Dante on the Move

Tag: divine-comedy

Ditches, Dandylions and Donkeys: From Forlí to Passo Vico

Today’s walk gave a detailed insight into rural life, while the animals at the farm where we stayed were a delight.

I had met my friend Kelsey in Forlí the evening before, still somewhat shaken after my strange encounter with the dog. To shake it off, we went partying until around 2am.

We must have been the oldest people in the underground club, but we had a blast, dancing and chatting to various Erasmus exchange students. We also met a couple of Moroccan men with whom I spoke Arabic and French. One was a hairdresser from Fez where I have a dear friend from a former home stay called Fatima Zohra. I thought of how unsuccessful I had been at navigating the souk when I stayed with her and felt proud, on the whole, of the navigational abilities I had demonstrated during this trip thus far.

The nardo oil I had purchased at San Pietro a Romena had opened and spilled all over my bag in the night. I was sad to lose it, but at least the canvas now smelt fantastic which was not insignificant given that I had spent over a week sweating into the back of it.

After a slight panic about Kelsey misplacing her wallet, and then her earrings, we checked out of Hotel Lory at 11.30 after a breakfast of pastries, kiwis and bananas. Kelsey pointed out that the reason Italian café paper napkins are so thin and unpliable is because their primary purpose is to be used to hold the food rather than to clean yourself up after it. She demonstrated this with a cream cornetto (no, not the type Pavarotti sung about, but a pastry).

I’d dried my boots on the towel rail and they appeared to have shrunk. After applying two blister plasters to my heels and two smaller elastic plasters to my second toes – which now had blisters at the very end – I had to lever my feet into them with a lot of wriggling and brute force. These were not happy feet. But today had been meant to be a shorter walk of only 15 kilometres. It turned out, of course, to be 22.

‘Do you mind?’ said Kelsey as she strode out into the tentative sunlight, putting on her all-American baseball cap which was a bright lemon colour. She tugged her long brown ponytail through the hole at the back as I laughed,

‘Go for it! Americans on tour.’

Around her neck she wore a wooden necklace of a kingfisher which served as a whistle and, in her ears, she wore studs a friend had made for her out of wood depicting a little hiking backpack and a firepit.

A local pharmacy with an embellished façade had Chinese jars in the window and displays of honey, teas and perfumes. In fact, it was more like an apothecary, but luckily it sold Compeed blister plasters. They really are like a second skin.

Kelsey introduced me to Propoli, an Italian herbal remedy for a scratchy throat made from a resinous mixture that honeybees produce by mixing saliva and beeswax with exudate gathered from tree buds and sap flows, in this case the Mediterranean poplar.

When we stopped for a coffee, we got chatting to a middle-aged man called Alessandro from Bologna who thought nothing of drinking a large glass of prosecco at midday. The café was still displaying Christmas gnomes inside.

When I explained about the cammino, Alessandro began reciting a verse from canto 33 of Inferno, Dante’s famous encounter with the last great charismatic sinner of Inferno: the Sardinian vicar Ugolino who was locked in a tower in Pisa with his children. His sin was to have manipulated his family members in securing and consolidating power over Pisa. This form of exploitation, while taken to the extreme in Ugolino’s case, was systemic in Dante’s dynastic society.

Ugolino narrates to Dante the tortured days of imprisonment in the tower and his death by starvation, a death that takes him only after he has witnessed the deaths by starvation, one by one, of his children and grandchildren. Ugolino is depicted as an absent and terrible father.

‘I did not weep; within, I turned to stone.

They wept; and my poor little Anselm said:

“Father, you look so . . . What is wrong with you?”

Therefore I shed no tears and did not answer.’

Dante insists on the innocence of youth, saying of the children, ‘their youth made them innocent’, seeming to imply that Ugolino’s sins should not have been visited upon his descendants.

I reflected on the many young male Albanians with whom I’ve worked who have fled blood feuds of familial descent, a phenomenon that is largely ignored by the UK government in asylum decisions.

Though the text is ambiguous, in a dramatic crescendo it seems to imply that Ugolino ate one of the bodies of his children who offered himself up to him so that he might survive a little longer:

‘As soon as a thin ray had made its way
into that sorry prison, and I saw,
reflected in four faces, my own gaze,

out of my grief, I bit at both my hands;
and they, who thought I’d done that out of hunger,
immediately rose and told me: “Father,

it would be far less painful for us if
you ate of us; for you clothed us in this
sad flesh—it is for you to strip it off.”

Then I grew calm, to keep them from more sadness;
through that day and the next, we all were silent;
O hard earth, why did you not open up?

But after we had reached the fourth day, Gaddo,
throwing himself, outstretched, down at my feet,
implored me: “Father, why do you not help me?”

And there he died; and just as you see me,
I saw the other three fall one by one
between the fifth day and the sixth; at which,

now blind, I started groping over each;
and after they were dead, I called them for
two days; then fasting had more force than grief.’

This is a famous passage which Alessandro must have studied at school.

He offered to buy us more coffee, but we made our way to the Duomo of Santa Croce where Kelsey had attended mass the evening before. She took her cap off as we entered and made a cross.

The cathedral contained a spectacular array of marble and, to the left, the Madonna del Fuoco, the Fire Madonna, a painting of the Virgin Mary with Jesus. An information plaque and mural informed us that the artwork had hung in a school until 1425 when it miraculously survived a fire. The Fire Madonna is now considered the protector of the city.

Though the Piazza Dante Alighieri was a bit disappointing – an urban rectangle of stray cats and pigeons with a war memorial – a plaque on the wall of the surrounding street said something of the time the poet had spent in exile in Forlí: ‘here, the house of the Ordelaffi family welcomed Dante Alighieri’.

The cross at the alter had been covered by a large maroon cloth because it was Good Friday. They would unveil it again on Sunday to mark Easter, when Jesus came back to life.

A man with brown skin and worn shoes showed us the screen of his iPhone where there was written a request for money in multiple languages.

The market was in full swing outside the church, including clothes, shoes and fresh vegetable stalls from local farmers. We passed by a tiny rusting Fiat red panda car. A lady in a leopard coat with matching trousers and purse cycled by. A sausage dog came waddling down the street.

We had a leisurely lunch at a restaurant called Zio Bio 100% natura in Piazza Dante Alighieri. It consisted of aubergine parmigiana, a delicious crecione (the typical specialty of Romagna cuisine I had first tried yesterday) and fennel salad.

Delicious doesn’t come close to it.

Today’s stretch of the cammino began with passing through the city gates of Forlí. From there we proceeded to a river where we had to army roll under a metal fence that blocked the path with a no entry sign which, by now, I’d learnt to ignore.

Like the doors of Dante’s Hell, it seemed to say,

THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE SUFFERING CITY,
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE ETERNAL PAIN,
THROUGH ME THE WAY THAT RUNS AMONG THE LOST.

JUSTICE URGED ON MY HIGH ARTIFICER;
MY MAKER WAS DIVINE AUTHORITY,
THE HIGHEST WISDOM, AND THE PRIMAL LOVE.

BEFORE ME NOTHING BUT ETERNAL THINGS
WERE MADE, AND I ENDURE ETERNALLY.
ABANDON EVERY HOPE, WHO ENTER HERE.

These words—their aspect was obscure—I read
inscribed above a gateway

Though we could see the mountains peeking in the distance, the route all day today was totally flat to the point that I almost missed the hills.

What I didn’t miss was the continued surplus of tacky mud.

As we crossed under a bridge, our feet were submerged by the molten riverbank. Further up, the terrain was cracked from where the river had recently been higher due to excessive rainfall and washed away the bank. Two men on bicycles also sought to navigate it.

There was a light breeze and the clouds hung low in the sky.

We passed through another ‘do not pass’ sign and observed a crane doing work on the other bank of the river.

After about an hour, the road became a raised mount between two ditches on which we continued nearly all the way to our final destination. The track was perfect for two people to walk side-by-side, which we did. It was riddled with ant mounds, beetles and seeds the shape of hearts (Kelsey’s interpretation) or pig snouts (mine).

‘That’s the biggest worm I’ve ever seen!’ Kelsey exclaimed.

Plastic nets had been placed over fruit trees to protect them from intruders – a white wedding veil here, a black funeral mantilla there. Kelsey whose work focusses on reducing plastic waste in fishing, pointed out the damage of such farming innovations.

We passed several farmers who were maintaining their fields and pretty country houses with large gardens. One had a rectangular swimming pool like a humungous bathtub. Another had a trampoline.

It felt somewhat voyeuristic to be staring down at this from on high. I thought of a backwater tour I had taken on a boat in Kerala and how awkward I had found the experience of staring into other people’s private yards and private lives.

The flat, single-track walk became a little tedious with the hours and I was grateful for Kelsey’s company. Though I was also sad that she had missed the more spectacular parts of the cammino.

By midafternoon, the wind had dropped and it was quite humid. A bird had become caught in one of the farming nets. As it futilely flapped upwards, we contemplated descending to try to rescue it but the bank was too steep. I thought of Ugolino in his tower and wondered if it would slowly starve to death. This is the price of our fresh nectarines, I thought.

As we walked, Kelsey was inspired by the agricultural landscape to tell me about her childhood. Growing up in Southern California in a rural town she could relate to the scenery which also reminded me of a Steinbeck novel.

A Bobcat tractor made her recall her twin brother Carl doing wheelies on theirs, while the waft of manure reminded her of playing in horse dung piles as a girl.

Red bugs burrowed into seed shells and a slug slowly made its way across the path.

A man in a smart bright blue coat was collecting dandelions for his rabbits. He scratched his back with his sickle dexterously.

There were horses and cockerels in the pretty farmsteads and gaggles of happy geese.

Kelsey picked up rocks to examine them as we walked. She also collected stray pieces of plastic that had been discarded on the road.

We passed an abandoned house which was framed by a caravan and a water tower.

Around 5pm, we stopped to take off a layer in the evening sun, sitting on the verge and putting our feet together and pumping them in a grounding stretch. I used to do this with my brother as a child when we were bored. We called it the ‘thinking game’. In a play on words, Kelsey called it ‘sole heal-ing’.

Our shadows merged together as we carried on beneath the crepuscular rays.

We passed by sprigs of elephant garlic which has healing properties and grass that looked like leeks. A hare leaped across a field, pumping its hind legs in tall arches like a water sprinkler.

I reassured Kelsey not to worry too much about ticks or rattle snakes which had killed many of her cats and dogs as a child.

Nearing the farm stay we had booked for the night, Fattoria Chiocce della Romagnole, we took a shortcut through an apricot farm. We passed by a muddy ditch, into which I promptly fell and soaked my left foot, and a stinky swamp. I was reminded of the eighth pit of the Malebolge (‘evil pockets’) that constitute, in a wheel shape connected by bridges, Dante’s eighth circle of Hell. These ditches, or ‘pockets’ are used to punish various sins of fraud. One example is the second bolgia, where flatterers are submerged in excrement.

We arrived at our accommodation around 6.30pm to a warm welcome from our host Rossella and from a sturdy-looking man who was mowing the lawn.

Everywhere there were animals.

Chickens with glossy coats of different varieties pecked at the ground; geese, both white and grey, waddled around on their neon orange feet; turkeys waved their wrinkled necks; guinea pigs nibbled on hay; sheep baad from a field behind the farmhouse; and two parrots, one red, one a grey African, spoke out to us. The guard dogs barked into the evening air. But best of all, four donkeys merrily wondered around the garden nibbling on the grass.

Kelsey is a huge animal lover.

As we walked, she had told me about a donkey she had owned as a child called Sweet Pea, on whom she would ride around selling girl scout cookies. Once, he had bitten off the button from her brother’s jacket. He was choking, so Kelsey had had to hold open his mouth while Carl put his hand down her throat to retrieve it.

‘She was such a good girl.’

When Sweet Pea died, they had used a tractor to dig her grave, only for it to fall on top of her. All of the neighbours had pitched in to tie ropes to rescue the tractor from the pit. In this landscape, I could picture all too well her rural childhood and took great pleasure in seeing her nuzzle the donkeys and kiss them on the nose.

The most lightly coloured one, Mais, Rossella explained to us, had become famous when, during a period of bad flooding that cut off the roads, he had walked three kilometers to safety with the help of the emergency services alongside his two girlfriends. In a play on words with his name, he became a symbol of the region’s resilience:

‘la Romagna non molla Mai(s)‘ – Romagna never gives up!’

Two men, Marco and Francesco, were also staying at the farm having left from Ravenna yesterday to do the Cammino in the Florence direction. Helpfully for other hikers, they are recording their walk on the app, Komoot.

‘Oh, so you’re Jenny from the blog!’ they exclaimed.

In our room, two kittens, one with a black patch on his eye and spot on his face, the other grey, brown and white, played on our bed, jumping to catch iPhone cables and sniffing every item as we unpacked. The grey one purred like a motorbike.

‘It must be a lot of work running this place,’ I commented to Rossella as we warmed up our dinner of artichoke pie.

‘It’s not work, it’s pleasure’ came her reply.

She was cradling, in her arms, a black and white skunk called Margarita.

April 21, 2025
‘Beware of the dog’: From Dovadola to Forlì

The town of Castrocaro Terme offered interesting street art and engaging conversation, but a strange encounter with a dog left me melancholy.

In the night we’d been visited by a storm which had brought with it thunder, lightning and heavy rain and so, over a breakfast of delicious fresh yoghurt, apricot jam and honey, I talked with Benjamin and Michaela, his partner and co-host, about the perilous weather in the region.

Mud slides and flooding had occurred in May of 2023 and an earthquake had struck in September of the same year. Their driveway had been split in two. In Faenza the river had broken its banks and Montemignaio had been cut off completely for 10 days. Two people had lost their lives.

Michaela showed me images on her phone – they were catastrophic.

Pepe, their small black dog, licked my hand, insinuating that he would be thrilled to share my breakfast thank you very much.

I’m not a big dog person and during this cammino I have been quite scared on occasion at the ferocious barking that greets you when you pass by houses in town and country alike.

They have, affixed to their gates, the sign, ‘beware of the dog.’

Michaela who is an interpreter fluent in Italian, French and Spanish explained that her and Benjamin spoke to one another and their two female children in French but that the dog was Spanish.

‘Pepe, ven aquí!’

I felt comfortable in this plurilinguistic environment and spoke to the dog in an accented Spanish that I had learnt in Cuba at the age of 19.

In canto 31 of Inferno, Dante offers an explanation for the world having multiple languages, or a ‘confusion of tongues.’ As was church doctrine at the time, he sees it as a punishment for the construction, by Nimrod the giant, of the Tower of the Babel through which he sought to reach God and glory.

‘He is his own accuser;
for this is Nimrod, through whose wicked thought
one single language cannot serve the world.

Leave him alone—let’s not waste time in talk;
for every language is to him the same
as his to others—no one knows his tongue.’

It is said that this tower was destroyed by an earthquake,

‘No earthquake ever was so violent
when called to shake a tower so robust’

The Tower of Babel is the subject of three stunning paintings by the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

According to the principle of contrapasso whereby the punishment is an inversion of the sin, Dante punishes Nimrod not with linguistic diversity, as in all previous versions of the story, but by assigning him a non-language that communicates non-sense.

