The Agony and the Comedy.
On the evening before our motley group of 14 Herald pilgrims headed off on our 108 km trek from Terni towards Assisi, we gathered at a little wine café across the street from our modest hotel for “welcome drinks”. As I entered the café, I was glad to see some familiar faces from previous Herald pilgrimages to Fatima and Santiago. As ever on pilgrimage, our pilgrim band comprised a colourfully Chaucerian range of professions and backgrounds, from a 1980s rock band member to a former high-ranking Home Office civil servant to an English sticky-toffee pudding entrepreneur working in the US.
On first impression, Terni, some 65 km north of Rome, is one of the least romantic looking towns in Italy. Bombed heavily by the Allies in World War II, the Steel City – as it is known in Italy due to its industrial past – doesn’t normally feature on tourism itineraries to Umbria. An odd choice perhaps, especially as a former armaments town during the war, from where to start a walking pilgrimage devoted to following the life and spiritual journey of the humble Saint Francis of Assisi, the man of peace and great lover of animals, birds and nature. But there is a twist. Terni is also known as the City of Lovers, as it’s where St Valentine was born and anointed as a bishop. He was martyred in the 3rd century and his relics are still kept in the Basilica of San Valentino outside the old town centre.
Such unlikely contrasts and paradoxes were to be a theme of our week-long pilgrimage in late September and early October, which, as with the often Mount Kilimanjaro-like terrain, wasn’t always easy going (even the official website flagged up some sections as “extremely challenging”). But a journey of contrasts fittingly reflects the spiritual character of St Francis himself. Born into a prosperous Umbrian silk merchant family, he spent his early life as something of a boulevardier, hanging with the local noble fast-set, and planning a life of soldiering, before choosing, clearly, a very different path.
What made our Assisi adventure special is that unlike the Camino de Santiago which we did in 2022 and which has around 330,000 pilgrims a year, the Via di Francesco is a route so new that no official numbers yet exist. The Umbrian regional government has invested significant sums in the hope of this new “Way of St Francis” doing for the local Umbrian economy what the “Way of St James” has done to revitalise the Galician economy.
We set out from the church of St Anthony of Padua where we were met by Friar Alessandro, a diminutive young Franciscan novice with a fiercely happy spiritual heart who showed us around the church, including a relic of St Anthony and a carved monument to Padro Pio, famous for his stigmata. As I knelt by his statue, I noticed written prayer dedications on pieces of paper. Thinking of my own pilgrimage intention, I scrawled the following on the back of a Herald business card: “Please pray for my children to flourish at school and learn the beauty of words not screens!”
After stamping our crisp new Via di Francesco pilgrim passports, the novice Franciscan sent us on our way with a blessing: “St Francis was first man in the world to have the gift of stigmata,” he said. “So Francis and Padre Pio both represent a sign of God’s presence and their spirit is here together in the church as you set off on your journey. Dear God, give us your grace on this walk for our friends and bring love to their journey.” We were soon out into the warm September sunshine on the dusty road towards Arrone and looking for our first official signage of the route. In the meantime, we followed crudely painted blue and yellow paint marks splashed on street signs, that looked like the Ukrainian national flag.
We climbed for a few hours until, around noon, we entered a forest-like national park. After tramping through pine groves carved out with seriously steep rock steps, we unexpectedly found ourselves standing at an ancient look-out point to see the famous Niagra-style man-made waterfalls of Marmore which were first built by the Romans in 271 BC and inspired such Romantic painters as Corot. Standing over 500 feet high, the water flow is controlled like a bath tap.
That first night, due to accommodation constraints in Arrone, half the group spent the night some 2 km away from the lovely small hilltop town at the 16th-century convent of Saint Bernardino. The nuns left seven years ago – a tale repeated at various former religious houses we stayed at along the way. The former nuns’ quarters are now comfortable hostel accommodation with a small table selling spiritual books. After breakfast in the old panelled nuns’ refectory, we were allowed to pray in the convent chapel with its flaking baroque paintings, cracked glass reliquary and dusty sacristy which looked sadly abandoned.
The convent gardener was bribed with 30 euros to drive us back into town where a number of our pilgrim group from the same family formed a choir to sing vespers in the exquisite 14th-century Chiesa San Giovanni Battista chapel, surrounded by faded yet still stunning Massacio-style frescoes, inside the old castle ramparts. Dinner followed in a family restaurant immediately next door (a large room in somebody’s house with wine served from boxes).
Day two was from Arrone to Scheggino (18 km); and then we met our physical reckoning on the punitive (off-piste) section from Scheggino to Spoleto. We found ourselves staggering up an Andes-style mountain goat path that was definitely not on the official website route. We spent around six hours crossing the Umbrian equivalent of the Khyber Pass with our Camino guide promising (several times) that we were “only a few km from the top”.
We finally arrived in Spoleto physically broken, starving and desperate for water. Matters were not helped by the fact that we ended up in an artisan vegan café for lunch. But we were simply too exhausted to move restaurants. We were soon thankfully restored by the arrival of our spiritual guide, Mgr Keith Newton, who celebrated our first pilgrim Mass in our convent hostel (bare-walled bedrooms with a solitary crucifix).
