knowledge of the civilizations cake-layered into it, and still want more. They haven’t messed with it. They haven’t tarted up their past or packaged it into a marketable narrative. Arrivederci, Viterbo. Stay real for the next pilgrim.

  Into the olive tree jungle we go, among the arboreal elderly. Some years ago, a killer freeze snuffed out many thousands of acres of these living ambassadors of Italy. It was worse than a wildfire, and left landowners in mourning. A lethal blight, passed by spittlebugs, took out others. Leaves went brown and stiff, skeletal limbs clacked in the wind. The trees died of thirst, their water passage lanes choked off. Those that survived are centuries old, the ulivi secolari, and exude a pride of place, their trunks as thick-wrinkled as elephant skin. Farmers will soon have their nets on the ground to pick up the shakedown of the harvest, and then the fruit goes under the great stone presses, those cranks and wheels. The November extra virgin oil—boldly aromatic, nutty, deep green—is the heart of the Mediterranean diet. First taste, after first press, is a stop-the-world moment. And unlike wine, every day that passes thereafter takes something away from the oil.

  The trail gets tricky in parts. We come to a locked gate, with no indication of which way to go. Ah—here are footprints over muddy grass, a diversion blazed by morning pilgrims, perhaps the Laughing Germans. Water flows, a freshet from the rain, that grows to a creek and expands to a stream the longer we follow. Then it’s onto private land, between the rails of fences, still guided by markers, through straight rows of hazelnut trees, past twenty-foot-tall Roman funerary towers conquered by creeping vines. The ground is covered with nuts. We’re walking on mahogany ball bearings in the heart of hazelnut country. Italy produces more than any country but one, and a third of all the nuts are grown in Lazio. Joni scoops up a single nocciola and hands it to me.

  “Bring it home. We’ll remember this day.”

  We’re trying to get to Vetralla, a long day’s walk through a section of the V.F. where trees are revered—and not just the ones that produce oil or protein for candied confections. The people of Lazio have long known that trees have feelings. Recent studies suggest that many species experience pain, communicate with one another, send out distress signals, and lead complicated sex lives. None of this is a surprise to the forest dwellers of Etruria. Every May, a Wedding of the Trees takes place atop nearby Mount Fogliano in front of thousands of dancing women and men. Two sturdy hardwoods, chosen for outward virility, are draped in ribbons and garlands, and sealed for life by a priest. The marriage is notarized, a way to ensure leafy fidelity through troubled years ahead. The union is pagan in origin, though that hasn’t kept the monks who live in a local nearby monastery from blessing the entire event.

  Hiking during the last part of the day is brutal. Everything hurts. We’re both dragging, not saying anything, lost in our thoughts. It’s warm and sticky, in the mid-70s. Our water is gone. Vetralla is on a hill that appears when the forest clears, and disappears when we’re back in the woods. I try to think of this aching ambulation as a duty, like the labors of monks in the scriptorium at Saint-Omer, or the hike of hermits to that cliffside dwelling at Saint-Maurice. But it’s an imperfect comparison. This is low-level pain. And yet it’s not tedious if you put it to good use. A friend in Seattle, Ron Sims, gave me some advice after he walked the Camino de Santiago. Sims and I both grew up in Spokane. But he came from one of the few African American families in our overwhelmingly white hometown; barely a day went by, he told me, when someone didn’t cruelly remind him of his race. By the time he got to college, he was full of rage. By the time he was the highest elected official in King County, which covers the heart of the Seattle metro area, race was always in the room with him whenever he spoke. And by the time he walked toward God in Spain in his late sixties, he found a way to let it go—all the petty, bigoted assholes. “One by one, I got rid of them along the trail,” he said. “By the end of my camino, this baggage was gone. I was free of them. I wondered why I even let these people stay in my head for so long.”

  At day’s end, Joni looks flushed. She sits on a chair in our room inside the family-run agriturismo in a valley at the base of Vetralla. She stares at the wall, blank-faced. She doesn’t unstrap her pack.

  “Are you O.K.?”

  “I can’t move.”

  “Let’s take your pack off. Get a shower and rest.”

  “No, just let me be still for a while.”