As the Dante critic Teodolind Barolini explains, the social analogue to the linguistic fall is betrayal: the misuse and corrosion of the bonds that tie humans into social and familial consortia.

After the terrible weather events of 2023, Michaela and Benjamin had taken in two donkeys who had been displaced. Their names were Socrates and Augustine.

I passed them and saluted them as I set off on my way. Ducks were quaking in the reservoir as I descended the hill at 11:30am. The rain was spitting.

Dante includes rain among the punishments for the violent against God, nature and art in canto 14 of Inferno, although his is a rain of fire. The arid desert of the third ring of the seventh circle is compared to the African deserts trod by Roman Cato, and Alexander the Great is evoked as having experienced in India a similar rain of fire:

‘Above that plain of sand, distended flakes
of fire showered down; their fall was slow—
as snow descends on alps when no wind blows.

Just like the flames that Alexander saw
in India’s hot zones, when fires fell,
intact and to the ground, on his battalions,

for which—wisely—he had his soldiers tramp
the soil to see that every fire was spent
before new flames were added to the old;

so did the never-ending heat descend;
with this, the sand was kindled just as tinder
on meeting flint will flame—doubling the pain.’

The rivers of Hell, meanwhile, Virgil informs Dante, are created by the tears of the Old Man of Crete.

It was cold and so I was wearing my yellow striped hoodie under my anorak, the only thing that I had left in my backpack that was dry.

I had washed my hair with the conditioner I’d purchased yesterday and tied it in two braids that hung down my neck. I’d put nardo oil on my feet before the plasters. I was getting short. I’d have to buy more in Forlì.

I walked along a road for 15 minutes feeling anxious of the speeding cars. The clouds were bulbous and pregnant with rain.

Soon the roar of the lorries was replaced by that of the river and I proceeded to a more tranquil trail. Wisteria pods hung off their stems like runner beans. They were soft to the touch like donkey ears.

I wondered why on earth I’d packed two pairs of shorts.

I passed by vines which were contorting their limbs on one side of the path and, to the other, olive trees were bunched together, a dusty green.

Soon I entered the town of Castrocaro Terme which is known for its healing thermal waters. The fortress towered over me. The greenery on its top looked like a toupee.

An acer tree thriving in the ground told me something of the composition of the soil. A DHL delivery driver in a yellow van was playing drum and bass.

The first café I tried for lunch was closed – of course, it was a Thursday? But in a little square I found a bar outside of which an elderly man was coughing over a thick cigar.

As I ate a mozzarella and rocket sandwich which had been freshly prepared, we got chatting. His name was Silvano which means ‘man of the woods.’ When I explained about my cammino he began citing canto 3 of Inferno where Dante crosses the river Acheron, guided by Charon.

‘here, advancing toward us, in a boat,
an aged man—his hair was white with years —
was shouting: “Woe to you, corrupted souls!

… Charon, pilot of the livid marsh,
whose eyes were ringed about with wheels of flame.’

The demon Charon, with his eyes like embers,
by signaling to them, has all embark;
his oar strikes anyone who stretches out.’

Although Dante’s verse doesn’t describe his crossing of the Acheron in Charon’s boat, since he faints with fear, his voyage has been imagined by several prominent painters including the Frenchman Delacroix.

Silvano and I discussed the Euro, Brexit and who had killed Princess Diana. He was impressed, as was I, that King Charles had given a short speech in Italian on a recent visit to Ravenna. When he complemented me on my Italian I replied,

‘The Italian language is logical. Well, the language is logical, but not always what people say.’

He chortled heartily. It felt good to be able to make a joke in a foreign language.

A rum and tea was two euros fifty.

I took my jumper off since the rain had stopped and the humidity returned. Some of the other men in the bar chuckled, one explaining that when he’d gone to a wedding in England, he had been the only own dressed in a jacket while all the other guests were practically nude. Us Brits like to expose ourselves at the first sign of Spring, whereas the Italians cautiously hang on to their feather jackets, or piumini until May at the very least.

Silvano who had owned a gift shop by the seaside prior to his retirement was struck by my lapis lazuli necklace. It was gift from my East German friend Susanna who does ecological activism in Guatemala.

‘She’s doing the Grand Tour!’ one patron cried. ‘You’re here to cultivarti – to culture yourself, no? Just like the British elite did in the 19^th century?’

It turned out his name was Giovanni and he was a respiratory doctor who worked in the thermal baths.

I left Silvano and Giovanni with a ‘buon appetito’ after an hour of rich conversation and carried on my way. Because of the weather, I decided not to take advantage of the many gelaterie.

The town benches had been painted in different colours with messages that sought to bring hope to the local people. One read, ‘I keep asking myself, would there still be war if people used their brains?’ Another, ‘no to violence against women’ and another still, ‘one less piece of rubbish in the environment is a smile for the people’ – a phrase that rhymes in the original Italian.

There was a random photo booth in the street next to a Perspex bus stop. A school wall was painted with a mural depicting women from around the world and a garden contained a series of stone sculpture people.

The town had a surplus of banks, and there was the fizzy water fountain, next to a defibrillator. A small park with fairground rides sat next to an ugly breeze block hotel. Someone had graffitied a rather accurate penis on a bin.

The town wouldn’t be a bad place to grow old, I contemplated. It reminded me of the spa town of Balneari Prats where I had spent time with my yoga guru Mary Paffard in Spain during multiple Springs.

I exited through the medieval walls of the city, the cobbled stones serving as a welcome massage for my feet. Two children’s bicycles had been discarded on a corner without locks. There was an unexpected little forest of bamboo to the right.

I stopped to explore the beautiful little church of Santa Reparata where there was a strong smell of bleach. Here too, women were cleaning in preparation for the Easter services. Outside, a lady was trying to entice two cats off the roof of her car.

As I proceeded to the off-road track that would take me all the way to Forlì beside the river, I met an Italian man with hiking poles.

‘Be careful,’ he said, ‘it’s super muddy.’

I thanked him and carried on. Mud? I could handle mud by now.

Upon reaching the riverbank, I disturbed a heron who flew – dinosaur like – into the grey air.

The path was poorly trodden and tall grasses obscured it here and there. I’d attached my hiking sticks to my backpack since the terrain was flat and, without knowing what to do with my hands, I tugged on my braids and ran my fingers through the flora.

Soon I arrived at an expansive mud flat which had the texture of quicksand on a beach.

The Abominable Sands is a location in Dante’s Inferno. Indeed, it is the third and final region of the Seventh Circle of Hell.

I thought of Dante’s description:

‘The ground was made of sand, dry and compact,
a sand not different in kind from that
on which the feet of Cato had once tramped.’

In places, this sand was certainly far from dry and compact and the gentleman had certainly been right about the mud. I proceeded tentatively, one step at a time, managing to avoid submersion.

Red poppies clustered at the feet of vines to my left and an ugly piece of orange plastic netting blocked off a worksite.

Then I took a sharp left into the woods.

The brambles reminded me of home, however I was relieved that there were relatively few nettles. A man mowed a lawn behind a hedge and I observed a plastic red chair stuck in a tree.

Though the path was deserted, I took comfort in the dog prints that marked the path before me.

The cloud still hanged low but the sun was starting to break through. I removed my anorak and enjoyed the feel of the breeze and occasional sun on my skin. My bare arms were covered in bramble scratches from earlier in the hike when I’d got lost in the woods with Alina.

I noted the contrast between the wild grasses and the tidy vines. There was an abundance of a beautiful spiky, thistle-like plant that was streaked white and green.

Inspired by the morning’s conversation, I sent a voice note in French to my friend and former student Sahra from Afghanistan who had moved from Italy to Belgium a couple of months prior where she was applying for university. Her response came quickly in a mix of Italian and French.

‘You’re like a Sufi,’ she said. ‘Sufis walk and wonder.’

I recalled placing a basket bin on my head and spinning in my mum’s white silk dressing gown as a child after we returned from a holiday in Turkey.

‘I’m a whirling dervish,’ I had exclaimed.

And then there was the time I’d been to a global Sufi gathering on the Algerian border with my Moroccan friend Miriam. One woman had become so ecstatic she had collapsed in a fit of ecstasy. Some say Dante was influenced in writing the Divine Comedy by Sufi mysticism.

I passed a greenhouse with plants erupting through the roof and briefly conversed with two ladies who were hiking with a dog called Clifford. They agreed with me that Dante would have wanted me to do the walk this way, finishing in Florence and not Ravenna. Did I need anything?

Further ahead, I saw a family complete with a dog, toddler, bike and pram. The middle child was racing ahead on his cycle and circling back in a burst of freedom.

As I turned a corner, there appeared a black dog who was sporting a red bandana round his neck. Cautious at first, I pulled my hand into a fist to let it sniff me which it did tentatively. Then it looked at me as if to say, ‘are you coming?’ and trotted on.

For well over an hour, I followed the dog as it made its way alone along the Dante path. At each fork in the road, I wondered whether it might turn the other way. But on it went in the direction of Forlì. When I stopped to pee, drink or rest, so it stopped too. And mad as it sounds, it appeared to be smiling at me, lolling out its neon pink tongue and wagging its tail erect.

As I ducked under a surplus of ivy, I lost sight of it and felt a pang of sadness. But then there it was again. This part of the path was more well-trodden and I imagined it was a common recreational ground for the locals. Still, there was nobody around except me and my new guide.

All the while, he kept ahead at a distance of around three metres. Now the dog prints ahead of me made sense.

I felt my belly rumble and wanted to stop for a snack, but I was scared of losing this dog who I had by now nicknamed Virgil.

It stopped to defecate, yawning with his mouth wide open.

My leg had acquired a sprig of sticky weed. I blew a dandelion for no one else but myself. One obstinate seed stayed on the stem.

The river to my right gurgled like my stomach.

I wondered if the owner had dropped Virgil at Castrocaro Terme to let him take himself on a walk back to his home in Forlì. I tried to approach him to check his tag but he wouldn’t let me come close, only follow him.

He was quicker than me up the hill but when I turned the corner, there he was panting, still waiting for me.

My shoes were rubbing and I would have stopped to rest and take some ibuprofen, but for the dog, I had to continue.

He kept peeking his head back to check I was still there. Where was he going?

On the ground were fallen ivy leaves shaped like hearts and soon, as we passed through another prairie, Virgil’s back became covered in yellow petals from the flowers. A seed that looked like soft cotton on stems and another that resembled a caterpillar fell from the trees above me to my feet.

I thought we must be getting close to Forlì. There was some kind of industry that looked like a quarry on the left and pretty soon we hit a main road. Would Virgil now abandon me?

None of my friends had dogs and I was a cat person. I had a cat called Dante Alighi-‘hairy’ and, before that, I’d had Toffee, a rescue with anxiety issues. When I’d gone to the vet to put her down, my friend Danni accompanied me. I was so traumatized that I had vomited in the sink in the veterinary surgery. I still owe Danni 100 pounds for the procedure.

I was playing music on my iPhone which was tucked into my bra, the words of Talos rang out,

‘Your love is an island, I’m scorched in the sands of it.’

Virgil went under an underpass. I thought the way would be to the left, but I followed him. When I checked the map, he was right.

I wished I had some kind of treat to offer him, but the relationship was not reciprocal. He was leading me. Now, when he stopped to sniff something, I waited for him.

‘I’m here. Don’t worry I’m here,’ I said.

I could suddenly understand how people got so attached to their dogs. He was so loyal.

I think this was the longest I’d walked without taking a break. It was coming up to ninty minutes.

It was 5 o’clock and the sun now definitively occupied the sky having won the battle with the rain clouds. Virgil drank from a clear puddle in the path that hugged a ploughed field to the left.

When we came back to the river where I was supposed to cross, he jumped in for a swim and waited for me on the opposite bank. The current was strong and, lo and behold, there was no bridge. I would later learn that it had been washed away in the recent heavy rainfall. For now, I was quite literally stuck in the mud.

Five minutes passed as I tried to work out a solution. We locked eye contact. I couldn’t cross the river but to turn back to the road would mean to leave him.

I thought about taking my leggings off and trying to wade over but the water looked deep and the current spooked me.

I stood there on the shore feeling tears prick at my eyes and the muddy water soaked once more into my boots. My feet ached and I wanted to sit down and consider my options, but I couldn’t: the riverbank was a swamp of ash-coloured mud. My feet were slowly sinking down above the ankle.

A jogger ran past Virgil on the other side of the bank. I contemplated calling out to her.

I turned to wade back onto solid ground and when I looked back, Virgil was gone.

I walked five minutes to a bench and was just quiet for a while, listening to the sound of bird song. I noticed a little mushroom underneath the bench which was like a nipple in shape and size. I bit into an apple I had bought yesterday. It was the size of a fist, red and yellow.

I had a video of Virgil swimming across the river which I now watched obsessively on repeat.

I picked some grass out of the zip of my anorak with my hands and put it back on. A large pigeon flew through the trees. Finally, I took some ibuprofen for my feet.

I was riddled with a melancholy I found hard to understand. Virgil had crossed the river Acheron and I had not.

I headed back to the main road to take an alternative route into Forlì with a sigh.

April 20, 2025
A Secular Pigrim: From Portico di Romagna to Dovadola

People keep addressing me as a pilgrim which feels strangely comfortable, but my path is pantheistic.

At the start of canto 2 of Inferno, Virgil tells Dante that it is Beatrice who has sent him to guide him on his journey. Dante is reassured. He responds by describing how,

‘As little flowers, which the chill of night
has bent and huddled, when the white sun strikes
grow straight and open fully on their stems,

so did I, too, with my exhausted force’

Like Dante, I set off this morning standing tall but with some weariness in my body. I had a 33-kilometre day ahead of me and my feet were still painful from being waterlogged for the last two days. My boots hadn’t dried out in the night as I’d hoped they might, and so to put them on was to submerge my feet into a damp abyss.

I squelched my way out into the sun to set off at 9am. The golden orb had returned, at least momentarily.

I couldn’t help but stop for a coffee in the café I had visited yesterday to salute Lisl. A man in an African shirt was sat on a tall stall reading the paper. It turned out he was from Burkino Faso and he appeared delighted when I spoke to him in French. Once again that thought crept into my mind, ‘I could live here.’

Lisl put added a powder to my coffee,

‘It’s ginseng,’ she explained, ‘it will make you more powerful.’

After getting lost and losing phone signal the day before yesterday, I made sure to text my mum and let her know where I was heading and my estimated arrival time. Nadia had sent me another lovely message saying that my blog was helping her to see and appreciate Dante through a new sociological lens.

‘It’s so much more interesting that the way we’re taught at school,’ she said. ‘You’re now like my academic Virgil!’

I wondered whether the fact sociology is less respected in Italy, as Alim had opined last night, was why there were so many Italian sociologists in the UK. The migration research centre where I work, IRiS, at the University of Birmingham, counts three.

It was 9.30am by the time I left the bar. A band of us had had another long discussion about the prospect of rain. In these parts, people seem to enjoy talking about rain as much as in England.

On this walk, I’m finding that it’s a constant challenge to manage my time between walking, writing and making memories with new people. But I’m determined to write every day. The writing feels as important as the walking.

