The route is drunk. Not just a little tipsy, but straight up blottoed. It looks bad enough on a map, zigzagging north and south across the SP11. Heck, there are two points when it heads west on this ostensibly eastward-moving march.
Blame the rice paddies, not the route-makers. These swampy, boggy grounds, and I’ll use that term lightly, fill the region, and they hardly follow the clean gridlines of Kansas corn, Too many centuries of occupation have passed here, too many estates divided and subdivided, and then annexed and reallocated, to allow for any sort of neat and tidy distribution. It’s a sty, and we pilgrims the pigs rutting our way through the muck.
All of which is to say, I had a hard day.
I knew I was setting myself up for a difficult first week. Originally, my plan was to finish the spring walk at Grand Saint Bernard, looping my way back from Gemona del Friuli on the Via Postumia. For a lot of reasons, I opted instead to turn eastward to Slovenia, but that created a problem. I had intended to start this walk in Genoa. But I really wanted to revisit this part of the Via Francigena. Ultimately, I determined that it was mathematically feasible to squeeze this in, but that’s the reason this half of the walk is nearly 400km longer than its spring sibling. And given that the number of available days–ninety–isn’t changing, there’s only one way to make that work. Math is an ironfisted tyrant.
I’ve done distance. I’ve done heat and humidity. I’ve done elevation. However, I don’t believe I’ve done all three at once! Until now, that is. On the whole, I’m pleased with how I’ve held up. Some inevitable heat rash, but that’s just a cosmetic concern. I need to be more aggressive with my hydration, and I’ve made progress on that front the last couple days. What killed me today, though, was the track. Most would feel positive when learning that the majority of the walk was offroad; pavement gets old after a while, especially on a hot day. The problem, though, is that these tracks were rocky. Not clean gravel roads, where the rocks collectively balance each other out and provide a roughly flat surface. Rather, these were big enough, and just inconsistent enough, to ensure that I never had a good place to step down; my feet were constantly shoved into different angles, different positions, or with jabbing chunks directly underneath. It gets old after a while!
Anyway, I took the natural course of action to follow when annoyed: I looked for someone to blame. Where did all these rice paddies come from, anyway? When I was a kid, I heard someone link Marco Polo to Italian risotto, and that made a lasting impression, but like 90% of the history we learn as children, it’s likely nonsense. He’s simultaneously too late and too early. On the former, we know that the Romans made some use of rice, though mostly as a spice and thickener, and they never cultivated it. That took much, much longer–most likely the 15th century (the first documented case is from 1468), perhaps originating in Ferrara, or alternatively Lombardy. This was at least partially due to Spanish influence, with the Aragonese in the Kingdom of Naples sharing it with the Sforza family of Milan. Regardless of the precise spot, it was a natural fit for the Po Valley region of Northern Italy, thanks to the flat, marshy terrain. By the 1700s, around 20,000 hectares of land around Milan were dedicated to rice cultivation. Recent research found strong genetic connections between Italian rice and the varieties grown in Northern China, though many have speculated that the Spanish had brought it over by way of India. Plenty of people to blame across India, China, Spain, and Milan!
Leaving Santhià, I faced the stiffest climb of the day–the stairs leading to the overpass across the train tracks. I endured it bravely, and then descended into the agricultural void. It happened pretty much immediately. In the early cool, the walk was delightful, even as I navigated around large puddles left over from yesterday’s downpour. So pleased was I with my initial progress that I splurged on a cappuccino in San Germano Vercellese, nearly dropping it in shock when I turned back from the bar and saw a sideroom. Not only did it have elaborate decorative furnishings, but every chair and seat on the sofa was filled with dolls and mannequins, all dressed for a formal occasion. Where is the line between cute and creepy? It’s in that bar in San Germano Vercellese.
Walking out of town, I had to rub my eyes to confirm that they weren’t lying. Ahead, toiling in the rice paddies, were five individuals, covered head to toe in work gear. It was the head part that caught my attention, though, as they were wearing conical hats, as I saw in rural Japan on the Kumano Kodo. And sure enough, as I passed closer, I finally caught a glimpse of one face that was distinctly Asian. I’m 90% sure I wasn’t hallucinating. It was still too early for that.
A long, challenging stretch followed–some 18km of nothing but sweaty work–before I finally reached Vercelli, where reasonable pilgrims would be ending their walk from Santhià. It’s a very welcoming spot for pilgrims, with a donativo hostel offering communal meals. It also features a delightful piazza, a number of impressive churches, and some important Roman ruins. But I had a date with more rice, after a break in the piazza and a couple quick church pop-ins.
As difficult a time as I had in those rice paddies, as I marched onward, it could have been worse. In 1859, during the Second Italian War of Independence, Austria seized Vercelli, hoping to swiftly crush Piedmont and in so doing nip the revolutionary movement in the bud. Instead, Vercelli became a prison, as the defiant engineer, Carlo Noè, ordered the opening of every irrigation canal, completely submerging the plains around the city. The Austrians were stuck there for 17 days, buying time for the Piedmontese forces to rally, and ultimately forcing the imperials to beat a retreat, one squishy step at a time. Not long after, the Austrians would suffer their first defeat of the war in Palestro, the next town on my itinerary for the day.
The heat rash was at full blast as I plopped down in the shadow beneath a random building in Palestro. I was eight full hours of walking into the day at that point. A significant number, as it turns out, because the Vercelli rice-weeders, or the mondine, fought to earn the eight-hour work day in 1906, well before it was established elsewhere in Italy, and setting a precedent that would propel the labor rights struggle forward.
I struggled to propel myself forward, but at long last I finally arrived in Robbio, I stumbled into the Bar Tre Archi in the center, said the magic words, and the woman behind the bar phoned the hostel matron. Anna, an old woman on a bike, showed up a few minutes later, guiding me a mercifully short distance to my accommodation for the night.
Not long after, the town’s warning siren erupted beneath me. Heavy storms on the way. Time to sprint over to the supermarket for dinner.
