I pride myself on my stealthy extrication from crowded pilgrim dorms in the early morning, so I bore a thoroughly shamefaced expression as I descended the stairs, after the bedroom door caught on the floor midway and then shrieked as I pushed it the necessary distance. I’ve thought for years about carrying a can of WD40 on pilgrimage, but even that wouldn’t have helped in this case.
Anyway, sunrise begins right around 6am here, so my goal was to make it out the door right around then. After a walk across Ivrea, I was spat out quite abruptly into a broad agricultural field, before transitioning into a quiet wooded stretch. The world had been thoroughly refreshed by the previous night’s unrelenting storm; the air was clear and cool, and birds chipperly chattered all around. It seemed like every patch of grass had at least one bunny, masticating relentlessly. I was surprised to see a fox dart into a patch of soybeans; turning to my right, I was doubly caught off guard to spot two deer returning the favor.
The biggest shock came shortly after, though, when a hulking, dark black, wild boar went charging across my path, not much more than ten meters in front of me. He didn’t pause, never looked my way, just sprinted headlong across the field, and I froze stock still, realizing it was over before I should have been terrified. A wild boar works much better than coffee in the morning.
This is a transitional day on the Via Francigena. The Alpine section ends, more or less, in Ivrea. The Aosta Valley is long gone; Ivrea sits in Piedmont, as is Santhià, and the main reason I recognized that immediately was the loss of free and reliable public wifi that is so common in the valley. The morning’s walk remained mostly flat throughout, aside from a short jaunt along the edge of Lago Campagna. The town of Bollengo, roughly 9km from Ivrea, and Palazzo Canavese, 4km further, offer convenient options for breaks along the way.
The dominant feature of the middle third of this section, the long, thin Lago di Viverone isn’t even on the Via Francigena. Rather, the route passes a couple kilometers north of it, climbing a modest hill–the only genuine one of the day–through the cutesy named towns of Piverone and Viverone. The former wins the beauty competition, though, with a stunning clock tower flanked by a bar and bakery, and some outstanding views of the lake.
For me, though, the story of the day only took shape in the last third. Throughout the walk, I had been alone. This is a challenge I face quite a bit, even on better traveled routes like the VF, as I tend to leave a little (or a lot) earlier than most, and I tend to walk the equivalent of 1.5 or 2 stages, so the next wave of people I might encounter tends to have finished its walk before I arrive. Today, though, I ran into people over my last ten kilometers. Lots of people. OK, lots by Italian cammini standards–like 20 of them. But here’s the thing: they were all walking in reverse, smiling and waving as they passed me headed north. After I spent three months in the spring always walking routes in reverse, never having the chance to bank some kilometers alongside other pilgrims, here I was, finally following a route in the “correct” direction, only to have the tide entirely turned against me!
At day’s end, I was speaking with Mario at the hostel in Santhià. As it happens, I’ve stayed there four times now, twice alone and twice with students. Mario has been there throughout, and the thing about traveling with a group of American high schoolers is that you’re a spectacle–people tend to remember you. (Indeed, one of those groups is still featured on their website.) Anyway, I commented to Mario that I was astonished to see so many pilgrims headed in the opposite direction, and he smiled and explained that they’re not walking the Via Francigena, but rather the Cammino di Oropa. And the twenty I had seen are relatively small potatoes; he often has 30-40 pilgrims pass through per day on that Cammino!
Every time you start to feel like you’ve got a handle on things, that you’ve gotten an accurate snapshot of the pilgrimages and shrines in a particular corner of Europe, it’s just a matter of time until you are thoroughly disabused of that notion.
Without wifi in the hostel, I spent the evening, when it wasn’t pouring, sitting on the steps outside the pilgrim office, reading about Oropa. It turns out that this is the largest Marian shrine in Northern Italy, and a suitable pair to Santa Maria di Leuca in the south. Legend holds that it was founded by Saint Eusebius, the bishop of nearby Vercelli, in the fourth century. Eusebius himself is a legendary figure in the region, celebrated (by Christians) as one of the great forces of the faith around here. At that time, most in what would become the Piedmont were Pagan, and out in the Alps–where Oropa is located, sitting at 1160m in a natural stone amphitheater–ancient Celtic rites were preserved, including the veneration of so-called erratic boulders, which were transported and deposited by glaciers. There is something foreign, different, out of place about them, and that imbues them with mystery and mystique.
Eusebius wasn’t original, but he was effective. Tapping into the traditional playbook, he simply worked to replace Celtic female deities with Mary. It did the job. To some degree.
Oropa became particularly important because it is the site of one of the most important erratic boulders to ancient Celtic worship, the gran deyro, and it was integrated into one of the two churches on the site dating to the 8th-9th centuries, the Church of Saint Mary. That boulder, during Celtic rule, had been associated with childbirth. Women were said to have… rubbed themselves on the stone, in a particular fashion, to stimulate childbirth. Christian leaders in the area first tamped down on this, and a compromise was found; women in the Middle Ages, with far greater decorum, merely smacked their bottoms against the boulder. Even that proved to be too much, and by the 19th century the church installed a metal gate around the boulder, blocking access completely.
In the heart of the shrine sits the Gothic statue of the Black Madonna of Oropa, said to date to the 14th century–another in a series of Black Madonnas, like the ones in Le Puy-en-Velay and Rocamadour. Legends abound. It is said to show no signs of aging or wear. Despite having the foot touched by so many believers in supplication over the years, it appears the same as the rest of the statue. Dust, they say, never settles on the faces of the Virgin and child; indeed, they prove this once annually, when a cloth is wiped across the statue and emerges clean as day.
And the virgin belongs to Oropa. At one point, as with the miraculous Eucharist in O Cebreiro, some local leaders attempted to move the statue, and it became so heavy it wouldn’t budge.
We know from the historical record that, from the 15th century at least, families from the surrounding region built private homes here and that some began hosting pilgrims around that time. So the Cammino di Oropa isn’t an artificial walk; it’s grounded in a long-established tradition. A full-fledged hospice for pilgrims was built in Oropa in the 17th century. By 1885, interest was so high that a modern sanctuary was established alongside the historic sites, to accommodate crowds.
It would take a lifetime to walk all the cammini in Italy. Fortunately, this is a quick one. Just 62km from Santhià to Oropa. Maybe next time!