As the critic Osip Mandelstam has observed, the rhythm of Dante’s prose – in the form he invented of terza rime – third line rhymes – reminds us of the footsteps of a walk. He writes,

‘Inferno, and even more so Purgatory, celebrate the human journey, the measure and rhythm of our steps, the foot and its form…Dante’s is a prosaic modality. He pictures the coming and goings of life drawing on multiform and captivating expressions. In Dante, philosophy and poetry are always on the move, always on their feet.’

I followed to Via dei caduti – the way of the fallen – up for about 5 kilometres before I stopped to see what is known as the world’s smallest volcano which has been active since before 1500. In reality, the perennial flame is due to the emanation of gaseous hydrocarbons which, in contact with oxygen, remain perpetually on. The flames that emerge from the subsoil, in the middle of an uncultivated field, create a particular sight that reminded me of Ulysses speaking to Dante from within the tongue of far – could this have inspired him?

I stayed a while to look at the body of a dead mole. Its hands were leathery with large talons stemming from them. Then I set back off.

Pink flowers had climbed through the centre of an abandoned traffic cone in the hedgerow and buttercups, cow parsley, and dandelions lined the verges of the road. I was glad to have a single path to follow so I couldn’t get lost. Here to my right were hexagonal, indigo flowers, and there, a mauve plant that looked a bit like lavender but without the smell.

Tractors were loading hay bales into a lorry and I passed more piles of wood and a fence weaved with sticks the way I’ve seen in Shining Cliff Woods near my house back home.

The sweat was dripping down my forehead, but I resisted the temptation to put my cap on for fear I would fate the sun to disappear.

I passed by rosehip, the fruit of which we’d used at my primary school as a form of itching powder, and modesty, the seeds of which my brother and I used to shake out and use as money in pretend games of a summer.

A black goat bleated from behind an electric fence and out of the margins there emerged a wild iris, a vivid purple in the sun. A happy bee buzzed past and a couple of butterflies tentatively made their way back out into the sunlight after the rain

It was a show and steady ascent with panoramic views of the town. Electric cables were strung across the landscape like fairy lights on a Christmas tree.

A single stone house with a terra-cotta roof was nuzzled into the bosom of the rolling hills.

The path was covered in more broken tiles that would have made for spectacular mosaic pieces had I only had the space in my bag: there was a flower, some sunglasses, a pineapple, pink, purple, yellow and green – perhaps we could adopt this method to fill the ubiquitous potholes in England. The Department for Transport had recently said that the local authorities’ road maintenance pot would be boosted by £500m from mid-April, but councils must publish annual reports detailing progress on potholes or lose a quarter of that extra funding.

I heard the familiar rustle of lizards and a frog jumped into the stream to the right of the road. But would the weather hold?

I was making slow progress at about 4 kilometres an hour, unlike the cyclists who sped past me up the hill in their fifty shades of lycra. At one point the road was interrupted by a landslide, the asphalt shredded into black puzzle pieces.

My bag was definitely heavier than the recommended weight of 10 pounds and I was reminded of the proud penitents who carry heavy rocks on their backs in Purgatorio. The weight forces them to walk slowly, their bodies bent low to the ground. Dante compares the suffering of the hunched souls to the human figures (with knees to their chest and pained expressions) used in architecture to support a ceiling or roof.

‘Just as one sees at times—as corbel for
support of ceiling or of roof—a figure
with knees drawn up into its chest (and this

oppressiveness, unreal, gives rise to real
distress in him who watches it): such was
the state of those I saw when I looked hard.

They were indeed bent down—some less, some more—
according to the weights their backs now bore;
and even he whose aspect showed most patience,

in tears, appeared to say: “I can no more.

Hairpin turn after hairpin turn, I proceeded up with my stash of coffee and a cachet of teabags. I was carrying two litres of water, Alina’s socks, my blue eyeliner, a Pokémon card and one tile fragment – the one with the pineapple – that I just hadn’t been able to resist picking up.

On a wall there was graffitied ‘Viva la resistenza Palestinese‘ (long live the Palestine resistance).

Unlike previous days where I’d been totally alone, today I passed a few individuals. I oscillated between ‘ciao,’ ‘salve’ and ‘buongiorno’ and people returned a friendly reply.

The village of Monte Busca announced itself by the sight of wheat and a display of orange flowers that did not appear wild. Here, potholes in the road had been filled with tarmac. A man sat outside a wood workshop eating a yoghurt next to a stack of abandoned crates. There were sweeping views on either side of the path.

Much thought has gone into this route so that, wherever possible, you are not walking on the road but it felt good to have my feet on solid ground.

The expansive green lawns that cascaded down the slopes reminded me of the quads of Oxford colleges, although these always came with a sign, ‘do not step on the grass.’ Here I could tread as I pleased. I thought back to the Wadham summer ball. At 6 in the morning a group of us had staggered out onto the quad in a rare opportunity to laze there for a while, hung over and cuddling one another for the fun of it all.

The cloud started to hang heavy and I could smell the oncoming rain.

By midday, I’d done 10 kilmetres. Since it was a long day, I was rationing my water intake. Thirsty, I bit into an apple and ate a cheese sandwich. As Dante writes also in canto 10 of Purgatorio,

‘I was exhausted; with the two of us
uncertain of our way, we halted on
a plateau lonelier than desert paths.’

Except now I was alone, walking with just the familiar sound of the cuckoo. It sounded like a child’s first notes on the recorder.

My guidebook was still a little damp, though it had spent all night on the radiator.

I snapped a nail heaving my bag back onto my shoulders. I hadn’t brought a nailfile and, though I’d gifted one to my twelve-year-old niece for her birthday, I didn’t have a Swiss army knife of my own.

With my bag I was now also carrying a spider as a stowaway.

I disturbed a dandelion, sending the seeds into a little cloud.

The path went from asphalt to gravel to concrete to woodland. It was hard to walk past an agriturismo without stopping but I had to keep moving forwards. I stopped briefly to change my sodden socks for dry ones, a piece of advice my friend Craig from the local pub, Angel’s, had given me before I set off. My feet felt like they were on fire, bringing to mind the popes who are buried in holes by Dante with their feet in flames.

‘Out from the mouth of each hole there emerged
a sinner’s feet and so much of his legs
up to the thigh; the rest remained within.

Both soles of every sinner were on fire;
their joints were writhing with such violence,
they would have severed withes and ropes of grass.

As flame on oily things will only stir
along the outer surface, so there, too,
that fire made its way from heels to toes.’

Inferno 19 is the first full-fledged indictment of the Church in the Divine Comedy, picking up on some earlier indications that Dante associates the clerical establishment with the sin of avarice. He, like me, was not a fan of organized religion, or at least as it existed in its contemporary form.

I sat for a while and observed some baby donkeys. They had soft hair on their heads, fluffy like little chicks. I thought about the similarity of their hooves and my nail that had just snapped off and of how all things in nature are connected.

The two calves hung close to their mother nuzzling her neck. One of them had a large penis that hung down. The other didn’t. One bit its mother’s mane playfully, and the mother nibbled the back knee of the lighter of the two which was coloured like ash.

Mud stuck to their fur which was wavy, and their ears looked soft to the touch. They were pointing forward. Did that mean that they were happy or scared?

I was reminded of a quote from Alice Walker’s novel, The Colour Purple,

‘Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up the flowers, wind, water, a big rock…The more I wonder, the more I love.’

Tiny flies buzzed around puddles on the muddy woodland path which I tried to avoid in order to keep my feet some semblance of dry.

Suddenly it became humid and I felt a twinge in my right buttock. I was tired from the uneven path and would be happy to get back on the road. Prickled by pines on the descent, I put one foot in front of the other on the narrow path like a tightrope walker. I got my foot caught in a bramble and nearly went tumbling

I ate some almond cake and chocolate and worried that I hadn’t factored enough rest days to the return.

At 2 o’clock the first rain came. I was counting the kilometers religiously on my phone, grateful for my solar powered phone charger. A beetle climbed onto my shoe. It was iridescent, despite the lack of sun.

Curious ants had burrowed minuscule holes in the ground and a yellow and black butterfly soared past me, the first I’ve seen of its kind. White and brown ones abound.

To the right, solar panels spilled over the landscape reflecting the light like strips of unraveled cassette tape.

I saw cows in a field which always reminded me of my dad and the game Spot It that we would play in the car as children. You had a series of cards with things to see on the road: a tractor, a yellow car, a phone box etc. Once my dad had taken a 2 kilometre detour via a fire station so that he could trump us with his fire engine card.

At 4 o’clock, the mist started to descend, and the top of the hills were obscured

Haybales had been tucked up in tarpaulin and an abandoned piece of farming equipment was slowly rusting outside an old farmhouse.

The cloud hung in heavy curtains, a blind folding down over the undulating hills.

An bathtub containing water was propped up on the marsh by two pieces of wood. Daisies stretched out on their storks which were the length of a ruler.

I turned the corner and there it was, the village of Dovadola, with its winding path that would take me to shelter. The stark cliff faces were a mark of the ancient river that had forged the valley. Once again, the rocks were caged in to avoid landslides. As my earth sciences major mother had taught me, geology is the language of the land.

I heard the familiar sound of the church bell strike 5pm and felt a pang of hunger. I’d always liked the sound of church bells just like in Morocco and Syria I had so enjoyed the call to prayer.

Wisteria was hanging down from fences like bunches of grapes. The scent was something akin to the tiny round violet sweets that I would eat as a child. A three-wheel vehicle passed me. It was an emerald green.

I passed the FC Dovalda football ground and an older church in town with a medieval tower. Someone stopped to asked me if I was doing the cammino of Assisi but I explained that I was a secular pilgrim doing the Dante cammino. I was a pantheist and following nature as my guide.

I went into the to bar the Antica Osteria and had a delicious spinach and ricotta crecione. This regional plate is a folded piadina in the shape of a half-moon. It looks like one big piece of ravioli, or rather, a raviolo.

I was self-conscious that I smelt but the atmosphere in the joint was intoxicating. An older lady sat in the corner peeling plastic labels off a new set of plates. A little girl called Lucia was dressed as Snow White and sat terrorizing a black cat.

‘It’s from the Befana!’ she shrieked, alluding to the old witch who brings sweets on the epiphany according to Italian folklore.

Another group of kids hung about in a gaggle around the ice cream freezer. Outside the adults were smoking. One of them had a beautiful wolf-like dog called Deni. After spending the day walking alone it was nice to be in company and I stayed and talked awhile.

I brought some cheese, tomatoes, dates, a big apple, pistachio nuts and some much-needed hair conditioner from a local store and continued with the next 50 minutes down the busy road to my agriturismo.

I passed the sign to Loch Ness fishing zone and a petrol station. In Italy they put in the petrol for you, so you don’t even have to exit your car for a fill up.

I already missed being up in the hills with the wildflowers. I thought back again of Oxford and how I’d religiously learnt all their names in translation. We had had to learn an insane amount of very specific vocabulary in French and Italian. I still have a cushion my friend Caroline sewed for me with the opening phrase from our French translation exam,

‘You are the most wonderful hippogriff.’

Now I’ve been here a week, I’ve started thinking in Italian.

The final leg involved another steep ascent along a winding road. I tried to channel the spirt of Virgil as my guide. As Dante writes when he finally reaches the slopes of Mount Purgatory, leaving Hell behind:

‘The climb had sapped my last strength when I cried:
“Sweet Father, turn to me: unless you pause
I shall be left here on the mountainside!”

He pointed to a ledge a little ahead
that wound around the whole face of the slope.
“Pull yourself that much higher, my son,” he said.

His words so spurred me that I forced myself
to push on after him on hands and knees
until at last my feet were on that shelf.’

Thus I arrived in the Airbnb, Naturaliterre BnB – Microfattoria, a sweaty mess.

I was greeted by Benjamin, a kind French host who ordered me a pizza and put my boots by the fire. I checked my email to see that I had received a beautiful note from Anna in Montemignaio. There is so much love on this cammino. I feel held by the path itself.

Another email to my work account reminded me to finish a funding application this week and for once I felt inspired and up to it. I’d been holding myself back because of confidence, but if I could do this hike, I could do anything.

April 20, 2025
Dante’s Women: From Premilcuore to Portico di Romagna

Today’s short hike promised a rainbow but real colour came in the narrow streets of the medieval town where Beatrice’s family lived.

‘Gloom of Hell or of a night deprived

of all the stars, beneath a barren sky

Which everywhere was overcast with clouds’

With these words Dante begins the canto of Purgatorio 16. I could relate. All night, it hadn’t stopped raining and, as I opened the curtains, the grey clouds still hung in webs.

My top and bottoms had dried on the radiator, but my anorak was still slightly wet. My boots were soaked through.

Nadia had given me some sweet treats for breakfast the night before since, though it was Tuesday, today was their day off. They coordinate in the village so that no one closes on the same day.

There was no big rush to get going today since the hike to Portico di Romagna is one of the shortest of the cammino at around 10 kilometres. But still, I was a little wary after yesterday’s experience of getting lost.

I caught up with work emails, performed my usual ritual of folding my hiking socks over my laces so that they would not become untied, and by 11am I had set off into the spitting rain. I stopped briefly at a panettiere – bread shop – and bought a slice of vegetable pizza to complement my sweet breakfast, breaking the hard and fast Italian rule of not eating on the move.

By the time I exited the town over the bridge, the rain had eased off a bit and sunlight was pushing through the clouds. In Canto 17 of Purgatorio, Dante makes a similar observation on the particular microclimate of the region, writing,

‘Remember, reader, if you’ve ever been
caught in the mountains by a mist through which
you only saw as moles see through their skin,

how, when the thick, damp vapors once begin
to thin, the sun’s sphere passes feebly through them,
then your imagination will be quick’

It was. I scanned 360° for a rainbow but was left disappointed.

As I made the ascent, I thought of the line from the film Forrest Gump, ‘I’d never seen so many shades of green until I went to Vietnam [insert Premilcuore].

To my left were horses with bells tied around their neck nodding in the rain, their mains slick to their necks.

There was something in the rolling hills of the Lake District in my native England as I looked back down towards the town.

A brown spider the size of my little fingernail crossed the path.

The concrete way had foot and paw prints cast into it, reminding me of the concrete in my garden back home. I’d have to do something with it upon my return. I thought of my Great Aunt Lena who in her older age would still bend forward with a butter knife to tease the weeds out from the cracks.

The path transitioned to tarmac which was coated in petals that had been cast into the air like confetti at a wedding. Some of the blossom had caught on the needles of the pines, embellishing them like Christmas trees.

It felt strange to be walking along the path strewn with the petals. I was reminded of my wedding to my former husband which had taken place in Port Meadow, Oxford. I had been an excellent bride, but a terrible wife, though I still have fond memories of the day which was themed around love art, and revolution. I had shown Alina some pictures two days before. She had complemented my mother’s sewing work on the dress I wore in the engagement shoot in Wadham College gardens.

Here the path turned to mud with a little strip of green running down the middle, riddled with an abundance of rust-coloured pinecones. Encroaching at the sides were imposing, prickly trees. I thought of the aide-memoire I’d learnt to identify plants in the White Mountains – ‘spiky, spruce; friendly fern.’

I suddenly realized that with the rain had come the absence of lizards, bees, and butterflies and I missed them.

