One of the things I’ve learned over the years that would have surprised younger me is that I’m an optimist. It’s nearly unshakeable at this point. (I mean, if the last handful of years hasn’t shaken it, what could? Don’t answer that.) It’s what keeps me going strong in the face of dire, looming issues like climate change. Why couldn’t we develop currently unimaginable technology to extricate ourselves from the unprecedentedly dire hole in which we find ourselves? Maybe that’s naive, but to some degree it’s also the human story.
Where does that orientation come from? Why would I be wired this way? Looking back, I can see any number of turning points where an outcome hung in the balance, where I might have given up on a situation, or I might have benefited from less support, or the coin might simply have tilted one more time to land on the hostile side. How many opposing outcomes would have flipped me to pessimism?
When I first left Lucca on the Via Francigena, I was staring face-first into a disaster. It was December 2004. My first student pilgrimage on the Camino had taken place over the previous summer and it was so successful that the group, sitting at Finisterre, asked if we could just carry on to Rome the next year. Ultimately, half of those students signed back up, and they brought a lot of their friends along. It’s important to note that by the time I found myself in Lucca, then, I had already committed to the trip, signed up the students, and received deposits from their families–even though I had never set foot on the Via Francigena. This was my two-week window over my winter break from school to get boots on the ground.
Where to start? That was the first big question. There were no dedicated guidebooks to the full Via Francigena at that point. I managed to get my hands on an Italian guide from the 2000 Jubilee that included a handful of different routes to Rome. I decided, for reasons that no longer persist in my memory, to begin in Modena, the balsamic vinegar capital of Europe (among other things).
I remember charging confidently out of Modena. There were no waymarks or signs. I just had the book–in Italian–and determination. My next memory of that day is sitting on a bus stop bench at 6pm, the sun already set, a frigid cold settling in, and nowhere to sleep. That was all it took. I scrapped the Modena idea, was supremely lucky to catch a pair of buses to Lucca, and then set out from there the next morning.
This was already a setback. We could pad out the pilgrimage with a couple side-trips and make it three weeks, but it certainly wouldn’t be a month-long adventure like we had on the Camino. But would the walk from Lucca even work? Leaving the city, I was highway bound, cars whipping past in the morning commute. Was the Via Francigena just a fiction, a dream, existing solely on paper?
And then, suddenly, miraculously, I saw it. A brown road sign, with VIA FRANCIGENA in large lettering, and an arrow sending me right off the highway. It was real! This just might work.
Many pilgrims today dislike the walk from Lucca. Some will advise new pilgrims to skip ahead a ways, maybe as far as Altopascio, 18km later, in order to avoid the pavement and cars. But for me, this is a nostalgic delight. It’s one town after another: Capannori, Porcari, Turchetto and its giant Pam supermarket, Altopascio, Galleno (following a wonderful little stretch of original Roman road), Ponte a Cappiano (with its Medici bridge), and the hilltown of Fucecchio. None will take the cover of the next Tuscany calendar, but each has its charms, and one could sip a few dozen cappuccini if they stopped in just every other bar.
The great joy of the day, though, is San Miniato Alto–a perfect medieval village situated on the hilltop, with one particularly prominent tower, the Torre di Federico, hovering above it all. As many times as I’ve been to San Miniato, I still can’t resist taking another climb to the tower’s top, to look back at the day’s walk, to stare down at the town’s different tendrils, and to gaze ahead at tomorrow’s route.
The tower itself has a long history, but I’m struck most of all by what happened over the last century. After the First World War, towns across Italy decided to construct memorials to those who died in the conflict, as did cities all across Europe. The norm was to build a monument out of marble; back in those days, they made their toothpaste out of other stuff. The problem, though, was that San Miniato couldn’t afford all that marble. Instead, the clever town leaders came up with a novel idea. They would build a lighthouse. Well, they would take their giant tower, and then they would beam colored lights from the top, every evening, from an hour after sunset until midnight. You can imagine the town bursar running bare-chested around town, waving his shirt in the air, and high-fiving his fellow residents when celebrating this cost-saving idea. The installation was complete by 1928.
And in World War II, the Nazis destroyed the memorial to the war dead of World War I, along with the tower.
In the years after the war, quick efforts were made to rebuild San Miniato Alto, including its tower. And the German government, as part of its extensive restoration efforts, paid for a new lighthouse. San Miniato had this at some point in the 1950s; you can see it, sitting in the upper levels of the tower. And yet, it has never been reinstalled since the war. In the decades that followed, the lighthouse was swept up in the wake of anti-fascist condemnations, viewed as a piece of propaganda in that pernicious Italian narrative. The debate among locals persists about what should be done about the lighthouse, to this day.
If you wanted to inspire cynicism, then telling a story about a monument to war victims getting demolished in the next war seems like a fitting measure. But standing atop the tower, I can’t feel any of that. It’s about perspective. The view from above, the spectacular scene of the world below, shatters any negative sentiments. For all our failures, our arrogance, our confounding missteps, and egregious corruption, nearly every step of my walk through Italy reminds me of our capacity to create beauty, to engineer remarkable places of habitation and life, to preserve our shared patrimony of millennia while also reimagining the future. Nature has been undeniably transformed, of course, but staring out at those tidy rows of vineyards, those cone-shaped olive trees, those blossoming fields and towering trees, it’s hard to feel too disappointed. Up close, some of this loses its charm; I’ve spent too many days directly alongside corn at this point to see the magic. But zoomed out, from above, it’s a miracle. I know all of that transformation has come at a cost; I realize there are dozens of things we could and should have done differently. But I defy anyone to stand atop that tower, to take in that view, and even to grapple with that difficult history, while still remaining a pessimist.