  She sits, sphinxlike, for half an hour. Then she finally removes her weight, changes, cleans up, and shows signs of renewal. We’re famished. The two women who run this little inn say that dinner will not be ready for hours. We can hike up the hill to Vetralla, which sits on the lower slope of Mount Fogliano, where the trees were married, and get something to eat. We’ve already done fifteen miles, counting two wrong-way diversions. The twilight should provide enough illumination to find our way. So we hit the road again, a slog over pavement with no shoulder, an encounter with an unleashed dog, an alley that dead-ends, a full hour to get to the crest of Vetralla. The story here is that Noah ran the Ark aground on these heights during the epic flood. While repairing his vessel, he became a fan of the local wines and stocked the Ark accordingly. Sure, what else you got, Vetralla? The town was given to the English, to Henry VIII, by Pope Julius II. This was before the big monarch went rogue, founding his own branch of Christianity. The Brits held on to Vetralla for hundreds of years, one of two towns in Italy under protection of the Crown. Well then, perhaps we’ll find bangers and mash in a pub full of lit-up soccer hooligans. No such luck. Vetralla is not open for business this evening. In the dark, using our cell phone flashlights, we retrace the tortured route back—all told, an additional three miles after we’d dropped packs at the agriturismo. Ron Sims told me one other thing before I left: a pilgrimage, he said, is doing something you don’t think you can do, which Joni proves tonight. Dinner at the farmhouse, cooked by the mother and served by her daughter, is pasta arrabbiata and a pork loin buried under funghi and oil from the olive trees we passed this morning. It’s heaven.

  “Since when do you eat pork?”

  “Since walking twenty miles in a day.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  COMPANIONS OF THE CAMINO

  Breakfast of ibuprofen. Walking over a blanket of mist-covered hazelnuts before dawn’s first light, crunch, crunch, crunch. Up the hill, past the same unleashed dog to Vetralla again, and now the town is awake. In a bar, we devour pastries just removed from the forno, cappuccini, and catch the news on an overhead television screen. We hike almost nine miles before our next stop, which is in Capranica. Feet fine. Backs holding up. And a reward: lasagna in the Roman style—without the béchamel or the meat ragù, heavy on cheese and tomato ricotta sauce. On most Italian days, you walk so you can eat, especially when the fuel is this good. Afterward, we light out beyond the hazelnut groves through a thick forest of chestnuts ablaze with color. The trail cuts through stone of hardened volcanic sponge, and deeper into the woods. We cross a waterfall on a rickety wood-poled bridge and into nature’s hushed tones, away from any urban noise, then on mud and a slippery path next to the stream banks. It feels primeval. I would hate to be alone. The drop from the cliffs is precipitous. We have to concentrate. Some trees are down, blocking the path in places, felled by the storm. Time slows. We’re lost, and will be stuck in this jungle of wet woods. It’s my fault. I stopped following the guidebook.

  But at a low point we find voices and a welcome trio of pilgrims. They are led by a woman from Lucca, a paramedic named Monica. She projects an imperious optimism that is much needed this late in the day, when gloom is at our heels. We stay with them for the last two miles, listening to their stories. They love the Via Francigena for the variety of terrain and the history, and t
heir journey is an effort to raise money for emergency medical services inside the walls of their hometown. They heard about us from the Sardinians. Us? They laugh when they say this. What’s so funny? Americans! Walking! Monica likes to sing as she strolls. Her voice carries us along until we emerge from the colors of fall to an open vista. There on a rise of tufa is Sutri, a place first settled during the middle of the Bronze Age, about 2,800 years ago. We part, the lucchesi off to stay at a convent, we to another family farm at the edge of town.

