Via di Francesco, Day 16: Assisi - Spello

Thursday, June 8
13.8 k
301 m

It's only day 16 of our journey on the Via di Francesco, but it's day 48 of our total Italian pilgrimage. That's longer than Jesus fasted in the desert. After that many days of walking, they all start to run together. The towns-- each unique in character, materials, lodgings-- are individually memorable, but the scenery and the memory of where each day begins and ends are hard to pin down. Some days, I struggle to remember where we began that morning, or where we will stop that evening.

Today's walk out of Assisi, through olive groves, up hills, down roads, through towns and hamlets, has already faded into the blur of hundreds of miles. I remember climbing through Assisi to the top of the hill and passing through a large stone archway. I remember bickering then with my partner, and I remember thinking: sometimes the challenges we face on Camino aren't on the road, but carried in our hearts. And I remember hoping, as I walked through a cloud of dust, that I would find the solutions in my heart too. I remember a friendly cat that made us forget our conflict as we scratched her chin and thought of our cat at home and how much we both miss her. That's all. The rest is a blur til Spello.

You might think it a shame, to see so much of a country and yet have so few clear memories of place, of moment, of event, but I would disagree. We have walked so far, each day is faded into one long, continuous memory. From French to Ligurian, to Italian. From balmy seasides to breezy forests, to sun-drenched countryside, to blistering summer roads. From seafood, to pasta, to game, to grain.  We can measure our passage in so many ways, so many feelings, so many experiences-- they only lack a clock. The air, the smell, the taste, the sound, the feeling of the earth beneath our feet are all our time lines.

A pilgrimage is an opportunity to learn about a country in a way even few locals ever do: to follow a path through regions, traditions, histories, cultures. To know a place with your feet, your skin, your breath. You see intimate details and sweeping vistas, and the vast combination of things is impossible to hold onto as a single object-- like trying to look at the whole night sky at once. You can only ever see part of it, one constellation, one group of stars.

So too with the complete experience of a camino: you can never remember all of it at once. If you focus on one part, you can tease the details from your memory: the names of towns, the places you stayed, the wildlife you saw that day, the brutal hills, quiet forests, or peaceful picnics. Mostly, though, it is one big, beautiful memory.

As you walk, this too-vast-to-remember-everything feeling is what makes a pilgrimage different from a vacation; there are too many things-- big and small, easy and hard, beautiful and ugly, important and insignificant-- to focus on any one thing. So you walk, and the dust beneath your feet, or the olive groves around you, or the sweat dripping down your brow become your entire world. Each individual experience becomes both meditation and mantra, because what else is there? Not the next town; you can't remember where you're going. And certainly not last month or next week or next year. For a pilgrim, those are times beyond reason.

As we sit here now, in the quaint and beautifully preserved medieval Spello, the most I want is a cold drink, a hot meal, and a soft cat to pet. There are 20 churches in this town, we will see two, and tomorrow we will struggle to remember their names. But the birds overhead will dive gracefully, and I'll turn my face into the wind, and the olive trees will ripple with a sound so like running water it will make me thirsty-- and the memory of pilgrimage will grow longer and blurrier, and I will know this place a little better than I did before.