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 the walk was monotonous–flat, paved, and consistently flanked by orange orchards–it was a step up from the morning.
But that morning… the continuation of the “special train stage” from Catania spanned 30 kilometers of highway walking. My plan had been to hit this extra early, waking up at 4am. One advantage of urban walks, after all, is streetlights. Unfortunately, immediately after my alarm did its dirty work, I registered the heavy rain lashing the windows, and the thunder rumbling almost directly overhead. The forecast made it clear that the storm had another hour of peak intensity, so I snoozed for a half-hour and then chugged coffee until the rain ebbed. I stepped out the front door at 5:20am to a light drizzle, already behind schedule.
I puddle jumped my way out of the city center, somehow managing to keep my feet dry amidst a sea of standing water. Abandoned furniture, old mattresses, and scattered garbage lined the way as I pushed outward, winding my way to the coastal highway. Every minute or two, the Mediterranean burst to life, lightning coruscating high above. I passed a string of fancy hotels, all with their own private beaches, and then Catania’s airport. After that, nothing remained but morning commuters and countless other mounds of abandoned garbage.
In the midst of those countless kilometers of tedious, tiring, uninspiring walking, though, I stumbled across something entirely unexpected. Prostitutes. Sitting on plastic chairs on otherwise empty stretches of the highway, already dressed for work and in position by 9am. All of African heritage. They were as surprised to see me as I was to see them.
Amazingly, Spiegel has a remarkable article about prostitution along the highway–admittedly, a parallel track to the one I was following–out of Catania. The story features a nun from Caltagirone, a town where coincidentally I’ll be staying tomorrow night, who took interest in these women after traveling on the highway. “The nun learned,” the article explains, “that up to 80 percent of the women who migrate from Nigeria to Italy end up in the clutches of criminals and working as prostitutes. She also learned that each day, some 10,000 Nigerian women, many of them underage, stand on the side of Italian roads waiting for johns.” The mafia is at work here, but not the Cosa Nostra or the Camorra. Rather, this is the Nigerian mafia, which “establish[es] contact with the women before they even leave their homeland, provide[s] them money for their journey and then blackmail[s] them with that debt once they arrive in Italy.”
A photo essay by UNICEF, which also merits attention, lays out the daily experience in more detail. Pimps lurk in the bushes; when the sun sets, they emerge and drive the women back into Catania for the night. Mattresses are also positioned offroad, in olive groves or between orange trees. Many of these also end up abandoned on the road side; I must have passed a dozen on my way into Lentini.
There’s plenty of discussion among pilgrims about whether one should strive to walk every single kilometer of a particular route, or if it’s fair to skip ahead past less scenic sections. While the authorities might have a say in the matter, as with Camino de Santiago guidelines requiring pilgrims to walk the final stage into Compostela, most pilgrims ultimately regard this as a personal choice with no singular, correct answer.
My personal position is that a route, in all its ups and downs, tells a story, and–to the extent possible–I want to witness the beginning, middle, and end. The unappealing or monotonous sections are part of the package, and often those experiences help me to better appreciate the more scenic highlights. But today’s walk underscored a different point. The pretty walk sometimes follows the more manicured route, one that tells an idealized story, one that bypasses the lived reality of many locals. Those were not a fun 30 kilometers. But they showed me something important about life in Sicily.