  Sutri wears its Etruscan years with elegance, in the ancestral center of a civilization that lost its freedom more than four hundred years before the birth of Christ to expansion-minded Romans. After conquest, an amphitheater a third the size of the Colosseum rose near the town center. We’re also in the heart of the old Papal States, the Vatican-ruled kingdom in central Italy. But the Etruscan dead predominate, with their vast necropolis at ground level, more than sixty tombs in the rock, and shrines to their gods. Our knowledge of them is almost entirely from objects left behind—murals and sarcophagi ornamented with lively figures. From these, we can guess that they were fun-loving, fond of large banquets, dancing, music, and sport. Their funerals were not unlike Irish wakes, sending the dead off on a wave of good cheer and well-told stories. They built sewage lines under roads and were likely responsible for introducing wine to the peninsula, sometime in the ninth century BC. Many deities of both sexes were worshipped, among them a goddess of wisdom, of night, of fire and of gold, and male gods of sun, storms, and the underworld. The afterlife, by all appearances, was a drinking party, for no Etruscan went to the great beyond without being prepared for a bacchanal.

  What stands out among this glorious litter of antiquity is Santa Maria del Parto, a church built into the enormous rock foundation of a Mithraeum, dedicated to a cryptic Roman cult. Unable to completely banish the old gods, Christians incorporated them, as the Italians have done all along the Via Francigena—but here, to a fine blend. Greeks shaped the Etruscans, the Etruscans melded the Romans, and the church built on the teachings of Jesus Christ is a descendant of those cultures, along with its significant Jewish influence. You can’t fully understand Christianity’s hold on Italians without some knowledge of the ruins all over this part of the pilgrim trail. At this temple that became a church is an inscription, some words that people of any faith can follow: Pray or pass on. We do both, fifty kilometers from Rome.

  The next day starts on the wrong road, miles from the trail. I was feeling so good about cajoling a ride from a middle-aged man staying at the same place as us. Last night over dinner he showed off his pictures of the pope from St. Peter’s Square. He got very close and something clicked inside him; it deeply affected him. He wants to go back soon. He drove us to what I thought was a shortcut. The day is supposed to be only twelve miles, though much of it will be uphill. We follow red-and-black notches on telephone poles, which I mistake for V.F. signs. They’re utility markers. We backtrack all the way to Sutri, and begin there, an hour before noon. But the day is cloudless, we’re blister-free, and within Rome’s magnetic pull.

  Our destination, the town of Campagnano di Roma, is another jewel atop a hill, a mélange of faded pastel. This follows the pattern, going back to the middle of France. At the end of every day on the V.F. is an Old World town placed in the windblown heights, the highest perch around. They look lovely from afar, these summit towns, and they’re magical once you get inside the walls. But you have to work for the payoff, at a time of the day when you’re spent. We link up again with Monica and friends at the base of the final ascent. She’s in desperate need of a beer. I try to engage her in some tales from her camino, wondering in particular if she saw Lucy. But she says they’re pounding down the miles, with little time for sites. When we start the push up the hill, she breaks into what is almost a trot, and begins to chant:

  “Birra! Birra! Birra!”

  Campagnano di Roma is worth the climb. I feel light-headed and happy, or is that the endorphins? As soon as we walk under the portal, I fall for this place, which dates to 1500 BC. After shedding packs, I’m back out walking the length of Campagnano—twice. It has the same amenities as any other lost Italian small town: the fruit vendor and the butcher, the flowers in terra-cotta and those that drip from arched entrances, the well-dressed little children licking cones beneath the counter of a gelateria, protected by their nonne, the polished shoes of elderly men who sit outside in the last light. But in Campagnano things look like they fit, and always have, an organic whole, with no need to mourn a gloried past or pine for something more modern. The man who runs the restaurant in the place where we bed down for the night is of the same breezy self-confidence. He tells us precisely what to eat—minestra, a soup made of eight vegetables, the gnocchi with pesto and cherry tomatoes, a veal limone with the brightest zest of local citrus. I ask him if he makes everything in house, fatto a mano. He laughs and pats his sizable gut. “And I eat everything I make, even if you don’t.”

  Being this close to Rome has a way of concentrating the senses. The nearer we get, the more we accept the immutable, but also the more palpable the joy. The two exist together, oddly without dissonance. We know we’re going to get lost again today and tomorrow. We understand that physical pain is part of the package. We recognize that there will come a time in the afternoon when we say basta, we can’t make it any farther, and start to cramp and feel a bit of self-pity. I will go into a church and come out with a head full of questions and exclamations. Joni will put up with me. We will have the same conversation, with minor changes, based on what she heard from her sister that morning. She calls Margie just as she goes to bed in Los Angeles. Joni is walking with sorrow, but she also is walking for something more. What, I can’t tell. The glimpse into another’s interior life is not enough to know the whole, even in a spouse.

