Days 50 & 51 – Cerviolo to Verzino, Italy – 70km
In the spring, when I spoke with Italians about my plans for the six months of walking, up and down across the peninsula, the responses were nearly all encouraging, enthusiastic, and constructive. But there was one message that slipped through that was more concerning. Watch out for the people in Calabria, several said. All of […]
Day 49 – Rossano to Cerviolo, Italy – 58km
There were two big pieces. Two of them. I had confidently turned into the bakery, pleased with my pace, and assured that a plan was indeed coming together. I hadn’t just left Rossano in darkness; it was one of my earliest departures of the trip, straight into the maws of a persistent rain that just […]
Day 48 – Acri to Rossano, Italy – 45km
One of the funny things about a walk is that it can go 98% according to plan, predictable as can be, and yet it’s the two percent that determines the outcome of the day. I slipped out of the agriturismo before 6am, as planned, hoping to carve out as much time as possible in Rossano […]
Days 46 & 47 – Civita to Acri, Italy – 69km
After a high-level mountain crossing, these two days brought me down to sea level and then back through more gentle hills. They also immersed me in a land rich with layers of religious tradition, extending the Italo-Albanian focus in Civita and the cult of Marian worship further north, adding another strand to the Basilian presence […]
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. […]