I was feeling tired, achy and nostalgic.

Dante, like me, had not suited married life, though for him it had been more of a familial negotiation rather than anything to do with love. When he was exiled, it is said his wife Emma Donati would cry in the streets where she was left behind with her children. Dante, on his travels, continued to pen poetry to his one true love, Beatrice Portinari.

An ancient legend goes that Dante met Beatrice in Portico di Romagna where her family owned an estate, though Dante himself writes that he first saw her as a girl and then when she was 19 in Florence on the Santa Trinità bridge. This image was rendered immortal by Henry Holiday in 1884.

Dante’s treatment of women in the Divine Comedy is proto feminist. Although they rarely speak, he was one of the first writers to document the lives of women in Medieval Italy at all and he depicts them in various roles: as victims of domestic violence, harlots and saviors. The fact that he was guided in Paradise by a woman was revolutionary and, though she is put on a pedestal, she is also ‘real’. She chastises Dante for his sins and baulks at him for not listening attentively to her philosophizing.

Another woman, Mathilda, is given the task of baptizing him in the river before he can enter the Earthly Paradise at the top of Purgatorio. For the umpteenth time, Dante passes out, and when he comes to, Mathilda is reviving him in the river Lethe. Some people believe Dante may have had a condition like epilepsy or narcolepsy because of how many times he passes out, and how realistic his descriptions are of coming back to himself.

Mathilda has been compared to a priestess,although the Roman Catholic Church forbids women from being ordained as priests. Dante confesses to having erotic feelings for her however she quickly assumes the role of teacher and sister-in-Christ to Dante when she scolds him and refers to him as frate, or ‘brother’. Mathilda, far from being a romantic interest for Dante, demonstrates the brotherly love found between the blessed souls of Paradise.

This representation of the Beatrice and Mathilda is foreshadowed by Dante in Canto 27 where he has his character dream of Leah and Rachel, Mathilda and Beatrice’s biblical counterparts.

The issue of women was in my mind today as the UK Supreme Court made a controversial and cruel ruling to deny rights to trans women by deciding that the legal definition of women in the Equalities Act only relates to biological sex. I messaged my trans friend Andie back home to see how she had received the news.

‘I’m terrified,’ she replied. ‘I can’t change – I’ve come too far. But had I not come out in 2017, I wouldn’t come out in today’s climate. How fucking sad is that?’

To the right the slope was precipitous. A blister at the top of my middle toe pushed painfully against the inside of my wet shoe as I kicked conkers along the trail that had fallen from the horse chestnut trees. As kids, my brother and I had tried all sorts of tactics to try to strengthen them so that we might compete with them honorably in the playground: baking them, freezing them, soaking them in vinager. How did we play? Well, you would thread a string through with a needle and then compete to crack open the opposing party’s conker. It was good, honest fun, but fun that had been banned in my Middle School on health and safety grounds.

Their cases lay split open like sea urchins on the ground.

The air was fresh and my spirit lifted.

Now that the path was easy to follow and I knew the day was short, it was fantastic to be outside alone in the forest. With absolutely no one around, I listened to some music on my phone which was tucked into my pocket – the Italian composer Einaudi’s album, Seven Days of Walking.

Needles from the pine trees reminded me of another childhood game, pick-a-sticks, where you’d let a tray of thin sticks go from your hands and then try to remove them from the pile without disturbing the others. There was a version at Anna’s house Air B&B in Castel San Niccolò , but Alina and I had been too tired to play.

A tree which had fallen down was consumed by ivy which threaded tightly around it like the serpents who take over the souls’ bodies in Dante’s circle of the thieves.

A cuckoo sounded like a hollow wooden wind instrument

I walked downstream tentatively over the slippery lime, disturbing several boulders. I was still cautious after yesterday’s fall, though I was relieved to see that my arm had not come out in a bruise.

As Dante writes of him and Virgil in canto 12 of Inferno,

‘And so we made our way across that heap
of stones, which often moved beneath my feet
because my weight was somewhat strange for them.’

Unlike the other souls in Hell who are bestowed with the quasi-Foucauldian invention of ‘aerial bodies’ that can experience pain while exerting no weight, Dante, the living pilgrim, also disturbs the land around him.

Now it was raining in earnest but not quite so hard as yesterday. The sun still couldn’t make up its mind. I kept my hood down, enjoying the pitter patter of raindrops on my forehead.

A small brown bird chirped alone on an electric wire and something like bulrushes lined the little stream to the left of the path.

I was starting to enjoy my own company.

And with that, the sun exploded out.

I was so happy to see the sun again that I stopped to nibble on a pistachio and chocolate biscuit. A bee puffed past like a yellow pom pom; a tiny beetle the size of a penny coin climbed onto my rucksack, iridescent.

As I descended into Portico di Romagna, a range of stark orange tubes cut into the earth to channel the stream, the mark of humans interfering with the landscape to try to master the ubiquitous water of the region.

Before me lay a beautiful scene. A medieval arched bridge framed a permaculture plantation in which herbs sprouted in a bathtub and old pipe into which holes had been drilled. A tortured vine hanged from a scaffold. Something of the scene reminded me of Hebden Bridge.

The river ran ferociously in rapids from all the recent rainfall. It was a sandy brown, coloured by silt.

As I followed the steep street as it winded upwards, I was rewarded with the sight of flower boxes bursting forth with tropical plants which were clearly happy in the wet, temperate climate: bromelias, calla lilies and ferns. There were painted pebbles and succulents planted into tree barks. Someone had posted poetry on their door, another had hung Nepali prayer flags from their window.

Around the corner, just before the central arch, there appeared the jewel of the town, the amazing ‘Libri Libreria’ or ‘free book bookshop’. Though I knew I couldn’t carry the weight of a book, I couldn’t help but go in. The walls were lined with all manner of tomes. Comfy antique sofas and strings of poetry made for a welcoming environment.

I rounded the corner and took a coffee in a bar in which a group of men, all wearing flat caps, were playing at cards. They were waving their arms around in the passion of the game. A younger man with a broken arm sat outside smoking. He was chatting to a man in an orange waterproof with a walking stick.

Lisl, the bar owner, told me there were two English couples who lived in the town who usually spent their evenings there. For her part, she told me she was from the Philippines. She offered to make me a sandwich for tomorrow’s hike.

‘I could live here,’ I thought.

I saw the longest worm I’ve ever seen as I walked down to the B&B, the Molino di Sopra. Next to the house, the river had burst its banks and was straying onto the lawn. I was reminded of the great Florentine flood of 1966 which killed 101 people and damaged or destroyed millions of masterpieces of art and rare books, including Ghiberti’s famous bronze baptistry doors which were rescued and given sanctuary in the Duomo museum. The doors you see in the city today are replicas.

There was a big pile of logs stacked outside. This is the nature of the region, wood everywhere: wood and water.

My hosts for the night, Orlando and Cinzia, were incredibly welcoming, inviting me to dry my wet clothes by the fireplace and showing me up to the modern two-story apartment with a bed at the top and a view of the river. They’d already heard of me and my journey from my blog. When I handed it over, even my passport was sodden.

At 7.30pm I headed out to the only local restaurant, Il Vecchio Convento – The Old Convent, where I dined surrounded by orchids on an exceptional and somewhat extravagant set menu which included, among other things, strawberry gazpacho and wild rocket and carrot pesto gnocchi which were perfectly pan fried, like scallops.

Despite the fancy environs I was eager not to miss a bite so I ‘did the scarpetta’, the act of circling your plate with a piece of bread to absorb the remaining scraps and juices. The plates were flat with raised edges like the ones my friend Carly makes back home and my knife and fork came with a little raised plate to perch them upon. Lounge jazz played in the background.

I felt underdressed in my hiking gear. At least I had put on, with my sandals, Alina’s glittery mismatching socks.

‘See,’ she later wrote to me, ‘they’re not that impractical after all!’ She also sent me a video she had made of our trip which nearly made me cry.

I was tempted to go back to the bar to meet the English locals but I was tired and had a long day of walking ahead and so I carried on back to the B&B beneath a night sky which was now strewn with stars. Finally, the cloud had lifted, and as Dante writes at the end of Inferno,

‘thus, we departed to see once more the stars’.

I stopped a while to contemplate the Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt and listen to the roar of the river.

Recommended Listening: Einaudi, Seven Days of Walking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_Walking

Recommended Viewing: Forrest Gump: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109830/

April 17, 2025
Snow on the Mountaintop: From Passo della Calla to Premilcuore

The unrelenting rain made the path treacherous, and I got lost, only to re-find myself again with new friends eating pecorino.

It wasn’t easy to leave the luxurious round bed this morning, but the weather forecast predicted rain from about midday. The earlier I left, the less chance I’d have of repeating yesterday’s wipe out.

To leave early and avoid the rain or stay in bed and walk for a while beneath the drizzle, that was the question.

I took the middle ground.

I took my breakfast of a rather disappointing raspberry tart at around 8.30am – my one disillusionment with an otherwise exceptional hotel – and was on the road by 9am.

I’m a savory breakfast kind of girl and one of my only gripes with Italy is the madness of calling a cornetto or croissant a morning meal. Oh no. I’m a vegetarian but I need sustenance – cheese, bread, eggs.

I thought back to the yearly hiking trips I would do in the Lake District with my folks and two other families: the Halsteads and the Milns. Well, the men would go hiking and the women would go to Lakeland Plastics to buy kitchenware. The exception was Barbara. She was, and remains, a badass.

At the Red Lion hotel in the morning before we set off, we’d all have a full English. When I’d ask for the ‘Walker’s Breakfast but without the sausage and black pudding the heavily mustached waiter would respond,

‘But then it’s not a walker’s breakfast, is it?’

Everyone around the table would guffaw. It was an annual joke, and I took pleasure in the familiarity of the routine.

I was dreading the prospect of the 3.5 kilometre hike up the winding road back to the path and had been told the shuttle bus wasn’t running out of season. Still, when I exited the hotel I met Giovanni, the grandfather of six-year-old the Desire with whom I’d exchanged conversation and giggles the evening prior.

‘I don’t suppose if I give you 10 Euros, you’d be willing to give me a lift back up to the trailhead?’ I cheekily proposed.

‘But of course!’ came his reply. ‘And don’t be daft about the money.’

On the way up in his cream leather upholstered 4-by-4, Giovanni pointed out the landslide to one side of the road where men were working to resecure the road. Temporary traffic lights had been installed to aid their toil.

He also remarked on the high number of trees that had been damaged or toppled over.

‘It’s the weight of the snow,’ he explained, ‘the trees have been here for centuries, but they’re not used to these new extreme climate conditions.’

Climate change is an issue that increasingly surfaces in my research with refugees. In my work in Guatemala and Mexico, I found that failing crops are a significant reason alongside poverty and natural disasters why some Indigenous families migrate upwards in search of better opportunities. It’s like the Grapes of Wrath but tipped sidewards on a diagonal axis.

Landslides were nevertheless also a feature of Dante’s time. In fact, he was pretty into Geology. In the Divine Comedy he mentions earthquakes, rivers, the shape of mountains and landslides, a desert of hot sand and some types of rocks (like the marble of Carrara).

The circles that make up Dante’s Hell gradually become smaller with less circumference, as Inferno is depicted like an inverted cone in a sphere, protruding towards Earth’s core. This image is based on calculations of Greek philosophers.

Virgil explains to Dante that the cone in the planet’s surface into which they descend formed when Lucifer, the fallen angel, fell to Earth. Indeed, the impact was so great that it shaped Earth’s surface, with continents formed on the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere covered by the sea (Dante didn’t know of the existence of the southern continents of Australia and Antarctica).

In the south, Dante depicted only the mountain of Purgatory. Purgatory, together with the holy city of Jerusalem, forms an axis passing Earth, where Lucifer’s belly sits at the centre. It’s an allegoric image, since Lucifer is damned as far as possible away from the sun and divine light.

In Canto 12 of Inferno, the travelers face a difficult climb down a steep and mountainous rock face. The terrain is passable, albeit tortuous, as if the travelers were making their way in the wake of an alpine landslide. They must climb down a rockslide in order to access the first ring of the seventh circle.

Virgil calls this rocky mass questa ruina (this ruin) and explains to Dante that the ruins of Hell were caused by Christ’s Harrowing of Hell: they are places where the infernal infrastructure was destroyed by the earthquake that preceded Christ’s arrival. Thus, the ruins are a continual witness to Hell’s defeat, its impotence in the face of an all-powerful divinity.

‘The place that we had reached for our descent
along the bank was alpine; what reclined
upon that bank would, too, repel all eyes.

Just like the toppled mass of rock that struck—
because of earthquake or eroded props—
the Adige on its flank, this side of Trent,

where from the mountain top from which it thrust
down to the plain, the rock is shattered so
that it permits a path for those above:

such was the passage down to that ravine.
And at the edge above the cracked abyss,
there lay outstretched the infamy of Crete.’

And with that, Dante and Virgil encounter the minotaur.

It is hypothesized, David Bressan relates, that the landslide is based on the a 3,000 year old landslide near the Italian city of Trento. Dante maybe visited this site, as he lived for a time in the nearby city of Verona.

After thanking Giovanni, I made the steep climb upwards to Mount Falco, passing a Madonna of the Forest.

Angel fibre was draped over the distant trees that peeked out between trunks. And higher still were more rounded clouds like those in Renaissance paintings. For a moment I imagined that I was in the world of Sonic the Hedgehog, like you could just jump and land on one of them to reach a new level.

The path expanded into a big field strewn with tiny blue wild flowers and animal droppings the size of olives. An army base sat to my left. I nearly took wrong path but I double checked after yesterday’s 3-kilometre detour.

The moss, like socks, covered the trees’ stems in a vibrant green.

And then I suddenly found myself in a snowy landscape.

Using the compass on my phone I decided to head back down to where I’d come from and just walk off piste in the direct of Fiumicello. I would give it 30 minutes and if I hadn’t re-found the path, I would have to give up and face the unappealing four hour hike back up the path I’d made back to Passo della Callo and call today a write off. Tears pricked at my eyes. I hated the thought of defeat.

With a foot of snow beneath me, I dug my heels in to keep my balance as I descended. Crocuses pushed up through snow, determined to mark the Spring.

The snow made it hard to make out the path, obscuring the tracks of pilgrims prior. Moreover, the rain in the night had formed a thin skin of ice over the terrain. Now I really was skiing – reliant on my sticks not to fall forward.

I followed the signs that looked like the polish flag, red and white, and proceeded tentatively to the sound of birdsong.

The snow soon soaked through my boots and there began seven hours of squelching forward with saturated socks and shoes. The water in my boots bubbled through the top of the canvas, reminding me of the jacuzzi I’d luxuriated in last night which now felt a world away.

In these treacherous conditions, it took me nearly 2 hours to descend 5 kilometers.

I wasn’t cold until the rain came at around 10.30am. My hood up, I reflected on the epicentre of Dante’s Hell where we meet Satan writhing in a lake of ice. Unlike many popular depictions of the time, Dante’s Hell was not all fire and brimstone. Rather, while we encounter fire in the higher spheres, the more serious crimes are punished by a frozen sense of total immobility.

In the belly of Hell are Judas, Brutus and Cassius who each writhe in one of Satan’s three mouths.