The next day we stood inside the Romanesque cathedral of Spoleto, as an Italian TV cop crime drama was being filmed outside, with Mgr Newton reminding us that it was in this city that St Francis experienced his vocation to leave soldiering behind. Afterwards he saw his life’s work as to radically simplify and rebuild the Catholic Church. By the time of his death in 1226 the cult of Francis was such that he was made a saint within two years, with his own basilica in Assisi.
Unlike the Camino de Santiago where there are whispers that the tomb of St James may not actually include his true relics, the Way of St Francis is stamped with Francis’s personal history. Inside Spoleto cathedral there is a framed inky letter written by Francis to “Brother Leo”, one of his fellow friars and closest confidants, in which he sets out why Leo should follow his own example giving everything up “to make yourself dear to our Lord God and follow his example and poverty”. In Assisi, there is another such moment of saintly proximity when the queue to his tomb in the crypt passes by a much-darned rough brown tunic in a glass case, which belonged to Francis.
The next two days were relatively easy going. In one village, dogs barked to the sound of the Angelus. On day four, after walking through olive groves which had been ploughed by bulldozers to create the new route, we stayed at another recently abandoned monastery, the Convento Padri Barnabiti, now re-named the Borgo Campello hotel, on a hill outside the village of Poreta.
The last monks had left in the pandemic and a hotel entrepreneur had snapped up not just the monastery but also the accompanying small hillside village where the old castle and church were located. Our ancient oak-beamed room was charming but cell-like. The shower certainly hadn’t been changed since the last monk left.
From Poreta it was just 10 km to Trevi – almost a holiday – and then from Trevi to Foligno the following day it was only another 13 km. We veered wildy from the spartan to the indulgent, sometimes overdoing the local Grechetti or else marching like 13th-century hermits. On some days we spent hours walking through Umbria’s finest truffle country but only ate a bread roll (often smuggled out of the breakfast buffet) due to no roadside cafés or shops.
At one stage, walking with Mgr Newton, the only food we could forage was when I ambushed a mobile bread van and peering inside noticed beautifully wrapped pizza slices. We enjoyed our two slices after hearing the Angelus bell at noon; Mgr Newton recited the prayers. We then walked deep into pine forests with signs stuck on barbed wire fencing that threatened arrest (E’ Probita: La Raccolta di Funghi, Tartufi, Asparagi…) for illegal foraging. The only water to be found was from an animal trough. We took it in turns to use a cup to shower each other’s head with the refreshing cold mountain water and to fill our water bottles.
There were moments of high comedy. How could we forget arriving at our hotel 2 km outside Scheggino around 4pm on a Sunday afternoon, and donning swimming trunks at the sight of a hotel pool in which to refresh our sweating and aching limbs. As we stood perched to dive in, a staff member stopped us: “Can you please not swim until the wedding party is over and the photos have been taken.” So we had to sit pool-side in our swimming wear whilst various karaoke songs were blasted out by guests including, most incongruously, Enrique Iglesias’s “One Night Stand”. Finally, after the giant balloons were removed, we were allowed a dip in the freezing water. Dinner was the same menu as the celebrating guests in the wedding party room.
Our family choir performed most days at Mass, and all pilgrims were given Latin chant books to help us with our singing. On other days we recited the Rosary as we marched along the Umbrian countryside. We met far fewer pilgrims than on the Santiago trip but that didn’t register as we were put through a flagellating SAS-style spiritual experience that was more medieval Trappist than Franciscan. The DNF (Did Not Finish) pilgrim body count was much higher than any previous Herald pilgrimage, with early taxis sometimes needed to ensure arrival at the destination hotel before the onset of either sunset or physical collapse. But in so many ways being so physically and spiritually stretched also made it more rewarding. Every pilgrimage I have been on has a moment which somehow encapsulates the spirit of the trip.
Yes, this walk was hard, especially Day Four, when I was some 8 km away from Poreta. At one point, when I was far, far behind the others, and feeling that I could not go on any further, I sat down in a bus shelter to escape the heat and sun and take a break. The moment I sat down on the bench I saw a local bus pull up with Poreta as its destination, exactly where I was headed. For a second or two I was tempted to board the bus and pack it in. But somewhere inside me, I felt an urge to battle such weakness and a new spirit entered my body, and I was soon back on my feet, my poles pushing me along with a new zest in my step. I covered those 7 km in record time and was soon having an omelette and parma ham on a table outside a small village butcher’s shop with the others.
When we got to Assisi, we were lucky enough to have Mass in the Basilica in a private chapel. Mgr Newton said that life is a struggle and that as pilgrims we need to embrace the suffering and also think of others as an intention for our safe pilgrimage journey. Before our final dinner, he sat on the wall to hear our confessions as we walked around the grassy lawn surrounding the Basilica of St Francis looking out towards the plains below. Next to us was a bronze statue of St Francis on his horse, looking like Don Quixote.
At our final lunch, Mgr Newton reflected: “Yes, this walk been tough at times. But you have to go through purgatory, or suffering, to get into heaven.”
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