The Tuscan landscape with its dandelions, daisies and cultivated fields has echoes of Ukraine where war still rages on.
Today we woke up leisurely and made the 13-kilometre trek to Castel San Niccolò from Montemignaio.
As we munched on basil pesto on toast for breakfast, Alina showed me videos from the cities of Ukraine, Lviv – city of the lion, and of the epic landscape of the Carpathian Mountains. She has been commenting a lot in the last three days on how the landscape reminds her of Ukraine: a dandelion, a freshly ploughed field, an iris tentatively spreading its pastel petals in the Spring breeze.
The emotion is raw. Watching the camera pan over the hills and churches we both had tears in our eyes.
‘We’ll go and hike there one day’, we both agreed.
Alina is getting a taste for the sweet ache of long-distance walking.
She’s hardly hiked before and her life in Italy is largely restricted to Rome where she runs the holistic creative agency Sensi and fights to thrive in a context that would have her live on a meagre allowance a month. This is money incidentally that hasn’t even reached her account in recent months because of bureaucratic delays. She’s nothing if but a fighter. As she hopped over logs today in soggy trainers she was on the phone doing business.
‘This walk is like metaphorically walking through my homeland’, she remarked today as the rain began to fall and the scent of freshly cut grass and quarry dust mingled in the air.
The first part of our walk was uphill through dense forest. The leaves that blanketed the floor crunched beneath our feet. They were interspersed with primroses the colour of Sicilian lemons, violet flowers and patches of moss an emerald shade of green.
Some of the trees seemed strangely out of place with their brown flesh shedding into the wind.
After talking with Alina about the war this morning, I was reminded of the poem ‘Soldati’ by the Italian poet Ungaretti:
‘‘They hover like
The leaves
Of autumn
On the trees’
Si sta come
d’autunno
sugli alberi
le foglie.’
I remember I was given this poem at my interview at Oxford University when I auditioned to read French and Italian. I was quite stunned to read it then and it moves me now in its simplicity. The verb ‘stare’ connotates a sense of temporariness that I’ve tried to capture with the word hover in my translation.
‘How do we mourn so many dead?’ asked Alina.
‘I feel like this trip is a very healing space. Like we’re doing it here but the impact touches back home.’
As we were speaking, a Whatsapp message pinged into a group I share with university friends.
‘Will’s been got!!!’ It read.
Will is the co-head of the charity Greenpeace UK and one of my dearest friends. It transpired that he had been arrested for pouring biodegradable blood-red dye into a pond outside the US embassy in London. He was among five people put in cuffs when the large pond outside the embassy was turned red in what Greenpeace said was a protest at the US government’s continued sale of weapons to Israel.
Will had been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to cause criminal damage, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. Four other activists were also arrested near the embassy.
I’ve become used to friends being arrested in the last two decades. A lot of my acquaintances are activists and I’ve come to know the deep belly fear of not knowing how the UK’s increasingly repressive government will punish them. Once, we recorded a whole audiobook for my friend Danni, fearing the worse when she was on trial for ‘aggravated trespass’ for occupying a runway to protest climate change and the new Heathrow runway. Luckily, she got off, but the terror was real.
How, my mind repeated. How do we mourn so many dead.
The chestnut shells were crispy at our feet, their hairy bodies split open by the footsteps of previous pilgrims. Though it must be said that whoever had come before us also had their work cut out. The path today was riddled with fallen trees and prickly thorns that sought to impede our route. We only got lost once, a move remedied by a twenty-minute dance over dead trees and waterfalls. I went ahead, whistling to orientate Alina with my two fingers tucked tightly into my mouth the way my Granny taught me as a child.
As we approached another ascent, we played 90’s pop songs on our phones to maintain our mood. And then came the relief of the classic anthem by Paul Johnson, ‘Get Get Down’. And down we went, tottering with aching feet on the rocky terrain.
The sound of flowing water accompanied us today as we passed by numerous cascades and then arrived at the river. The town of Prato di Strada is well named – it is quite literally ‘lawns’ by the side of a major ‘road’ with the river bubbling by to the right of it. Stones line the sides of its path, worn smooth by the flow of the years.