For Dante, the very worst sin was to betray one’s hosts like they did – perhaps something informed by his refugee experience.

I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but the commonly cited proverb attributed to Dante that ‘the deepest parts of Hell are reserved for those who stay neutral in times of conflict’ is simply not true.

I stuck to the side of the path where the snow was thinner and, without phone signal, I blindly carried on. The fog was now so thick that anything more than five metres away was obscured.

I eyed a footprint which appeared to be fox, or a wolf perhaps, and another that looked like a deer.

When I came to a steel barrier in the path with barbed wire either side, I shimmied my body around the side of it, clinging to the metal frame. I was back in a videogame.

Without peering down at the precipitous drop, I carried on. There is no public right of way in Italy as in England, but I’d learnt in my six days of the cammino that to make progress, ‘no entry’ signs on this trail are largly to be ignored.

I soon came to doubt this fact and felt foolish as I followed signs into a huge prairie where the straight path was well and truly lost.

Still with no phone signal and with my hard copy map of little use for its sparse detail, I spent about an hour circumventing the huge stretch of grass looking out for a red and white sign. There was nothing to be found. I heaved my body and rucksack up to the top of the hill to see if the advantage point would reveal the path but alas, there was nothing. I was well and truly fucked.

The anti-anxiety drugs I am currently taking helped me resist the temptation to panic, though my heartbeat was still racing at twice its normal speed. I could see tracks running here and there, but the mud and pools of water made the animal and human tracks indistinguishable.

Worried about water getting into my phone again, I used my chest as a ledge to protect it, walking forwards like a hunchback one step at a time. I found myself crossing my fingers and suddenly, out of the mist, there is appeared! A red and white lick of paint on a tree.

Hallelujah!

A few metres after that I saw a Cammino di Dante sign and, by God, I have never been more relieved to see a little block of wood – thank you Oliviero for your toils!

I took a deep breath but couldn’t stop to process recent events since the rain was now pouring and there was absolutely nothing in the way of shelter at any point today on the route. I had told my therapist Hugh that one of my fears for the walk was that an annoying fellow hiker might attach themselves to me, but in that moment, I would have given anything for a companion. I felt utterly and completely alone to face my fears. I had a first aid kit and a tinfoil blanket, but I hadn’t even thought to bring emergency flares with me. What was I thinking?

The path for the next three hours was literally just like sliding down a waterfall. I slipped about five times and banged by arm on a rock but the damage was superficial. The bank was so steep that with one proper fall you would go hurtling down the mountain side.

I had to balance pulling out my iPhone from my bra for directions with the risk of water damage and, since the charge had run out, I also had to plug it into my power bank which I tucked into my pocket. The cable caught up in the necklace Alina had gifted me and now I thought of her words of encouragement as I navigated the puddles and the precipitous edge. Forza, Jenny, forza! ‘You are destined to complete this trail.’

I’d gone from digging my heels into the snow this morning to walking sideways in a snowplow to try and defeat the soggy leaves which collected at the bottom of my poles like I was a garbage collector. My fingers had become like prunes and my boots thudded on the rocks for the extra weight of the water they had accumulated.

As I descended into Fiumicello – literally meaning little river – the muddy banks of the stream on my right side had given in so that to walk through the path was to walk through water.

I finally found some shelter under the porch of a house in the tiny hamlet of Fiumicello and untangled my iPhone cable which had stopped charging from the power pack. I had noted that the plastic was coming loose yesterday and now, though I’d applied an ample amount of the cellotape Alina had left me from her Mary Poppins style bag this morning, it was doggedly refusing to function.

Hopefully I’d have enough battery to make it the further 5 kilometers to Premilcuore, then I didn’t know what I’d do about the charger. Perhaps tomorrow would be a write off. I’d have to spend it getting a bus to the nearest supermarket in a larger town? I felt defeated.

As I walked along the road from Fiumicello to Premilcuore I passed the stations of the cross and towering cliffs in which the rocks had been confined to cages to avoid damage to the path.

Finally, I descended into the charming little town of Primilcuore – meaning squeeze heart – and was somewhat surprised that the first person I’d seen all day was wearing a hijab.

I easily found my B&B, la Rosa della Rabbia, where my hostess Nadia could not have been more welcoming. When I asked about the iPhone charger she calmy replied,

‘No worries! You can use mine or else they sell hem in that tiny Tobacco shop just down the street.’

I could not believe my luck. I headed straight there and purchased a golden thread of cable that was labelled as ‘extra resilient.’ I breathed a huge sigh of relief. An older lady in the shop was playing lotto.

‘Long day?’ she asked me.

‘Just a bit,’ came my reply.

Back in my room I peeled off my shoes and socks to reveal heels turned white from eight hours of soggy walking. They were cratered with little marks like the surface of the moon.

Eyeing up the bin I was disappointed that it looked more akin to the size of a mug so there would be no foot bath for me today. Instead, I bundled myself into the shower and held the nozzle up close against my toes, spraying them, one-by-one, back to life. Then, at my mum’s advice I wrapped my feet in a warm towel with Nardo oil.

Emptying the contents of my rucksack, the coffee I had packed had exploded and the dried spaghetti was now moist in the bottom of my bag. I threw on my spare pair of clothes that had only got partially wet and went next-door for an onion and cheese Piadina, an Italian sandwich made with soft flat bread.

As I ate, I got talking to a friendly local man, Alim, of Moroccan origin, who was sipping on a white Russian – ‘like coffee, but a cocktail’ – he informed me. He was wearing a fashionable adidas tracksuit and fixed eye contact as he spoke to me.

I told him I had been surprised to see the lady with the hijab on my entrance into the village.

‘Oh yes, we’re quite a few here,’ he replied. ‘The first Arabs came in 1989.’

We exchanged some conversation in Arabic, at which he seemed at once delighted and surprised. Alim had five kids and was a social worker who supported the elderly and people suffering from poor mental health.

‘You have to speak to old people and poor people if you want to understand life,’ he said.

On his neck were three tattoos of stars which increased in size as they reached his earlobe.

I told him I had visited Morocco and had good friend, Fatima-Zohra, in Fez, where there exists one of the oldest universities in the world.

There followed a heated discussion between myself, Alim and Nadia about whether social sciences were worth studying at all – Nadia had an undergraduate and masters in Sociology and Criminology, the specialism of the department where I teach at the University of Birmingham. Alim also sought to convert me to religion.

‘You cannot read Dante or any philosophy for that matter and not be religious,’ he insisted, ‘we never have an original thought, we just receive it.’

His speech was strewn with adages and beautiful words,

‘Poetry,’ he remarked, ‘is the skin of a language that you cannot graft or translate…sorry, when I drink, I become a philosopher.’

We discussed all things abolishing the police – or not, and Nadia told me about her thesis on the mafia in the region we were now in, Emilia Romana, and dreams of pursuing further studies in psychology. Her boyfriend listened in but did not engage in the conversation.

As I munched on rosemary flavoured crisps, Alim chastised me and bought me a plate of local pecorino – ‘much healthier,’ he said. ‘Do you like tequila?’

It was 10pm when I left the restaurant. I’m not sure I managed to convert Alim to the delights of social sciences, just as he made little headway in converting to me religion, but the next day I received a text from Nadia,

‘Thanks for everything, and especially for giving me hope in pursuing my passion,’ it read.

Recommended reading: KNOW Your Rights: A Critical Rights Literacy Framework Based on Indigenous Migrant Practices across Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States (available in English and Spanish): http://collections.unu.edu/view/UNU:9673#viewAttachments

Recommended reading: The Grapes of Wrath: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath

April 16, 2025
Into the misty morning: from Casalino to Passo della Calla

Today’s hike zigzags the Tuscany and Emilia-Romaña borders across the Apennine ridge where ghosts from historic battles give it a spooky air.

I woke up at 6am to see Alina off. Massino Kyo had kindly offered to take her down to Prato Vecchio to catch the bus back to Florence from where she’d take the train. Refugees in Italy are obliged to not leave their accommodation for a certain amount of time or they lose it. So, despite her newfound love for hiking, the prospect of Alina continuing with me wasn’t possible.

Unlike when Virgil leaves Dante in Purgatory, suddenly and without warning, Alina and I shared a meaningful hug goodbye. Also in contrast to Dante, I was now completely alone, without a fellow traveller or guide.

Alina had left me a little glass vial of Chinese ointment for my aching limbs. She also accidentally left her impractical mismatching socks which were glittery: a sea blue and an emerald green. Though every ounce counts in long distance walking, I carried them with me. I was too sentimental to throw them away.

At 7am I was cooking ravioli to take with me for lunch. The weather forecast predicted rain and I had ahead of me a steep climb of 23 kilometres and 255 floors up.

I was on the road by 9am as I had to wait to go over the calculations of the heating costs in extensive detail with our host. This is something I’ve only ever encountered in Italy – that in B&B’s you pay only for what you use in electricity.

It was a steep climb up out of the village and the rocky terrain reminded me of the White Mountains where I’d hiked in New Hampshire during the year and a half I lived in Massachusetts. I’d joined a meet-up group called Ridjit where we carpooled to go on walks most weekends. I joined the Appalachian Mountain Club and by the end of my time there, I’d succeeded in climbing 14 of the 48 4,000-footers. I’m determined to go back and cross off them all.

The path was uneven and steep and composed of grit and stones. This stood in contrast to some of the other paths I’ve trodden on the cammino which are scattered with shards of terracotta and old tiles in shades of pink, white and blue. As a mosaicist, it has been difficult not to succumb to the temptation to pick up little pieces, but I know the extra weight is not worth it.

Mushrooms jutted out from tree trunks like fairy ledges making me think of the Enid Blyton book, The Magic Faraway Tree which my Granny would read to me in bed. We used to call her Granny Daisy though I’m not sure why. Perhaps because of her beautiful little garden and for the fact she once worked as a florist. It’s from her that I get my love of flowers.

At 11am the rain was immanent so I stopped by the bridge of Prato Al Fiume to eat some of my pasta which was still warm. I sat on a plastic bin liner which I’d unfolded to make an improvised tarpaulin. I’d brought with me Tupperware and a travel set of cutlery and now I stuffed rocket into my mouth with spinach and ricotta and bit, apple-like, directly into a chunk of pecorino cheese.

The Via dei Legni, or ‘way of the woods’ has long been a place of cross-border encounter and trade but also of fighting. The North Apennine mountains ridge weaves across the border of three regions of Italy: Liguria, and also Tuscany and Emilia Romagna. I crossed between the latter two, straddling the nature reserves of Sasso Fratino and Pietra.

Casentino, the Tuscan land between Arezzo and Florence, is the first valley of the river Arno – the same river that flows through Dante’s hometown of Florence. I could imagine that the enduring presence of this river was a great comfort to him, hence the ubiquity of rivers in the Divine Comedy.

The abundant waterfalls and streams, which also feature in the Comedy, are a legacy of the glacial age.

If the water is one of the great riches of the high Emilian Apennine, we mustn’t forget that this is also due to the unusual microclimate. The area has record rainfall, exceeding, on occasions, 2000 mm of rain per year. The region is also known for its cumulonimbus, or thunderclouds, the only cloud type that can produce hail, thunder and lightning. The base of the cloud is often flat, with a very dark wall-like feature hanging underneath and it sometimes lies just a few hundred feet above the Earth’s surface.

Today the clouds started as white slivers but, as I ascended the Faggiolo mountain, they soon became a panorama of white which engulfed the sky like curtains at an opera.

The gray-blue clouds, laden with water from the Tyrrhenian Sea which is part of the Mediterranean Sea off the western coast of Italy, rise up with the thermal winds and clash against the Apennines. They are an integral part of the landscape of the ridge, and one I was to come to know all too well.

While yesterday we had contemplated the rolling green hills, now the crown of surrounding mountains was obscured from view by the mist which served as an uneasy companion to the Spring blossom.

Shortly after eating, I arrived at the Monastery in Camaldoli, a monastic complex located within the municipality of Poppi, in the heart of the Park of the Casentinesi Forest. The place used to be known by the name Fontebuona – literally, ‘good fountain’ – because of the high quality of its waters.

And with that the rain began to fall.

I had planned to visit the nearby castle of Poppi yesterday. Here Dante had been hosted for one year by the Guidi Counts in 1310 and here he likely wrote parts of Inferno.

But my visit to Poppi on this occasion was not to be. Instead, today I contemplated Dante’s time in exile as I listened back to audio recordings of my Reading Dante with Refugees project and made voice notes into my iPhone.

As the panorama became spookier, with clouds hanging in the trees like gigantic cobwebs, I also contemplated Dante’s time in the military.

Between the castles of Poppi and Romena, on the plains of Campaldino on June 11, 1289, a 24-year-old Dante took part in the Battle of Campaldino between the pro-imperial Ghibelline troops from Arezzo and the pro-papal Guelph troops from Florence. It was likely he was on horseback.

It was a fierce clash in which Dante’s side, the Florentines, won but there were many fallen soldiers on either side. It is estimated that some 1,700 Ghibellines died and around 2000 were taken prisoner. The battle marked the beginning of the hegemony of the Florentine Guelfs over Tuscany which subsequently split into two factions – the black Guelfs and the White Guelfs of which Dante was a part.

Indeed, Dante was exiled for being a White Guelf in 1302 when the Black Guelphs took control of Florence. The Blacks continued to support the Papacy, while the Whites were opposed to Papal influence, specifically the influence of Pope Boniface VIII who Dante prophesizes as being condemned to the eighth circle of Hell, that of the simoniacs.

Simony is the act of selling church offices and roles or sacred things.

Dante directly references the Battle of Campaldino in canto 5 of Purgatory where the reader might be surprised to find a slain Ghibelline soldier granted redemption. From the terrace of those who have repented last minute and died in situations of violence, Bonconte da Montefeltro, interrupts his singing of the Miserere to speak. In the canto, three souls tell of their violent deaths: two in battle, and one at the hands of her husband. Bonconte da Montefeltro is the second soul who speaks to Dante.

After he led the Ghibelline cavalry at Campaldino, Bonconte’s body was never found on the battlefield. Instead, he explains to Virgil and Dante, it was carried by the elements into the river Arno:

‘…across the Casentino
there runs a stream called Archiano—born
in the Apennines above the Hermitage.

There, at the place where that stream’s name is lost,
I came—my throat was pierced—fleeing on foot
and bloodying the plain; and there it was

that I lost sight and speech; and there, as I
had finished uttering the name of Mary,
I fell; and there my flesh alone remained.

His evil will, which only seeks out evil,
conjoined with intellect; and with the power
his nature grants, he stirred up wind and vapor.

And then, when day was done, he filled the valley
from Pratomagno far as the great ridge
with mist; the sky above was saturated.

The dense air was converted into water;
rain fell, and then the gullies had to carry
whatever water earth could not receive;

and when that rain was gathered into torrents,
it rushed so swiftly toward the royal river
that nothing could contain its turbulence.

The angry Archiano—at its mouth—
had found my frozen body; and it thrust
it in the Arno and set loose the cross

that, on my chest, my arms, in pain, had formed.
It rolled me on the banks and river bed,
then covered, girded me with its debris.’