  I leave her at a café the next day in Formello, a few hours south of Campagnano, to climb a bell tower dedicated to V.F. pilgrims. There are sixteen glass steps. On every tread is the name of another stop along the camino from Canterbury. I take them slowly, with my pack on, pausing to remember something from each of the places. I can’t imagine much has changed in the months since I set out. Pilgrims still flock to the altar where Thomas Becket was hacked to death. The lost voices from the scriptorium of Saint-Omer remain overlooked. Champagne bottles get turned, one eighth at a time. The first snow of the dark season is piling up on the pass at Great Saint Bernard, though the doors of the refuge will never be locked. Augustine’s bones draw Augustine acolytes. Lucca’s walls are not coming down. What changes are the people who take the journey. What was dead to one is alive to another.

  The stairs top out with a view over the sienna-colored roofs of Lazio. Retracing my steps, down to the base of the tower, I stop at a large metal bowl filled with assorted talismans. A pilgrim is advised to unload something that was carried along the way. I leave behind the little stone I picked up on the beach in Dover. My friend Sam says I have too many chips on my shoulder—about the Brits and the Irish, about the monopoly that Harvard and Yale have on the Supreme Court, about the way the East Coast still condescends to the West—all the things I couldn’t shake at the start of this pilgrimage, when I tried to lighten the load. My little grudges are nothing, a hill of beans when you think in Etruscan time. With the clink of an English pebble in an Italian kettle, it’s goodbye to all that.

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  ODE TO A MEGALITHIC ARCH: each stone weighs half a ton or more. Each was cut by hand into a block. There’s no mortar. No cement. No rebar. Gravity and the compression of the years hold it all together. The curved span frames a small cutout of sky. Why don’t the center stones, the ones directly over my head, fall to the ground? In America, we build our arches for show, as in the Gateway structure in St. Louis, more than six hundred feet of stainless steel overlooking the Mississippi. But will a pilgrim walk under it two thousand years from now?

 
A complaint: Why do Italians dump their trash in the most beautiful places? We walk through Veio “parco naturale,” a wonderland of pines, verdant canyons, and waterfalls just outside the last towns along the V.F. But there’s nothing natural about the things that have been thrown to the ground in this open country before Rome. At the bottom of one ravine is a clutter of rusted appliances, televisions, mattresses, and other crap from people’s homes. A long stretch of fence holds the tumbleweeds of plastic bags. It’s not just unsightly and unhealthy, but unbecoming a people who know better than almost any other how to make the beautiful out of the ordinary. They shame themselves with these small acts of civic vandalism.

  A discovery: at the end of today’s walk, outside the last town where we will sleep before Rome, is a church dedicated to Saint Pancras. Him! The headless boy saint whose name was given to my first stop on the Tube in London is a bookend at Rome’s edge. And just as we lounge against a fountain wall, tanking up on cold water, a wedding party arrives for a rehearsal at the church of Saint Pancras—bride, groom, best friends, kids, priest, musicians. How renewing.

  Another discovery: Carlo the London blogger, in person. We had dropped packs at a little hotel named for Apollo—unfit for a god, fine for a pilgrim—and walked along the spine of La Storta looking for a final meal matching the culinary grandeur of the V.F. Sigeric the Serious spent two nights here. It’s odd that he stayed that long, for he was so close to getting his pallium from the pope—the woolen cloak and object of his pilgrimage. We’d been given three suggestions for dinner. The first place was closed. The second was booked for eternity. In search of the third, I got distracted trying to find the chapel where Saint Ignatius of Loyola received his vision from God in 1537. It’s in a busy traffic circle named for the appearance, the Piazza della Visione. The tiny space where the founder of the Jesuits saw his apparition is faded pink with grime on the outside, a homeless man sleeping on a bench. It was open, but I was the only visitor. The detour cost us seats at the last restaurant. The owner said it was impossible—no openings until tomorrow. From the back of the room, someone shouted at me.