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Later this month, Sandy Brown and I will be heading south for a mini speaking tour, connecting with pilgrim groups from Medford, Oregon (I’ll be solo on that first date) to San Diego, California. Here’s the official event blurb: The Camino de Santiago and the Resurgence of Pilgrimage – An Evening with Guidebook Authors Sandy Brown and Dave Whitson More than a half-million people will complete a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela this year, while countless others will follow one of the scores of ancient, medieval, and contemporary routes across Europe and beyond. For two decades, Sandy Brown and Dave… Read more: Sandy & Dave in California

The weather reports in Italy have often cried wolf, with alarming “Severe Thunderstorm Warnings” resulting in little more than a sprinkle. On this morning, though, the forecast’s bite was every bit as bad as its bark, with a relentless downpour waking me early and carrying on for hours. A lull conveniently lined up with my intended departure time, and I set forth smiling, pleased to have once again dodged a drenching. Five minutes later, still within the bounds of Santo Stefano, I was squeezed beneath an awning, as thunder boomed immediately overhead. I remained in that position for nearly a… Read more: Days 82-84 – Santo Stefano Quisquina to Palermo, Italy – 105km

I’ve been on different branches of the Vie Francigene di Sicilia for more than a couple weeks now, and as I’ve moved along I’ve found myself wondering about motivation. Obviously, a core component of my motivation at this point is simply to cross the finish line, which is so dang close now. The beauty of pilgrimage, though, is that ideally it adds layers of meaning to a walk, imbuing the final destination, or stops along the way, with greater significance. Even as a non-Catholic, there’s a gravitational pull exerted by Santiago or Rome, and the collective impact of this invisible… Read more: Days 80 & 81 – Comitini to Santo Stefano Quisquina, Italy – 75km

Over the course of a ninety-day trip, with only three stays extending past a single night, you end up assembling a wealth of accommodation experiences. Some are perfunctory and sufficient; others are warm and memorable. There are ruined buildings, historic structures, purpose-built complexes, and some places that exist on the continuum between those poles. It’s difficult, by day 79, to experience anything entirely novel, but Aragona delivered that today. This was my first genuinely kafkaesque accommodation encounter, resembling a scene in The Trial of all things. But first, the walk. It was a short thing, intended to be a half-day… Read more: Day 79 – Agrigento to Comitini, Italy – 26km

The sun rose behind me, and the full moon sank ahead, as I set forth from my coastal campsite. Within a kilometer or two, the seaside trail had joined the sun in my wake. Another kilometer wrapped up the unpaved part of the day. The Agrigento sprawl kicked in soon after, first as a trickle, and then a flood, delivering a wave of big box stores, McDonald’s, and a Lidl supermarket where I was quite content to kill some time. Even with a leisurely pace, I was ahead of schedule, and as excited as I was to reach the Valley… Read more: Day 78 – Punta Bianca to Agrigento, Italy – 19km

I could walk through this whole section, so many kilometers on the beach or overlooking the coast, and not consider them at all. Find no trace of them, really. And I guess that’s kind of the point, by all involved. But they have been here and will be here again. The desperate and the hungry, taking a steep personal risk in pursuit of opportunity, crossing a large sea and an even greater political barrier. The Strait of Sicily, separating Tunisia and Sicily, or Africa and Europe, is just 145 kilometers wide, roughly equivalent to what I walked over three days… Read more: Days 76 & 77 – Gela to Punta Bianca, Italy – 75km

A walking trip immerses you in a place in a unique way, leading you through all kinds of neighborhoods, industries, rural areas, and towns. Even the most scenic routes can’t adhere exclusively to established tourist hot spots. It would be easy to sum this up as the most authentic way of experiencing a country or region, exposing one to a genuine slice of life. There’s some truth to that, for sure, but there can be a shallowness or a thinness to the walking experience that sometimes leaves one lacking. If an important site rests a kilometer or two off the… Read more: Day 75 – Caltagirone to Gela, Italy – 44km

The first time I walked the Camino Inglés, I confess that I didn’t particularly care for it. Truth be told, I was bored by it. These are not the kinds of thoughts you want to admit when you are the author of a guidebook on a particular route! But context, as always, is everything. And on that particular occasion, I had already walked the Camino del Norte and also the Camino del Mar, working my way through an extended scouting trip. This also meant that I had probably covered five hundred kilometers of walking in Galicia. As beautiful as Galicia… Read more: Day 74 – Militello to Caltagirone, Italy – 47km

The last six kilometers of walking today were fantastic. Well, ok, the last three of those kilometers were fantastic, leading into a river gorge and then climbing past the remains of the old Norman basilica of Santa Maria La Vetere. The three kilometers leading into that were fine. The seventeen kilometers preceding those final six, linking the city of Lentini with the town of Scordia, were rather boring, but they were also quiet. Road construction after Lentini shut down the road to traffic–and necessitated another fence-jumping excursion–and a bridge outage later on had the same effect. As such, even if… Read more: Day 73 – Catania to Militello, Italy – 53km

There are two kinds of volcanic explosions at Mount Etna. Summit explosions grab the headlines. These are just as the name suggests–spectacular events when Etna quite literally blows its top. They happen staggeringly often, with the most recent eruption taking place in February 2021. And yet, for all the shock and awe, they rarely prove threatening to the surrounding communities. The bark is far worse than the bite. The other kind is a flank explosion, when a seam is ripped open on the side of Etna, typically due to a blocked magma passage. These can occur almost anywhere along the… Read more: Days 70-72 – Montalbano Elicona to Catania, Italy – 121km