Through describing the fate of Bonconte’s body, Dante gives us a stark description of the weather conditions in the region.

Dante does not glorify violence. Quite the contrary. Teodolinda Barolini, Editor-in-Chief of Digital Dante writes that ‘when I read the Commedia, I am always struck by how forcefully Dante communicates historical pain.’

In Inferno 12, the violent are immersed in a river of boiling blood, the Phlegethon. Meanwhile, in canto 21 of Inferno, Dante demonstrates empathy for the opposing soldiers who were defeated in the siege on the Caprona Castle in August of 1289. It is possible Dante may have also fought in this battle. He recalls the fear of the opposing side as they walked among their enemies following surrender:

“so I saw the troops fearful as they left Caprona under treaty,

finding themselves in the midst of their many enemies”.

I was grateful for my hiking poles which I have not used until now as I made my way across the hostile terrain of the thick woodland.

After hours of climbing uphill, I was so relieved at the prospect of going down that I missed my turning and took a 3 kilometre detour, having to climb back up the path from which I’d come. The view was completely obscured by the clouds.

As the rain metamorphosed from mist to drizzle, I covered my backpack with its light waterproof cover, sending contact lenses spilling across the mud as I removed it from a pocket at the front of the bag. I tucked my phone into my sports bra so that I could continue listening back to my Dante class recordings. I had bought earbuds, but hiking alone I felt vulnerable and wanted to preserve my senses.

The combination of sweat and rain pooled in my eyes which stung from the sun cream I had pointlessly applied that morning. As I got my phone out to check directions – the amazing team at Cammino di Dante have made a GPS of the walk – the water also saturated my power bank, causing my phone to alert me that water had been detected in the charging cable.

My biodegradable phone case eroded from the rub of my breasts.

I jogged some of the downhill in the afternoon to make up lost time, using my sticks like a four-legged animal. The path was well trodden but abandoned. My heavy backpack thudded against my spine with every step.

I took a selfie and reflected how the flaps of my pink cagoule hung at my ears like Dante’s wimple. I felt like I was skiing as I rushed down the path, trees surrendering to my sight on either side.

Just after the Monastery in Camaldoli, I met the first fellow hiker of the day who was coming in the opposite direction, an Austrian woman who had a bad knee. She informed me that she had stayed at the same hotel to which I was headed and that it was luxurious. This motivated me to plough on with the steep climb back up.

At one point, to my left there appeared a mound of snow. I thought back to yesterday when I was dressed in old shorts and a t-shirt – an 80’s set up of leopard bottoms and a neon top that I could dump if needed. I had packed clothes for warm and cold weather but the contrast between the two days could not be starker.

I took a short break at 2.30pm, huddling under a protruding rock that served as a grotto for shelter – the first cover I had encountered all day. I couldn’t get my layers right – I was sweating but my hands were also starting to go numb. I truly felt like I was climbing Mount Purgatory as I weaved my path, staggering up and across the two regions.

I arrived at Passo della Calla at around 3pm then made the 40-minute descent down a steep, zig-zagging road to the Hotel Granduca in Campigna. The sky was white, not grey like when it rains in England.

Phalanxes of pine trees lined the road, some of which had been damaged by the winter snowfall. Here and there, waterfalls cascaded down from where they had been diverted by man to preserve the road. I tried not to think about the climb back up that awaited me tomorrow.

I arrived at the hotel reception soaking wet. My purple leggings, in their sodden state, had turned a darker plum hue.

Booking the Hotel Granduca was a treat for me at 100 Euros a night – much more expensive than most of my accommodation. But by God was it worth it.

I made use of the spa, contorting my body in the water to project the jets onto the aching arches of my feet. And the bed in my room, which had its own personal sauna, was round! What novelty.

I had my first meal out of the trip: a sweet onion soup on which I burnt my tongue I was so eager to devour it, and a plate of tagliatelle marinated with local mushrooms.

A little girl sat playing games on an iPhone behind the bar. It turned out she was the daughter of one of the owners.

‘What’s your boyfriend’s name?’ she asked me, handing me a little note with her name on it, like a business card.

‘I don’t have one.’ I said.

‘Come no!’ she exclaimed. She then proceeded to inform me that her own boyfriend Salvatore, was also 6 years old.

Finally, after a day walking in isolation, I’d made a friend.

Recommended reading: The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Faraway_Tree

April 15, 2025
An Infinite Spring: From Castel San Niccolò to Casalino

The expansive green landscapes and spectacular church complex of Romena will have you dreaming.

The first thing I did in the morning was to line my eyes with a thick rim of turquoise eye liner I had purchased along with sun cream in the town pharmacy yesterday. Meeting Anna in Montemignaio had left a big impression on both of us with her organic, healthy way of life and I sought to emulate something of her serenity. I wouldn’t be able to keep sheep with my work schedule and pickling my own walnuts appeared too much labour, so make-up seemed like a good enough place to start.

‘Sei Bellissima,’ said Alina. And with that, we grooved on down to the song of the same name by Annalisa.

Then she introduced me to her chat GBT mentor. He’d searched me up online and recited a shockingly accurate amount of information in a friendly tone.

I’m a luddite. On this trip she is teaching me how to use the new technology my students swear by.

We had another delicious breakfast of pesto toast on the patio in the rising sun and were up and at ‘em and back on the Dante trail by 8am. We passed houses where dried grain hung outside the porch. It shone golden in the sunlight. A child who looked about 8 sped past on a motorbike.

The stunning hilly scenery around Castel San Niccolò is interrupted by industry. The path is thick with hoof prints and acorn shells and lined with buttercups, dandelions and grape hyacinth. Butterflies and petals from the blossoming trees sweep across on the wind.

Interrupting the hedgerows are flaming trees the colour or Alina’s hair.

We saw the first cows of our trip, stopped to pet a number of horses and were hissed at by geese who appeared menacingly above the fence like the three-headed Cerberus.

On our way out of the town we crossed a stream. Alina had the sense to remove her trainers and traverse it barefoot.

I got wet feet.

I feel like Virgil would have chastised Dante for this stupidity as he does many times on their journey together through Hell and Purgatory. Alina just laughed.

We’d spent the last couple of days crunching through brown leaves in a climate that could have been mistaken for autumn if it were not for the primroses. But exiting the forest today, it felt like Spring had truly come. A gentle hike up afforded expansive views across the surrounding hills. The sun shone brightly on our faces and now it was my turn to be reminded of England. Alina said it also recalled Crimea where she would spend her holidays as a child.

As we stopped in a field next to a towering hay bale which was taller than me at five foot two, I was reminded of the poem L’Infinito by Giacomo Leopardi, an Italian poet born in 1798 in Naples.

The Infinite

‘This solitary hill has always been dear to me
And this hedge, which obscures from me
The endless horizon.
But when I sit and gaze, I imagine, in my thoughts,
Endless spaces beyond the hedge,
An all-encompassing silence and a deeply profound quiet,
To the point that my heart is quite overwhelmed.
And when I hear the wind rustling through the trees
I compare its voice to the infinite silence.
And I recall eternity, and all the ages past,
And the present time, and its sound.
Amidst this immensity my thought drowns:
And to flounder in this sea is sweet to me.’

‘Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle,
e questa siepe, che da tanta parte
dell’ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.
Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati
spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani
silenzi, e profondissima quïete
io nel pensier mi fingo, ove per poco
il cor non si spaura. E come il vento
odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello
infinito silenzio a questa voce
vo comparando: e mi sovvien l’eterno,
e le morte stagioni, e la presente
e viva, e il suon di lei. Così tra questa
immensità s’annega il pensier mio:
e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare.’

Once again, I’ve taken a stab at my own translation. ‘Naufragar’ – to flounder or to drown? I wish I had Anna’s Zingarelli dictionary.

The poem, written in the Marche region in 1819, is a prescient nod to the modern mindfulness movement. This is something my colleague Will at the University of Birmingham refers to in a recent work as ‘McMindfulness’ for its ubiquitousness in social prescribing. Every other person seems to have an app on their phone, but how mindful are we really?

Leopardi’s poem reminds us that contemplating the infinite nature of the horizon when in nature can return us to a sense of peace. It’s not quite the same as having a low-pitched American drawl telling us to ‘feel our feelings and let them drift by like clouds in the sky’, but it’s something akin to it and dare I say superior?

Alina and I spent a moment of silence contemplating the hedges and horizons around us and were quietly moved.

Walking up to the steep path to the rural church and complex of San Pietro a Romena, we were greeted by a man selling groceries from a battered old vehicle. At first, I thought it was an ice-cream van – damn. But it turned out to be a worthy pit stop anyway.

‘Where are you from?’

We replied.

‘Oh shit, there’s a war in your country,’ he told Alina.

‘Thanks for letting me know,’ she said.

‘Bastardi, those who make war should make love,’ he continued, a look of lust creeping over his narrow eyes.

Raffaele was eating straight from a can of tuna from which the tin lid flapped like a fin over the side. He had breadcrumbs around what he called his ‘muzzle’ and beseeched us to ‘stop and eat something with me!’

He had a fuel stove and paper plates in his van.

We kindly refused the offer – we had a Tupperware full of treats from the deli yesterday to attend to. Alina said the way the salads had mixed together reminded her of the first day of January in Ukraine where you eat all the leftovers. She is a stickler for not wasting food.

We purchased fresh strawberries and a huge bag of peanuts in their wrinkly shells for 5 euros and went on our way after exchanging a sweaty, and perhaps slightly too familiar, hug.

San Pietro a Romena is a tranquil oasis which extends way beyond the Parish church over the cascading fields.

Located on the slopes of the hill dominated by the remains of the castle of the Guidi Counts, on the right bank of the Arno, in the territory of the municipality of Pratovecchio Stia, the baptismal church is a masterpiece of Romanesque architecture.

The building, declared a national monument for its importance, was built in 1152. The place name of Etruscan origin, Romena probably already housed a temple that was readapted in Roman times. A Christian building later rose on the pagan building.

Descending under the staircase on the right wall, you can admire the traces under the present raised presbytery of an early medieval church built between the eighth and ninth centuries.

Art adorns the church, though it is simple: rustic tapestries and painted wooden panels.

Volunteers were cleaning and delicately placing olive branches in preparation for Palm Sunday.

Surrounding the church is a range of art, a conference suite, a meditation room, a café, bookshop, and gardens containing medicinal herbs and olive groves. There is no escaping the sense of tranquility afforded by the expansive complex.

A blend of Tracy Chapman and reggae played in the background as we perused the gift shop which was run by another spectacular 80-year-old woman who wore fashionable round, green glasses and a coral necklace. Behind the till, on the wall, friends had photoshopped her face and a glass of wine onto an image of the fashion icon, Iris Apfel with the quote,

‘First they say enough, you’re crazy, then they make you a saint.’

We admired her massive rings. One was made of silver, transformed into a circle of beads that encased a large labradorite.

‘Oh cool,’ came the voice of Alina as she pawed a book about one of her favourite singers, Gianmaria Testa. It turned out he had performed here. The singer and guitarist, who died in 2016, is something of an Italian Leonard Cohen, though in his lifetime he didn’t receive the same critical acclaim.

Throughout his musical career, Testa continued to work as a station master at the train station in Cuneo. One quote from the book read,

‘Poetry is literature’s form of combat.’

A dozen other quotes and pieces of art were scattered across the complex. These included a steel silhouette of Banky’s Girl with Balloon and a beautiful white sculpture of a couple embracing.

On an old door there appeared the words,

‘Everyone is looking for a bit of bread, a bit of affection and to feel at home somewhere.’

The place was very quiet, but we were informed that on Sundays it attracts up to 1,000 people, as we would soon find out.

‘The door is always open’, the lady in the café informed us.

A wooden placard beside the door displayed a quote by Marcel Proust,

‘Real travel doesn’t mean looking for new lands, but having new eyes.’

A sign in the café read,

‘A coffee, 3 euros’

‘A coffee please, 2 euros.’

‘Hello, may I have a coffee please, 1 euro.’

After a peaceful break, we hiked up the hill to Branda font. It is referenced by Dante in Inferno, canto 30 which depicts mutilated souls who, as follows the principle of contrapasso whereby the sin becomes the punishment, have been damned for representational and economic fraud.

Dante was clearly struck by the streams and hills of the Casantino landscape too and likely stayed in the castle on the hill. He writes of one soul from Romena who counterfeited money,

‘The rivulets that fall into the Arno
down from the green hills of the Casentino
with channels cool and moist, are constantly

before me; I am racked by memory—
the image of their flow parches me more
than the disease that robs my face of flesh.

There is Romena, there I counterfeited
the currency that bears the Baptist’s seal;
for this I left my body, burned, above.’

Dante then stages a meeting with Guido, Alessandro, or their brother,

‘I’d not give up the sight for Fonte Branda.’ He writes. Dante also mentions the Castle of Romena where the forger Adamo produced his florins.

The punishment of those in Hell is that they are perpetually tormented by memories of their past lives without being able to move forward.

Alina and I moved forward, walking past the castle through an avenue of lego green cyprus trees.

On our descent into the town of Pratovecchio, we encountered rusty tractors pulling ploughs in fields and beehives buzzing with life. It was easy to imagine Dante here, sat beside one of the many streams. Time seemed to have stopped in this part of Tuscany, if it were not for the electric cables and roar of motorbikes on the asphalt road.

In Prato Vecchio, known for the swallows that inhabit its grand porches, we stopped for a drink in a small café where we met a musician, theatre producer and yogi from the south of Italy, called Massimo Kyo. He had medium-long hair which was half tied back and kind eyes. He told us his second name had come to him in a dream.

Like Raffaele, Massimo Kyo also asked us where we were from. But he was somewhat more diplomatic in his reply when Alina responded with ‘Ukraine.’

‘Oh…I mean, how do you feel?’

She was surprised at the question – ‘no one ever asks me that,’ she said.

During the next hour of casual conversation he informed us that ‘Casentino is a magical place where you meet the people you have to meet’.

When we shared that we were on the Dante trail he offered up the theory that Dante had experimented with natural drugs to enter his imaginative afterlife.

‘Young people here go and look for mushrooms that grow in cow shit nearby,’ he explained.

Massimo kindly offered for us to use any of his music or jingles we liked for the podcast we have been recording as we walk and invited us to spend the next day together, saving Alina’s number in his phone as ‘Alina walker’.

I went to pay in the bar, commenting that I liked the tattoos of the bartender, one of which showed the stylized outline of a little girl holding her mother’s hand.

‘Oh, this is my little girl who never was,’ she explained.

‘She’s beautiful,’ came my reply.

The toilet was an old school squat.

We spent Sunday, our rest day, with Massimo, returning to Romena where he showed us his favourite spots. They included the Via della Resurrezione – the Path of Resurrection. On the way a sign read,

‘Before long you will do something new, in fact you’ve already started, don’t you see it?’

The path ,which was pitted with art, flowed through the olive groves , ending in a stunning waterfall that fell into a turquoise pool the colour of my eyeliner. We sat and Massimo asked if we’d like to sing some mantras together.

We did.

I was taken back to Sri Lanka and to Tye, my mantra teacher who would bring us all to tears with her harmonium singing the Ganesh Maha Mantra, Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha.

