Days 43-44 – Roma to Toffia – 75km

There’s not a ton to say about the past two days of walking. Those who have walked the Via Francigena Nord into Roma, especially prior to the route change through a natural area after La Storta, will recall it as one of the worst stages of the entire pilgrimage, to the point that some opted to take a bus into Roma instead of slogging along the highway. By comparison, the Via di Francesco into/out of Roma isn’t quite so bad. Plenty of traffic, for sure. It takes 20km to finally escape the city’s clutches, and the moments are rare when cars aren’t directly alongside. But, it also follows a cycling route for much of this stretch, and that at least allows one to get into a walking flow, as opposed to the start-and-stop nature of intersections and crosswalks. Unlike the other routes I’ve followed, it’s quite normal for pilgrims to walk the Via di Francesco in both directions, so waymarking was, on the whole, very easy to follow once outside of the urban center.

Most pilgrims stay in Monterotondo, but I’m hunting down interesting-sounding, donativo-based accommodations when possible, and there was a great option 8km further, called Il Rifugio di Noi. This is Simona and Filippo’s home, and they have converted an outbuilding into a pilgrim apartment, complete with three beds, a living area, a kitchen, and a bathroom. There’s a lazy dog, a curious cat, and a pack of chickens wandering around all over the place. It’s also the rare accommodation where both hosts speak fluent English. It has been good for me to be forced to operate almost exclusively in Italian, but it’s nice on occasion to be able to have a conversation above kindergarten level.

From there, the Via led me along paved roads with morning traffic, before transitioning finally to dirt tracks into the small town of Acquaviva, where I split onto a variant, detouring to the Abbey of Farfa. A long breakfast conversation, still entirely worth it in the end, resulted in me arriving just after the abbey closed for siesta, so the decision may have been a dubious one, but the neighboring hill town of Fara In Sabina had some brilliant views of the surrounding countryside, and it’s one of those places where everyone greets you as you move through the compact center. Plus, there was a bakery and free wifi, the perfect combination.

I had some difficulties with the route after that, making the final leg of this walk into Toffia much longer and more strenuous as a consequence, partially a byproduct of some gremlins getting into my gps and causing some very odd problems. By the time I reached Toffia, a particularly striking little hill town, with its church positioned on the cliff’s edge above a giant boulder, I was in full get-it-over-with mode, pushing on without taking advantage of the place at all. Once again, my plans had me staying in a family home in a rural area, “Il Seme” in the “Col di Melo” neighborhood. There’s no signage and Google Maps didn’t guide me in with any semblance of precision, so I once again relied on calling over people working in their fields to help steer me in the right direction. When I arrived at what I believed to be the house–and I definitely could have been wrong–I settled in at a picnic table and was soon petting a giant, snoring dog that had collapsed at my feet, and a purring machine that had decided my beard was for nuzzling. I suddenly froze, wondering what would happen if this was not, in fact, Il Seme! Fortunately, I had stumbled into the correct home. Nadah and Giogio were my hosts. Today, this is an organiz farm that welcomes pilgrims. Not long ago, this was a foster home for youth in difficult circumstances, and though their past charges are all adults, they continue to be welcomed back as needed–still very much part of the family. The circumstances were like Il Rifugio di Noi, but multiplied, with larger packs of chicken and ducks, and huge, sprawling fields with all kinds of delights, including avocado trees.

Ultimately, though, what stands out from the past three nights–dinner with pilgrims at the Spedale in Roma and then with my hosts in Il Rifugio and Il Seme–is that all conversations have been taken over by Trump talk, especially once they know that I’m an American. It always starts the same way, a tentative icebreaker: “I’m curious, what do you think about Trump?” There’s a right answer and a wrong answer.

I walked in Europe during the first Trump administration. People I encountered who wanted to discuss politics found his election odd, comical, foolish, and sometimes understandable. After all, populists have been on the rise in Europe for a while now, and there are plenty of Europeans who, for example, are critical of immigration. Like a lot of Americans, the main sentiment centered on cognitive dissonance, with people striving to understand how this celebrity suddenly became the most powerful man in the world.

The tone has changed. Now, the people I speak with–French and Dutch pilgrims, Italian hosts–are scared and angry. Some anticipate losing their jobs, because of a connection to USAid. Another described how an Italian minister has advised all citizens to create emergency kits at home, in case Russia extends its activity beyond Ukraine. Multiple people described being appalled by Trump’s interaction with Zelensky. Many wanted to know if Americans are doing anything about this, if they’re resisting, or if they’re just all on board, passively or actively, with the administration.

