Day 45 – Madonna del Pollino to Civita, Italy – 26km
It’s amazing what happens when you cross a mountain range. When one crosses the Cascades, for example, traveling from my home in Portland to the eastern half of Oregon, the lush, verdant landscape suddenly transforms into an arid range, thanks to those mountains hoarding the constant rain for the Willamette Valley. As for this walk, […]
Days 43 & 44 – Galdo to Madonna del Pollino, Italy – 60km
This is a mini-vacation of sorts, the first two of three days all around thirty kilometers or less. And, given that the first chunk of the walk from Galdo continued on the rail-trail, the terrain continued to be quite forgiving–at least for a while. The Calabro-Lucana railway, which once passed here, is characterized by the […]
Days 41 & 42 – Laurino to Galdo, Italy – 90km
In Italy, even when you’re not on pilgrimage, you’re probably on pilgrimage. Waking up early, I took full advantage of the self-service breakfast in a room just off the cloister, bringing out two mugs of coffee to admire the stars overhead as I fired off the previous day’s blog post. Even still, I couldn’t afford […]
Day 40 – Capaccio to Laurino, Italy – 36km
And now, I venture off into the great unknown. I certainly had plenty of blank spaces on my personal Italian map heading into this trip. Much of the east coast, for starters. Often, though, even in the midst of those mysterious voids, there were towns I had heard of, famous sites I could picture. But […]
Days 37-39 – Pompeii to Capaccio, Italy – 111km
Years ago, when Greg Bennick and I organized the Legacy Project, it all started around a single, simplistic question. What’s it like to grow up in Oswiecim, Poland, next door to Auschwitz? Or, to put it another way, what does normal look like when you spend your life to one of the universal symbols of […]
Day 36 – Pomigliano d’Arco to Pompeii, Italy – 36km
There’s a man strutting around the front of the bus like a rooster–chest out, chin forward, monitoring the action on all fronts. He quickly sacrificed his seat on behalf of an older woman; later, when another seat opened, he insisted that a nearby young woman take it, even though she was fine where she was. […]
Day 35 – Santa Maria Capua Vetere to Pomigliano d’Arco, Italy – 31km
It’s uncanny how quickly it happened. Within two days of leaving Roma, I was firmly, undeniably, in the South. How could I tell? I’m sure there are all kinds of markers, subtle and obvious, that I managed to neglect. But one jumps out above all the others: the garbage. In the spring, when I started […]
Day 34 – Corbara to Santa Maria Capua Vetere, Italy – 50km
What finally pushed Spartacus over the edge? It’s a question that’s simultaneously easy and difficult to answer. Easy because, having been enslaved as a gladiator, forced to battle wild animals and other humans to the death for sport, it’s only natural that one would eventually be pushed by desperation to pursue an unlikely escape. Challenging, […]
Days 32 & 33 – Monte San Biagio to Corbara, Italy – 88km
I should really know better. When I slipped out of the monastery this morning, I had a little extra spring in my step. It wasn’t the opening walk to Fondi, though it’s always nice to know you’ll have a (second) coffee waiting just an hour down the road. It didn’t involve my return to the […]
Days 30 & 31 – Cori to Monte San Biagio, Italy – 91km
Between 1265 and 1274, Thomas Aquinas set out in the Summa Theologica to prove that God exists, purely using five rational arguments, as opposed to drawing insights from scripture. Part 1 – The Argument from Motion: Drawing upon Aristotle’s writings, as Aquinas was wont to do, given his role as one of the great links […]