Thereafter we discussed our hopes and dreams. I shed a tear as I declared that one of mine was to finish the cammino.

‘You will,’ Massimo sagely confirmed.

Though I don’t believe in God and think this life is all we have to make what we can of it, I really did feel like a pilgrim.

Perhaps I do have a latent spiritual side after all.

Before we left, we returned to the giftshop where I bought Alina the Gianmaria Testa book and, at Massimo’s advice, some ‘nardo’ oil, made at the property.

Known in English as Spikenard, nard, nardin, or muskroot, nardo is a class of aromatic amber-colored essential oil that comes from a flowering plant in the honeysuckle family. The oil has been used over centuries as a perfume, a traditional medicine, or in religious ceremonies across a wide territory, from India to Europe. It is said that the Virgin Mary used it to anoint the body of Jesus when he was removed from the cross.

Back outside, Alina gifted me a beautiful artisanal necklace that she had bought which depicts an almond tree. The accompanying card contains a quote from Luigi Verdi,

‘Like the almond tree, you are the first to flower and the last to give fruit.’

‘It reminded me of you and your Dante book,’ Alina explained. ‘You’re flowering now, and you have to trust that the fruit will come.’

On the way back, Massimo took us to the supermarket, kindly relieving us of the one hour hike up to Casalino we had done yesterday which would have been strenuous with shopping bags, however beautiful with its surrounding fields and pathway through the ‘park of endangered fruit trees’. Alina had experienced foot cramps on the steep hill and so we’d stopped to record our podcast overlooking the fertile valley which was lit up by the sunshine like a strip light over a painting in a gallery.

I bought Massimo a little succulent with three buds,

‘It’s us,’ I said.

He blinked a few times and smiled.

Back at our air b and b we had an aperitivo with a selection of regional cheeses and made daisy chains in the pretty garden which we accessed from our apartment, number 74, via terracotta steps.

Alina’s method involved plaiting the flowers together whereas mine relied on poking holes in the stems and threading them through. I was thrilled to do this since as I child I bit my nails and was unable to do so.

I was reminded of Dante’s dream in Canto 27 of Purgatorio where he encounters the Old Testament characters of Leah and Rachel who were traditionally interpreted allegorically by the Church as figures of the active and contemplative life. Dante writes,

‘… in my dream, I seemed to see a woman
both young and fair; along a plain she gathered
flowers, and even as she sang, she said:

“Whoever asks my name, know that I’m Leah,
and I apply my lovely hands to fashion
a garland of the flowers I have gathered.

To find delight within this mirror I
adorn myself; whereas my sister Rachel
never deserts her mirror; there she sits

all day; she longs to see her fair eyes gazing,
as I, to see my hands adorning, long:
she is content with seeing, I with labor.’

We drank hot water, a habit Alina had picked up in her decade in China. She looked lovely in a forest themed patterned cotton top and trousers made by her fashion designer mum.

‘How have you packed all this into such a small bag!’ I exclaimed. ‘You’d make a good refugee.’

We both laughed. This is the kind of dark humour that keeps me sane.

After a simple dinner of spaghetti and green beans, we were delighted to discover not just a bin but a bucket and washing up basin into which Alina and I placed our aching feet in hot soapy water as has become tradition.

Before bed, we sat outside and contemplated the full moon.

‘You know no woman has ever walked on the moon?’ I said

‘Yet,’ replied Alina. ‘Who knows what wonders the future holds.’

I held my necklace in my hand and made a wish.

Recommended listening: music by Massimo Kyo: https://open.spotify.com/artist/72MZKpGf1ARioeXiHAWXCw?si=4CfTY_SbTk2KGSCMCRCPWw

Recommended listening: the music of Granmaria Testa: https://youtu.be/4f_4HW340Cw?si=JRfV45WqVPUDwt0B

Recommended using: Nardo oil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spikenard#:~:text=Spikenard%2C%20also%20called%20nard%2C%20nardin,Nepal%2C%20China%2C%20and%20India.

April 14, 2025
Mushrooms, Bees and Fallen Leaves: Montemignaio to Castel San Niccolò

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

April 13, 2025
Living Well and ‘Leidenschaft’: From Pieve a Pitiana to Montemignaio

The way up was steep, but inspiring company and a delicious supper awaited.

I awoke at 2am to refuel the log burner in the community arts room where we were lodging and there followed a difficult but warm night of sleep. My day started at 7am when I rose to write and check work emails. It felt like breathing a new kind of air to have the time to write as the birds chirruped outside the window.

At 9am we were packed and having a breakfast of cereal and yoghurt with Stefano and his youngest son. My placemat read, ‘today is a good day to…love nature’. It felt prescient.

Alina and I said our goodbyes to our hosts and headed uphill for what was supposed to be a much easier day of the cammino.

The sight of the church slowly disappeared from view as we climbed up the road which hugged sinuous vineyards. After yesterday’s experience and reflection on Dante’s wood of suicides, I found myself noticing each tree and wondering what kind of soul would be trapped within it. This one, here, with its gnarled roots and stubby fingers; and there, an oak with its sturdy frame.

Although the path uphill was quite straightforward, we missed a turning and ended up in the small, deserted town of Saltino (the official and much shorter route threads an arch to the side of it.).

The village appeared post-apocalyptic except for a bar where a lady with bleach blonde hair served us drinks – a cappuccino for Alina and an espresso macchiato for me. Alina introduced me to the song, Espresso Macchiato which is this year’s Estonian Eurovision song context entry.

‘Life is like spaghetti, it’s hard until you make it,’ sings Tommy Cash.

Eurovision has always been a big part of my life. I love the campness and the way that the heavy burden of nation states and regional strategizing is rendered playful, all accompanied in England by the teasing commentary of TV personalities Graham Norton and the late Terry Wogan. My sister-in-law, Jenny, is Swedish, and, in Sweden, Eurovision means business!

In recent months, after making a new year’s resolution to spend more time with my niece and nephew in light of the realization that I likely won’t have kids of my own, I’ve been driving the two hours in my blue Mini every month to visit them. This has included joining them in watching the Swedish nationals where viewers vote for this year’s entry. It’s a hyper produced show and luckily you don’t need to speak Swedish to enjoy it. I felt a stab of pride as my 12-year-old niece Louisa fluently translated the commentary for me. Oh, to be raised bilingual.

The winner of this year’s Swedish nationals who will travel to Basel, Switzerland for the competition in May is the Finnish band, KAJ, whose song, Bara Bada Bastu is about the joys of the sauna. It’s a catchy, extravagant number which will, for sure, give Estonia a run for its money.

Now here comes a fun fact I bet you didn’t know. Eurovision song contest entries don’t have to be from the country they represent. In 1988, Canadian artist Celine Dion represented Switzerland and won with the banger, ‘Ne partez pas sans moi’. Check out the video – she sports a tutu and a military jacket, quite the contrast to her sleek performance at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games (yes, I cried at it too).

I had the opportunity to travel to Finland myself in November last year during a research project for Save The Children on violence against children at EU borders. Between interviewing refugee children in reception centres, I had the pleasure of indulging in my own sauna experience. After singeing my skin red, I dived from Helsinki’s dock into the ice-cold ocean. Well, I say dive. In reality, I awkwardly and tentatively made my way down the metal steps until my body was under. Then my neck. Then my head.

Whoosh. The feeling was intoxicating, something between an orgasm and being burnt at the stake. I can see why the Fins are such a prosperous nation.

Saunas are such a big part of Finnish life that even one of the reception centres I visited had a sauna where a 17-year-old Colombian girl who was waiting on the result of her family’s asylum application told me she liked to spend time with her friends. I could imagine the Daily Mail headlines – ‘now SAUNAS for refugees!’ It made sense to me. It was freezing cold and in Finland, sauna equals life.

On our departure from the town up to Vallombrosa we passed a sign warning cars to slow down for migrating frogs.

The expansive abbey loomed over the surrounding landscape which included an empty water feature which was also signaled, ‘no fishing’. Italians in these parts seem to really like their public signs.

‘Sti Italiani!’ repeated Alina with her Roman lilt.

From there it was a steep climb up what seemed like one thousand stone steps which looked over one of several waterfalls we would cross today. Each corner of the cliff was marked by a little shrine.

At the start of Dante’s journey, he meets three beasts in the woods: a leopard, a lion and a female wolf that represent his fears. Readers have argued for centuries about what they signified for him – pride, lust, greed?

As we climbed, we distracted ourselves by discussing what our three beasts would be. Mine were fear of dying without realizing one’s talents and potential, perfectionism, and the terror that assails me from time to time that I might not be the good person people think I am. Alina is a Jungian. She reminded me, in a chastising tone, that ‘we all have shadow selves. Me, I can’t get enough of you.’

We are recording parts of our conversation as we walk for a future podcast since, to add to her already impressive portfolio of creative talents, Alina is currently studying sound design. As I adjusted my bra strap to ease the rub of my backpack, the portable microphone Alina had brought with her nearly went careering over the steep edge. Luckily it just fell a short way into the leaves where is disturbed a dozing lizard.

Alina and I have different body temperatures. I was sweating into my t-shirt, a gift from her which read Dante On the Move after our anthology of the same name, while she was wearing two jackets with a yellow jumper the colour of primroses tied around her neck like a scarf.

‘This was meant to be the easy day!’ exclaimed Alina.

We were rewarded with sweeping views across the surrounding hills. Then came the steep descent. It felt like we were walking down into Dante’s Inferno, each circle lined with ridges from which I could imagine Dante and Virgil looking down at the sinners below.

The sound of a stream accompanied our pilgrimage.

Animals have been a big part of our trip: we stop to pet every cat and salute every barking dog. But upon entering the town of Montemignaio we were greeted by two friendly sheep.

‘Salve!’ cried the owner who was walking them along a small lawn which was dotted with daisies.

‘Buona sera’ we replied.

‘Would you like to see where they live?’ asked the friendly lady. We did.

There followed an extraordinary evening.

First, Anna showed us the beautiful paddock in which the sheep resided at night to protect them from local wolves. It was built to specification, she proudly declared, by a shamanic Venetian man who spent three years alone in the virgin forest of Bolivia, where he acquired much of his knowledge and wisdom. Inside the straw was fresh and dry and the circular structure had a domed ceiling crafted with all the care of a Florentine cathedral. Alina and I joked that we could have happily spent the night there instead of continuing to our air b and b.

Then came the chickens, equally spoiled in a bountiful enclosure on the hillside, made out of all organic materials.

Anna had a way with the animals. She hugged them to her chest with a filial warmth.

As we were petting the sheep, a handsome stranger wearing an embroidered scarf and long leather boots made his way through the front gate to join us.

‘Ciao, Anna!’

‘Ciao, Matthias!’

They embraced.

Matthias, it turned out, was a fellow German. A writer who had moved to Montemignaio some eight months ago where he now runs a hostel for pilgrims, Frate e Sole.

‘So, you’ve met the wonderful Anna!’ he exclaimed.

They clearly had a bond. She traded with him ‘happy chicken’ eggs, fresh vegetables from her garden and her homemade walnut liquor.

When asked about what we would be eating tonight, we replied that we hoped to pick something up at the village shop. Anna and Matthias exchanged raised eyebrows.

‘But it’s Wednesday,’ came their response. As if, of course, logically, on Wednesday the shop would be closed.

‘Sti Italiani!’ repeated Alina playfully.

We were contemplating the prospect of dining on unsalted bread and cereal bars when Matthias invited us to spend the evening together.

‘It will be a simple fare, but healthy,’ he counselled. We were in.

Matthias bid us farewell for now and Anna invited us in.

Next to a beautifully landscaped vegetable garden sat Anna’s home, an old stone building which she’d had renovated. When Covid hit in the year 2020, she had relocated from her native Germany.

It was simple but spectacular. Every room was full of ornate bespoke wooden furniture that had been made for her great grandfather – a wardrobe, desk, sideboard – all had been shipped over at great expense from Germany. Anna was in no two minds. This was now her home. And she was ‘living well’ here.

Over the next hour, Anna shared insights from 82 years of life experience as we listened eagerly to her perfect English. Though she was born in the war in 1942, she looked not a day over 60. She radiated peace around her. The secret to being happy, she advised us, is to be grateful and to live in the moment. Her home had a traditional Etruscan metal handrail and organic earthen tiles the colour of doves.

In one room there greeted us the sight of marinating eggs and vegetables, in another vegetable seeds sprouted in tiny pots and here, in the bathroom, were a range of tinctures and ointments that she had made by hand. She showed us her traditional copper Florentine bed and her office which consisted of a shelf with an old Nokia mobile phone, an address book and a paper and pen.

‘This is why I look young!’ she chortled, entreating us to follow her into the next room which contained a small library and more budding seeds.

It turned out Anna carried the seeds around with her throughout the day to make sure they were always at the optimum temperature,

‘This is my little kindergarten’ she explained with glee. ‘Right now, some are sleeping but tomorrow, who knows!’

Anna shared with us some of her prized possessions. A steel candlestick holder from the war, a signed Zingarelli Italian dictionary and a book she had made herself with thick marbled Tuscan paper containing photographs from her collection – she was an artist too, it seemed. Alongside each photo was a short description which mindfully described the scene. One showed a rag rug made out of old textiles.

The accompanying text which was tucked into a pocket, sewn into the page of the book, read:

‘After

All those clothes

Sewn, worn and torn,

After being woven into this mat,

After the passage over it

Of so many feet, big and small…

Now, finally:

Loosen the grip,

Gracefully dissolving

Into a harmony of fading colours’

Anna was dressed like a farmer in a pink jumper and dungarees and she had circled her eyes with a turquoise eye liner. It looked magnificent. It reminded me of my late Italian teacher, Andi Oakley, who would line her eyes in a glittering violet hue.

As we parted ways, Anna gave us a bottle of her homemade walnut liquor and a dozen eggs and hugged us the way I haven’t been hugged in a long time. Her arms, strong with the labour of running her little farm, held me tightly while her calloused fingers caressed my back.

Of course, we were late to dinner, but we knocked on the way down and gave Matthias the heads up.

‘We’ve been with Anna,’ we explained, and he immediately understood.

After a quick turnaround, we arrived at his homely place where he’d lit a roaring fire. We found a table set with plates and crystals that glowed in the throw of his Himalayan salt lamp. The green man watched over us.

While Anna’s walls had been bare, here art and tapestries occupied the space: Monet, Van Gogh, Kandinsky. I was quite impressed that, between us, Alina and I managed to identify nearly all of them. Next to the fire was a bible. Matthias had moved to the town after doing the St Francis’ Way, or the Via di Francesco, which runs from Florence to Rome and shares some of the same route of the Cammino di Dante, including passing through this magical town.

Matthias explained how he sought to integrate the teachings of Saint Francis into his own life: living simply, staying humble, being kind to those in need (and saving hiking strangers from starvation because the bloody shop was closed.) He made his money writing short stories for German magazines.

We ate a delicious but humble meal of homemade bread which he’d taken 24 hours to prepare using a local method he’d learnt from Anna with flour from the local mill. The salad contained fresh beetroot and the garlicy local leaf known as ‘erba orsina’, a name that refers to the fact that a bear (orso), awakening in springtime after his winter sleep, goes for this herb in order to get strong and potent again.