To look up was to see tin beehives in multiple colours and stone terraced houses tucked neatly into the folds of the hills. Smoke rose into the grey sky from farmhouses lacing the air with the scent of charred oak which was mingled with manure.
As we trod the difficult terrain Alina repeated her refrain,
XiaoXin (小心) – careful!
It literally means ‘little heart’ in Mandarin Chinese.
We talked about how we both use these little phrases stolen from the various countries we have lived in. I say ‘oopla’ like a French woman when I tumble and ‘Alhamdulillah’ when we re-find the path from which we’ve strayed. Once I thanked Allah at a dry cleaner in Queensway, London after they managed to get a particularly difficult stain out of my then husband’s trousers. The Moroccan owners were so tickled they offered me the service for free. This is how we move through the world as global citizens.
Alina lived in China as a fashion designer for ten years before the war when she moved to Rome as a refugee. Like Dante, she was made an exile in absentia. Yesterday she’d told me about the richness of her experience in fashion and production: an apprenticeship at Alexander McQueen in London and then years spent in industry in China and the Middle East, including – a stint that tickled me – designing costumes for humans and animals alike for the world’s largest circus,
‘You know it’s quite a feat to measure the inner thigh of an elephant,’ she quipped.
The extraordinary variety of scenery we have passed in these three short days gives a sense of the topography of Dante’s Hell: towering banks from which he and Virgil stare down at sinners; streams made sinister by the force of gravity that has the water hiss like a serpent as it falls.
He makes little mention of the vast array of neon mushrooms, palm sized lizards. The ubiquitous caterpillars and butterflies are also absent from his infernal landscape.
We passed by horses in a field. A bus stop casually erected with three unmatching chairs beneath a tin canopy. We hugged the river until we arrived at our destination of Castel San Niccolò from where we faced another up-hill hike to our air b and b.
At the end of the second part of the Divine Comedy, Purgatory, Dante drinks from two rivers, the Lethe and then the Eunoe. I wondered whether the River Solano with its gentle banks had inspired him. Today it is hard to access due to the phalanx of ‘no fishing’ signs.
We went a bit wild in the grocery store and purchased local pecorino, marinated artichokes and some Tuscan ribollita, a soup made with left over vegetables and stale bread typical of Florence. The server was tickled by the way Alina and I spoke to each other in a mix of Italian and English. When we arrived back at the house to unpack our spoils, we found she’d tucked in some extra aniseed buns, on the house.
Many people greeted us in the town,
‘Salve!’
‘Buon cammino!’
‘Anna’s house’, was hard to find but once we arrived it afforded rewarding views of the valley and surrounding town. I sat on the doorstep with a cup of tea as Alina snuggled her slim body into the window ledge, reading out loud from the copy of Paradiso that was tucked into one of the bookshelves.
‘What’s the Empyrean?’ she asked.
In Dante’s cosmology, the Empyrean Heaven, Empyreal or simply the Empyrean, was the place in the highest heaven.
Speaking of heaven – though somewhat less glamorous. In the absence of a bathtub, as Alina read on contently in her nook, I took out one of the recycling bins and filled it with hot water.
Adding some shower gel, I slowly placed inside, one by one, my aching feet. The top of my toes were raw with blisters and my heels appeared to have swelled in size from the rub, rub, rub of my walking boots. The feeling of the warmth gave me an immediate dopamine boost and I heaved a peaceful sigh.
Alina had put on music.
Leonard Cohen’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ rang out into the evening air as swallows circled the sky and a neighbour’s cat walked curiously by.
‘Every house should have a copy of the Divine Comedy,’ Alina said.
Recommended reading: Activists disguise as delivery riders to pour blood-red dye into US Embassy pond in London: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/met-police-blood-red-dye-us-embassy-pond-israel-arms-sales-london-b1221715.html
Recommended viewing: video of the Ukrainian Carpathian Mountains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBW7EFfYGI0
Recommended listening: Leonard Cohen’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohk3DP5fMCg
