The Third Beginning: Via di Francesco, Day 1

Firenze - Pontessieve
Tuesday, May 23
25 km

Pilgrimage has a way of shifting one's perspective; one's sense of time, distance, and joy all take on new meaning on a walk that crosses borders, provinces, and countries over many weeks. The length or width of a country used to be an impossibly long distance to me; now a border is only a waymark, a hurdle, a goal.

Similarly, I once looked forward to visiting Florence but, after 30 days of walking, the great cultural center of the Italian Renaissance was more a place to rest my feet than a pilgrimage destination in itself. I'll admit, I also vastly underestimated the number of tourists the city attracted. Having spent so many long, quiet days of walking with only Rod's whistling along with the birds to interrupt my thoughts, the noise and activity of so many tourists, tour guides, hawkers, and vehicles was entirely overwhelming. So I was eager to leave in our wake Brunelleschi's fabled dome and all the people and commotion it attracted, and begin the third and final stage* of our walk to Rome.

We made our way to Santa Croce as the sun peeked over the top of old town. We used the church to orient ourselves on the piazza, switched on the GPS, consulted the guidebook, and set out first north through the city, then east through suburbs, til we found ourselves beyond the noise, the smells, the movement-- the chaos that characterizes a city the world flocks to see.

We walked up hills, through olive groves, through villages. We followed a winding path by the Arno and admired the frothing rush of water beneath an old mill. We met an old man next to his motorcycle at a bend in the road in a dense grove of oak trees, filling his canteen with water from a trickling natural spring. He insisted we fill our bottles and drink; "Fresca e bene" he repeated, smiling ear to ear. "It used to flow down the hillside," he reminisced, looking absently into the middle distance, "then the road came..." he trailed off. As we drank, he told us of the truffles that grow in the forests nearby, and in the grove that surrounded us. "You can smell them when they grow," he said knowingly. "A thousand euro a kilo...if only..." and he trailed off again. We walked on.

The sun rose steadily, hot and insistent, but the road was easy, the path clear, and the occassional shade of an unusually tall olive tree softened our way. We rose into the hills and left the city further and further behind.

Before two pm, we checked into the utterly charming Albergo I Villini in Pontassieve, handcrafted sculptures covering the walls. We washed our socks in the sink, found a store to resupply at, and settled in by the river with a bottle of Moscato to while away the heat of the afternoon.

Somewhere along the way, we fell back into the rhythm of pilgrimage: the walking, the discovery, the simple pleasures and physical challenges, the long hours in the sun with our thoughts. It's both impossibly easy and unimaginably challenging to be a pilgrim, to walk every day, to be both always arriving and always leaving. It's good to be back on the road.


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*Wondering about the first two stages of our pilgrimage? In short, they were the Via della Costa and part of the Via Francigena as we have walked from Monaco to Florence, but the whole story will have to wait til we're off the road, home in Seattle, and equipped with better tools than I can carry in my pack.

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