We discussed our mutual love of Erich Maria Remarque (Alina) and Stefan Zweig (me) and Alina read one of the poems from her new collection called, Why Do We Choose To Suffer. We discussed the meaning of leidenschaft – as artists, there is passion in a certain kind of suffering, we agreed.

This was something our feet knew all too well as we climbed back up the hill to the welcoming Agriturismo di Mela where we were greeted with milk for our morning coffee, supplies for an emergency dinner – which thankfully we didn’t need – and soft sheets.

April 12, 2025
In the Distance: Florence to Pieve a Pitiana

Renaissance paintings line the route, but be wary of getting lost in the wood of suicides.

Though I remain determined it is what Dante would have wanted, starting my pilgrimage in Florence, Dante’s birthplace, rather than his site of exile and death, Ravenna, had the drawback of beginning with what is said to be the hardest day of the cammino: 30 kilometres with an ascent of 895 metres. Though I’ve been training back in the UK in the Peak District near my home, I was somewhat daunted as to how the day would unfold.

I woke around 7am to the sound of birds singing and the chiming bells of Santa Spirito, the ‘church across the river’. I left Anna and her family sleeping soundly as I packed up my bag and tried discretely to exit the jewelry studio through the glass double doors that opened onto the quiet street. Succulents a hue of pink and green occupied window boxes along the cobbled passage into which the sun was sneakily smuggling its first rays of the morning.

In Santo Spirito square the market sellers were already setting up their stalls: leggings, knickers, pot plants, copper bracelets and beaded earrings the size of oranges. Two dogs – one caramel and fluffy, one white and slick – frolicked by the central fountain while their owners puffed on cigarettes and made casual conversation.

I took an espresso macchiato and looked across at the church. Among other delights, it contains the Madonna with St. Catherine of Alexandria and St. Martin of Tours by Filippino Lippi. The altarpiece is also known as Pala de’ Nerli from the name of the commissioners, Tanai de’ Nerli and his wife Nanna, who are shown in donor portraits at the sides – the Renaissance equivalent of a selfie.

The painting was commissioned by the church in 1494, so some 100 years after Dante walked the squares of Florence. Lippi’s style is sensual. Gone are the 2D Giotto era portraits of Jesus looking like an adult squeezed into a baby-sized body. Lippi was a contemporary of Botticelli whose fleshy Madonnas continue to mesmerize visitors to the Uffizi with their delicate features.

The Uffizi Gallery literally means ‘offices’. It is named after the seat where the city’s rulers used to conduct their affairs. Once business was conducted in the Bargello, now an art gallery home to dozens of Donatello sculptures where Dante would have served as a member of the political elite.

The Bargello is the ideal venue to trace the complex relationship between Dante and his home city. In the Sala dell’Udienza of the then Palazzo del Podestà (today the Salone di Donatello), on 10 March 1302, the poet-politician was condemned to exile. In the adjacent Cappella del Podestà, a few years later, Giotto and his school portrayed Dante’s face for the first time, including him in a fresco among the ranks of the elect in Paradise. It is said to be the first ever portrait of Dante.

The façade of the Santo Spirito Church is striking in its simplicity. As I passed and continued towards the Ponte Vecchio, runners wove in and out of my path and trucks disembarked cargo to one of Florence’s hundreds of eateries. One box read, ‘Lobsters and fresh mussels.’

An Asian couple were taking wedding photos on the famous bridge which connects the Uffizi Galleries to the Pitti Palace which the Medici once called their home. Her veil glittered in the morning sunlight as the photographer insisted they ‘kiss, kiss, kiss!’

I took a second coffee when I reached the Piazza del Duomo which, unlike the rest of the still sleepy city was bustling with life. Tour groups followed umbrellas like leaf cutter ants and carriages pulled by horses escorted tourists through the narrow streets. In Venice, the streets are known colloquially as ‘rughette’ or ‘little wrinkles’. I smiled as I recalled this fact, spreading wrinkles across my own face.

Then came the time for our meeting.

Alina arrived, her flaming red hair licking her collarbone and cascading over her shoulders.

She was wearing a beautiful black coat over sweatpants and a running jacket designed by one of the fashion houses for whom she had previously laboured. She had succeeded in stashing a huge amount into her small backpack.

‘That’s what comes with moving around a lot,’ she said. ‘And the coat? Well, if you invite a refugee on a walk, they likely only have one coat, and this is it.’

We hugged tightly, shedding the first of what would be several tears over the coming days, and reached out and touched the walls of the baptistry where Dante had been immersed in 1265 and to where he had hoped one day to return as a poet post-exile. In Paradiso canto 25 he writes,

‘If it should happen . . . If this sacred poem—

this work so shared by heaven and by earth

that it has made me lean through these long years—

can ever overcome the cruelty

that bars me from the fair fold where I slept,

a lamb opposed to wolves that war on it,

by then with other voice, with other fleece,

I shall return as poet and put on,

at my baptismal font, the laurel crown .’

‘Se mai continga che ’l poema sacro

al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra,

sì che m’ha fatto per molti anni macro,

vinca la crudeltà che fuor mi serra

del bello ovile ov’io dormi’ agnello,

nimico ai lupi che li danno guerra;

con altra voce omai, con altro vello

ritornerò poeta, e in sul fonte

del mio battesmo prenderò ’l cappello . ‘

It is tradition to depict poets in Italy with laurel crowns, one now adopted by students who port the symbol on graduation day. When we completed our Reading Dante with Refugees course in Rome, I made sure that all of the students received from Stephan, the Director of the Trinity College Rome Campus that hosted us, a laurel crown.

Alina, a Ukrainian refugee fashion designer turned feminist activist, was one of the eleven refugee students who took my class. For her final project she imagined her own journey from Inferno to Paradiso through the lens of the Italian bureaucracy. In the short film she made for the course, Paradise of Exiles, she shows herself moving from the dark wood (she literally, set off at 2am to shoot in woods outside of Rome) followed by the Purgatory of refugee status determination and the eventual Paradise of finding peace in Rome’s art scene. She filmed the final scenes at an exclusive shoot at the Galleria Borghese where my friend Stefania Vannini is a curator. She looks resplendent with her red hair against the green walls. I’m there in the background cheering her on.

Since the course finished two years ago, I have become somewhat of a mentor to Alina, even though she is only five years younger than me. I know the value of mentorship having experienced it first-hand myself so many times over: Julie, Andi, Janey, Joyce – you know who you are.

We took our time winding through the bustling morning streets before passing to the river, beside which we hiked a good few kilometres before turning up a road that led us outside of the city. For the entire morning, the Florentine landscape peaked out behind us like a jester egging us on. Each time we turned around she was more distant. I thought of Dante and how close he would have come in his exile. While we know, as this trek honours, that he dwelled at several lodgings by the river Arno, did he get close enough to see the cityscape which then would have been teaming with medieval towers and devoid of today’s famous domed landscape curated by Brunelleschi and Giotto?

Swallows sprung from under bridges and inside cemeteries, disturbing the air with the gentle flap of wings. Street corners were embellished with Madonna and child.

Alina and I chatted fluently in our colloquial mix of Italian-English as we followed the path up, up, up and left the gilded city in our trail. At 11.30 on the dot we stopped at a bench overlooking the city for her to join a call with two interns working for her holistic creative agency, Sensi, who were running an event on refugee wellbeing. I took the time to check our route and enjoy the delicate scent of crocuses that filled the spring air.

Despite her small bag, Alina had packed in an impressive amount of food including ‘unsalted bread’ from her local Bangladeshi deli. I was relieved to find that I was able to stomach dates again after a traumatic incident in Syria where I spent a 12-hour bus journey to Jordan munching on a bag-full only to find, upon sunrise, that it was also filled with ants. Oh well, protein is protein.

Alina shared her news and I caught her up with my life. We’d both spent depressive winters hiding beneath the sheets of our beds and were grateful, like the crocuses, to be coming back to life. I had nominated Alina to be part of the Nobel Women’s Initiative Sister to Sister mentorship programme in 2023 and now she’d been invited to participate in a peacekeeping mission to Ukraine. It’s a funny kind of pride I felt as both a teacher and a friend.

‘It’s about time women got some coverage in the Ukrainian-Russian conflict in Britain,’ I commented. ‘Too true,’ she observed.

Once we had taken in the last glimpse of the Duomo it was after lunch. We ate schiacchiata sandwiches, a Florentine delicacy which literally means ‘squashed together’.

The day was hot.

In the town of Bombone we stopped to refill our water bottles and I marveled at the fact that the town council had voted to put in a well that featured not just purified still, but fizzy water. I made the mistake of filling my camel drinking pouch with it, only for it later to explode inside my bag. Luckily though my bum got soaked, my laptop survived.

We met a kind faced 80-year-old lady who Alina showed how to use the fountain,

‘In all these years, I’ve never known,’ she said. ‘Buon cammino!’

A lot of Alina’s utterances start with the phrase ‘before the war’, just as mine do with ‘before my divorce’. Before long we were completing each other’s sentences.

‘Before the war, I got my eyebrows done.’

‘Before the war, I worked for Alexander McQueen.’

‘Before my divorce, I worked for openDemocracy’

‘Before my divorce, I thought that by simply loving people I could change the world.’

Perhaps something of the latter is still true.

Mum dropped me a text asking how it was going, addressing me as ‘her Marco Polo’.

‘Benissimo,’ I replied.

I was so happy to see Alina.

Despite her slender Ashtanga yoga and capoeira molded frame and my own body, bloated with anti-depressants, she was less trained for the hike than I was. She pushed on honorably in her sneakers rarely complaining or even stopping to drink water. Layers were taken off and on as we moved in and out of the sun.

‘I can’t get over the fact someone has gone to all this effort to mark this trail!’ I kept repeating, euphoric that someone out there might be more obsessed by Dante than me. Each sign post for the Dante trail had been marked with a red sticker on a lamppost or a wooden sign with the letters CD singed into it by hand by the trail’s father, Oliviero Resta, who I hope to meet in person in Ravenna.

I would say it was hard to get lost if it were not for the half an hour detour we took tumbling down a dark forest following the GPS and ignoring the very clear ‘no trespassing’ sign. It turned out we were right, but the forest spooked us both. As we crossed the barbed wire and our feet became trapped in brambles, I thought of the documentary, Green Border, I recently watched about refugees seeking to cross the Belarussian-Polish frontier at the edge of Europe.

‘You can imagine Dante feeling a little shitty here, eh?’ we remarked.

Finally, arms shredded with brambles we were back on solid ground.

We passed fields of tortured vines that provided a rich supply of local wine and stopped at a vineyard called Fattoria Pagnana to taste the local fare and buy a bottle for tonight’s hosts, a family of six who look after the local church. While much of today consisted of being barked at by aggressive guard dogs, at the winery the two brown dogs approached us tails wagging and tongues lolling out of their mouths, desperate for a touch. Alina like me is an animal lover.

‘Don’t lick my face!’ She squealed.

They licked her face.

At 5pm, our host, Stefano offered to pick us up in the neighbouring village but we were insistent that we would carry on. We resisted the temptation to stay in Rignano sull’Arno for a Palestine solidarity music night and arrived at Pieve a Pitiana at around 8 in the evening with the sun setting behind us.

We had both been spooked by getting lost in the forest earlier in the day and now as the sun set, the sun kissed vines metamorphosed into Dante’s wood of suicides.

In Canto 13 of Inferno, Dante encounters those who have taken their own lives, following on from Canto 12 where he depicts those who have been violent towards others or their possessions. The canto is heavy with negativity:

‘No green leaves in that forest, only black;

no branches straight and smooth, but knotted, gnarled;

no fruits were there, but briers bearing poison.’

‘Non fronda verde, ma di color fosco;

non rami schietti, ma nodosi e ’nvolti;

non pomi v’eran, ma stecchi con tòsco.’

Dante is remarkably kind to the souls, much to Virgil’s chastisement, asking after them and their stories. Virgil encourages him to snap a branch off one of the oaks from which blood drains and the soul within orates. This is how he meets Pier della Vigna, an advisor to Frederick II who killed himself when his reputation was ruined by false rumors. Frederick asks for Dante to heal his reputation on earth, because this is the only part of him that survives outside of Hell. Though encouraged by Virgil to interrogate the tree like an asylum seeker on trial, Dante is so stirred by pity that he says he cannot think of anything more to ask the soul.

Dante describes the tortured woodland as infested with harpies who abuse the souls by ripping off their branches. In an act of symbolic retribution, it is said that when each of the blessed and damned will return with their body from the Last Judgment, those damned for suicide will not re-inhabit their bodies but instead hang them on their branches, both because they denied them in their final act of life and as a reminder of what they denied themselves. Salvador Dalí depicted this starkly in one of his many paintings of the Commedia.

As I mentioned above, Alina and I had spoken over the course of the day frankly about our own very difficult winters. Previous experiences of depression and suicidal thoughts had also weaved their way into our casual conversation, as they had many times before. It felt concrete and somewhat scary to see this fictitious scene brought to life.

We arrived at the church of Pieve a Pitiana to a roaring fire and an equally warm welcome from our host Stefano, his wife Giorgia, Stefano’s mother and their three bubbly kids. Anna, the middle girl-child was excited to practice her English, asking us about our favourite sports, meanwhile the youngest boy was keen to discuss all things Pokémon, later gifting us each a precious Pokémon card (I got Chansey, super power level 80. Get in!)

He had been off school sick and held his arm in a sling made from a shredded blanket.

‘You look like a Roman wearing a toga!’ I commented, at which he giggled. His dimples pitted his face like someone had imprinted it with little olive pips.

We ate a simple meal of pasta al pomodoro with eggs from the three happy free-range hens that were the family pets and aubergine marinated by Stefano’s mother. Stefano and Giorgia talked to us about the 600-year-old house and the church that had even longer foundations. They had met in Peru. Their oldest son Michael was a bit timider but cited to us the first verse of the Divine Comedy after remarking,

‘Wow, you guys are like really, really into Dante!’

I think they were glad to have someone to talk to.

After dinner there followed a private tour of the church where we were able to marvel at the paintings of Ghirlandaio, an early Renaissance painter of the Florentine school noted for his detailed narrative frescoes. One had been stolen, Stefano explained, and a replacement had been installed. He was careful to put on the alarm before we left. Alina said a short prayer.

The house sits beside an NGO that works with local migrant children and the two stories Alina and I shared were strewn with half-finished craft projects and colourful drawings on the walls. Since we both work with refugee children, it was a sight familiar to us both. They marked a stark and stunning contrast with the 14^th century stonework which peaked out at points from beneath the pastel plaster.

With full tummies, Alina and I headed to our bunks in the arts room, sleeping beside loo roll easter bunnies and papier mâché masks. A warm shower was most welcome. My inner heels had developed thick blisters while Alina’s little toes looked like they had come down with plague sores.

An open fire kept us warm and dried our soap rinsed socks and knickers as we snuggled into our blankets and rested our weary limbs.

Apparently, I screamed out at one point in the night but this I don’t recall.

Recommended watching (turn on subtitles): Paradise of exiles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o-lUZq_71E

Recommended watching: Green Border: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27722543/

Recommended reading: openDemocracy 50.50: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/author/jennifer-allsopp/

April 11, 2025