I’ve made it out of the high Apennines at last, and continue pushing outward through the foothills. In just a couple more days, they’ll finally release their hold on me. While that sounds awfully nice at the moment, I’ll miss them when they’re gone.
What I won’t miss, though, will be the frequent reminders of just how harshly nature can wield its power in this part of the country. Landslides, or frane, continued to be a dominant feature of the walk over these past two days. It’s rarely a good sign when I learn an Italian word that has nothing to do with walking, beds, or food, so there you go.
Right from the start, landslides reshaped the walk, as the lion’s share of the route from Rocca San Casciano to Dovadola was shifted over to a rural road because of the lingering impact of the 2023 slides. Fortunately, this had little impact upon Dovadola itself, where I was pleased to visit the Abbazia di Sant’Andrea and learn about the Beata Benedetta Bianchi Porro, whose remains have rested here since 1969. She was beatified by the Church for her persistent faith and resilience in the face of a lifetime of illness and suffering. I was equally pleased by the town’s small forno, which had the most decadent vegan brownies you could ever hope to encounter.
The trail climbed from Dovadola, making its most significant ascent of the day–though far less imposing than the past few days–en route to Montepaolo. This is the first major Saint Anthony site of the Cammino. The young man settled here in 1221, spending a year in prayer in a small cave below a hermitage, following his initial meeting with Saint Francis. As happened with Benedict, his celebrity ultimately pushed him out of his spiritual spelunking. That grotto, unfortunately, is not immune to the ravaged landscape either, as the ground beneath the cave has largely been swept away.
The Cammino carried on from Montepaolo along an easy ridge-top road, and at long last the skies had reopened for business, the sun making a return from an extended vacation. All around, I could see gray slashes in the green hills, evidence of the widespread scope of this damage. Later, as I descended to the valley, I could see riverbanks run ragged, swollen torrents having swept far beyond their traditional margins, and leaving upturned trees in their wake, still cluttering the terrain two years later.
I’ve mentioned the 2023 landslides a couple of times, but it’s worth pausing to address just how cataclysmic those were. It started with rain. A lot of rain. By one account, six months’ worth of rain in just 36 hours–coming immediately on the heels of an extended drought that had left the ground ill-equipped to absorb what was coming. Simultaneously, a sea storm hammered the coast, which impeded the outflow of rivers, meaning that as those rivers swelled to historic levels, they effectively hammered into a wall along the coast, creating a devastating backlog. 17 people died. In one particularly grisly account, a woman’s body was swept 12 miles down the Savio River before finally being recovered on the Adriatic coast. More than 36,000 people were left homeless, as 100 cities and towns were badly damaged, some left fully submerged for days. Billions of dollars in damage was done, some of that linked to the 500 roads that were closed–some of which remain blocked off. At least 305 landslides occurred as a consequence of all that flooding.
Emilia-Romagna is out of the three most landslide-prone regions in Italy, with over 20% of its hill and mountain territory affected by active or dormant landslides. A fifth! And as my walk has hopefully demonstrated, a big chunk of this region qualifies as hill and mountain territory. What makes Emilia-Romagna so susceptible to landslides? I can’t claim any special expertise on this subject, but I found this source to be a helpful introduction.
My assumption had been that I would encounter some sordid narrative about human overreach, involving a prioritization of profits over lives, resulting in a series of poor choices about land use and management. On the contrary, though, it appears as though land use only bears a small sliver of the blame. Research reveals that most landslide areas have long been established as such, dating back to events from the last glacial age. These areas alternate extended dormant periods with eventual moments of collapse, often triggered by exceptional weather events and earthquakes. New landslides, it turns out, in regions not traditionally affected by such events, are “extremely rare and generally small.” The geology specific to different parts of the Apennines has a bearing on this as well. For example, the article explains that, “the lithological and lithotechnical characteristics of the Apennines, dominated by turbidite deposits, made up of alternations of massive rocks (mostly sandstones and calcarenites) and pelites or marly pelites.” Try alternating giant boulders with little pebbles and see what kind of structural integrity you can achieve on a cliff face. Good luck.
There is some evidence that could indicate the impact of land use policies, but it’s complicated, and I appreciated the care employed by the authors in their discussion of this matter. For example, “permanent pastures” are the category of land use that is correlated with the highest landslide index, but the issue is that these are mostly situated on argillaceous lithologies, which are more prone to landslides, while woodlands are clustered on arenaceous lithologies, which are less susceptible. It’s a chicken-and-the-egg situation, where causation is difficult to prove. It’s not as simple as woodlands getting axed, crops being planted, and the land being destabilized; these are, on the whole, entirely different categories of land.
The area over which humans can exercise the greatest amount of control, given this information, is following the history. If a particular area has a history of landslides–no matter how long dormant that may have been–then it shouldn’t become a development zone, at least without substantial interventions.
All of that upheaval has left me more appreciative of paved roads and solid walls, even if the sense of security provided is more illusory than real, and so I was happy to arrive in Brisighella and be shown to my convent room by Luciano, my generous host. So generous was Luciano, in fact, that he returned an hour later to take me on a tour of Brisighella, followed by gelato, followed by dinner–all on him. One place we weren’t able to visit was the duomo, which has been shut down due to cracks caused by seismic activity. And yeah, that’s part of the picture here as well. According to Earthquake List, “207 earthquakes with a magnitude of four or above have struck within 300 km (186 mi) of Emilia-Romagna, Italy in the past 10 years.” I’m starting to feel like this place is a death trap! The most substantial in recent years occurred in 2012–a 6.0 quake that killed six and wiped out all kinds of historic buildings. The mayor of Finale Emilia bemoaned the loss, stating “A thousand years of history disappears just like that.”
Leaving Brisighella the following morning, landslides once again made their presence known, forcing a rerouting of the ascent out of town. Along the road that followed, there were frequent points at which temporary barriers had been installed on the roadside, marking places where erosion was occurring beneath the road itself.
And yet, for all that instability, both literal and figurative, this place is a home, not a death trap. Luciano has spent his whole life in Brisighella. All around town, he stopped to introduce me to people–to the woman making handmade pasta, to the president of the town’s tourism board, to the local historian. At the bar and again at the restaurant, he was able to immediately survey the people present and tell me how many were locals and how many were tourists. He’s retired now, living on his pension, and eager to give back to the town–and the pilgrims who visit–in a dozen different ways, and the pride he has for the history of each corner of town came through clearly, even if I couldn’t fully grasp each individual word. Tossignano, meanwhile, is a smaller place–a compact little village in the hills, organized around one central piazza. While it was empty when I arrived mid-day on Easter Sunday, by the late afternoon the bar beneath my hostel had reopened, and fifty community members rolled through, including a group of kids playing some haphazard version of basketball. Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, and Journey blasted through the speakers, while everyone worked through one glass of wine, then another, then another. These are happy, vibrant places. Long may they stand.