When I was walking in the USA, the subject matter required explicit discussion of politics. Being back on pilgrimage, I feel some urgency to maintain a wall between the two topics, somehow keeping the Cammini/Caminos pure and unsullied by such intrusions. I know most pilgrims feel the same. A recent discussion in the American Pilgrims Facebook group, involving a question raised by a nervous pilgrim about encountering anti-American sentiment, was met with active rebuttals, with one experienced pilgrim after another asserting that the Camino is about people, not countries, and it’s about the commonality we share, not divisiveness.

That has certainly been my experience. I walked first in 2002, during the Bush administration and in the wake of 9/11, so I’ve passed through four different presidents, each of varying degrees of popularity. At his lowest point, Bush generated animosity among many Europeans, but that never translated onto the Camino, for me at least. And again, the first Trump administration made little tangible impact on my interactions with people.

This is different. And maybe it exposes the lie, that we can ever hope to cleanly separate politics from our experiences with one another. Nearly everyone reading this, after all, comes from a democracy, where we all share some degree of ownership in our governments and their accompanying policies. More to the point, though, the reality right now is that there is no neat and tidy division between what’s happening in the USA and the impact on Europe. Europe is being portrayed as a free-loader, weak, effeminate, duplicitous, a fake ally. People whose lives have been shaped for generations by particular dynamics established by the USA’s international policies are suddenly having the rug yanked out from under them, while a long-standing threat, Russia, seems to be emboldened. I’m trying to walk a line here; I don’t want to discuss the validity or viability of individual policy choices; certainly, nearly all Americans have believed at different points in their lives that government could operate more efficiently, and one could reasonably question the role and applications of international aid. The point, rather, is that the dramatic policy changes, the apparent hostility conveyed alongside of them, and the accompanying disregarding of traditional ties have left many, many people here feeling the worst about the USA that they have at any point in their lives.

On pilgrimage, at the core of the experience, I think many of us emerge with a more hopeful, uplifting view of humanity. People on the Camino, Cammino, Chemin look out for one another, display compassion, offer encouragement and a willing ear. They open their homes, or give of their time to care for one another. The other night in Roma, four pilgrims dedicated two weeks of their lives to tending to pilgrims in the Spedale, serving dinner and breakfast, keeping everything spotless, and performing the traditional foot wash in the evening. It is selfless love. It would be unreasonable to think that it’s not somewhere in the back of their mind, a question, a doubt… was the person that I am tending to, so polite in this moment, also content to unleash this force upon the world, which I perceive to be causing profound harm? There are already a few cases that I know of, such as one gite in France, that has banned Americans entirely. One of my hosts here in Italy was aghast at the notion. But even that host did the dance with me, asking around my thoughts on Trump, my perception of the situation. They wouldn’t have kicked me out if I had answered differently, but would the reception have been chillier?

Saint Francis story – losing sight, takes up residence near Rieti to see a doctor, followers come in droves, eat the grapes, local abbot grows concerned, Francis says it’ll be fine, easy for you to say, it’ll be fine, seriously it’s a problem, 20 bottles of wine are filled, but that’s not the miracle–the miracle is all of us coming together

It’s interesting to me that people celebrate how pilgrimage can exist in a world that is removed from politics, separate from the tensions of home, distinct from those more secular and polarizing matters. Is that denuding pilgrimage of its potential, though? If this context allows us to see the best of ourselves and each other, if it lends insight into healthier and more hopeful ways of living, why wouldn’t we want it to also inform those larger questions of how we are to live together, which (theoretically, I recognize) stand at the core of politics?

I didn’t anticipate writing about this situation because I’m kind of Trumped out after the many months of US walking, and even more so because I’m filled with ambivalence about this subject. Pilgrimage has been a great timeout from American politics for me; I’ve definitely enjoyed, over the years, getting to tune out that discourse entirely. And when we’ve had political leaders who I disagreed with in power, I appreciated the willingness of Europeans to recognize the distinction between a people and their government. This arrangement has been great for me as an individual, walking in Europe. At the same time, I wonder about the mindset that allows us to live in a democracy and distance ourselves from responsibility, and I’ve come to appreciate people who hold firmly to a line of principle. In 1980s South Africa–and please don’t extend this analogy beyond its immediate application; no further inferences you might draw are intentional–many factors led to the downfall of apartheid, but one of them was that many white South Africans had emerged as among the wealthiest people in the world, on par with the elites of other Western countries. And yet, they were treated as pariahs, unwelcome in many regards within that broader community, because of their country’s policies, from which they benefited. That lack of acceptance ultimately played a part in their endorsement of a political change. When people can push forward whatever policies they like in the privacy of their home, and then operate with impunity in public, that has its own set of consequences. We know that Russia and China have worked aggressively to influence American politics in surreptitious ways; at least this version is more direct.

This is a bit of a ramble without a coherent point, but that captures the current state of affairs pretty well, I suppose. The main point is that, over the last week, this has become the primary topic of discussion along the Cammino in Italy, and I don’t think that’s changing any time soon.