There have been a few great battles in the History Education Wars, but well before the Content vs. Skills conflict occurred, lines were drawn between Depth and Breadth. The Depth contingent enjoyed some stirring successes, arguing quite fairly that sophisticated analysis and authentic critical thinking challenges could only take place if students were fully immersed in the subject matter. However, at some point a school administrator popped into a department meeting to relay parental concerns about the lack of Middle East coverage, or the complete omission of indigenous history, or the neglect of geography and economics, and with those reinforcements… Read more: Days 68-69 – San Pier Niceto to Montalbano Elicona, Italy – 70km

As I took my first steps into Sicily, I did so while working my way through the opening pages of two books, Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily and John Julius Norwich’s Sicily. While the former focuses primarily on Cosa Nostra in the late 20th century, and the latter is a more expansive survey of the island’s history, they both spotlight the same quote from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, which is regarded by most to be Sicily’s greatest novel. “For over twenty-five centuries,” Lampedusa explains, “we’ve been bearing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilizations, all from outside, none… Read more: Days 66-67 – Reggio Calabria to San Pier Niceto, Italy – 50km

A small boy playing an accordion. He’s the first thing I see as I enter Samo, the last pocket of civilization before I disappear into the wilderness for a couple days. He looks at me ponderously and then ambles onward, slowly expanding and compressing his odd device. If not for him, I could be forgiven for assuming that Samo is exclusively composed of old men. A group outside one bar immediately called me over, asking what I was up to, and offering me drinks. When I finished with them, another man, sitting on a bench across the way, flagged me… Read more: Days 62-65 – Bianco to Reggio Calabria, Italy – 142.5km

The old ways persist in Calabria. Admittedly, rural regions around the world tend to hold more firmly to tradition, for reasons that are ideological as much as economic, but history doesn’t just place a thumb on the scales here; it’s pulling downward with both hands. Il Piccolo Eremo is an unusual combination of past and present, preserving millennium-old Basilian practices with a convent only 22 years old, an argument that time is a flat circle if ever there was one. Just downhill, though, is an even firmer assertion of tradition. The Santuario Maria Santissima di Crochi, set on a small… Read more: Days 60 & 61 – Il Piccolo Eremo delle Querce to Bianco, Italy – 85km

Suor Rossana ushered me into the workshop. “This is where we host classes in iconography,” she explained. Despite its name, it has sometimes been difficult to spot the Basilian sites on the Cammino Basiliano. In some cases, small piles of rocks are all that remain, and one would need a divination rod and some peyote to have any hope of manifesting what once occupied those spaces. It’s easy to think, after a few weeks of walking here, that the Basilian legacy of Southern Italy, once so prominent, is taking its dying breaths. And yet, twenty-two years ago, a vibrant new… Read more: Days 58 & 59 – Serra San Bruno to Il Piccolo Eremo delle Querce, Italy – 63km

What’s the best way to create a long-distance walking route from scratch? Over the last few days, I’ve been kicking around that question, and I’ve found the Cammino Materano and Cammino Basiliano to make for an interesting comparison. Both routes demonstrate the ambition of their creators. While the Basiliano spans many more kilometers, the Materano’s vision includes an expansive network of shorter routes spiderwebbing outward from Matera. That said, the organizers of the Materano have exercised considerable restraint in how they roll out each of those routes. Indeed, I found this rather frustrating when they wouldn’t share their in-progress itinerary… Read more: Day 57 – San Vito Sullo Ionio to Serra San Bruno, Italy – 32km

As morning flipped to afternoon, I ambled along in a somnambulant fashion, with little of the characteristic spring in my step. I still labored to take in the scene around me, far more scorched than any landscape since Lazio, but my eyes found their way back to my feet much more often than normal. When I paused to take in the view in Settingiano, a small village in which a group of residents were gathered outside the church, dressed in their Sunday best, an older man sitting beneath a statue spotted my arrival, and said, “it’s hot today, isn’t it?”… Read more: Days 55 & 56 – Catanzaro to San Vito Sullo Ionio, Italy – 73km

Pace is not an end unto itself, or at least it probably shouldn’t be most of the time. After all, if the goal were simply to move through the walk as swiftly as possible, one would probably be advised to stick to the highway and ignore the more scenic trails. It’s like the old line about the US freeway system–the best way to travel across the country and see none of it. But as daylight ebbs, pace becomes a bigger consideration for me on these longer days. Indeed, I’ve been sifting through my remaining schedule and trying to find ways… Read more: Day 54 – Gariglione to Catanzaro, Italy – 53km

Monte Gariglione is the tallest peak in the Sila, topping out at 1765m. The mountain refuge where I’m spending the night isn’t quite that high, but it’s close, and given that I couldn’t be bothered to start a fire, I’m feeling the cold of that elevation as I clumsily type up this reflection. It wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate to suggest that the day’s biggest highlight was breakfast. Along with the aforementioned scrambled eggs, I was delivered fried provolone (a great surprise), aged parmigiano, a fresh baked croissant, two equally fresh rolls of bread, several kinds of yogurt, a large saucer… Read more: Day 53 – San Giovanni in Fiore to Gariglione, Italy – 40km

One of the more difficult aspects of history to wrap my mind around was the sheer landedness of people. The fact that most premodern humans rarely traveled more than a handful of miles beyond their birthplace seemed inconceivable. Even without cars and roads, it seemed like innate curiosity and wanderlust would drive more out on even the most occasional journey. Even acknowledging the nasty-brutish-shortness of it all, certainly they could have carved out time for a periodic stroll, right? And related to that, the proliferation of local dialects seemed equally challenging to fathom. Even today, beyond Italian and the twelve… Read more: Day 52 – Verzino to San Giovanni in Fiore, Italy – 35km