Dante on the Move

Tag: emilia-romagna

  • The Art of Exile: From San Benedetto in Alpe to San Godenzo 

    I had an easy day, retracing Dante’s footsteps as a political exile who had a tumultuous relationship with his native Florence.

    My sleep was disturbed and, as I was sharing the dorm with an Italian couple from Bologna, Giuliana and Vittorio who had arrived late the night before, I finally made use of my pink EarPods to listen to some sleep hypnosis meditations.

    I had fevered dreams and was reminded of Dante who in canto 27 of Purgatorio passes through the wall of flames to Paradise, only to collapse with sleep with his guides, Virgil and Statius at his side:

    ‘Before one color came to occupy
    that sky in all of its immensity
    and night was free to summon all its darkness,

    each of us made one of those stairs his bed:
    the nature of the mountain had so weakened
    our power and desire to climb ahead…

    From there, one saw but little of the sky,
    but in that little, I could see the stars
    brighter and larger than they usually are.

    But while I watched the stars, in reverie,
    sleep overcame me—sleep, which often sees,
    before it happens, what is yet to be.’

    But as Dante wakes eager for the journey ahead, writing, 

    ‘my will on will to climb above was such
    that at each step I took I felt the force
    within my wings was growing for the flight’

    I, on the other hand, was exhausted.

    Because of a landslide, I would have to retrace yesterday’s steps and take a longer improvised route round to San Godenzo. 

    Over a breakfast of sweet pastries, the hostel owner Gian Luca suggested I miss the first part and start back on the trail from after the landslide. 

    I didn’t need much convincing, so when Vittorio offered to take me halfway in their car, I agreed. 

    It would give me more time to catch up with work, specifically, a funding application I was developing to read Tagore with refugees in India. In one of his most beautiful poems in the collection Gitanjali, he describes a world undivided by borders:

    ‘Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

    Where knowledge is free;

    Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

     Where words come out from the depth of truth;

     Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

     Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

    Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action

    Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.’

    It would be fascinating to see what refugees made of the world of this cosmopolitan Nobel Prize winning author. After Dante, Tagore was one of my favourite poets. 

    ‘Many people take public transport as they don’t manage after yesterday’, said Gian Luca reassuringly before he headed to the kitchen to make pasta for that day’s meal.  

    In the car, Giuliana and Vittorio told me a little of their work in music and events. 

    Soon we had arrived at Passo da Muraglione where Gian Luca had indicated to them to drop me but it turned out it was the wrong spot and I was completely off the Dante trail. I couldn’t ask the couple to drive me back another 30 minutes, and so I graciously accepted their offer to drop me directly in San Godenzo where they were passing through instead. From there it would be a three kilmetre walk up to the Agriturismo I had booked. I’d get a few steps in but the day would be my own to rest and recuperate.

    The car sounded out gospel tunes and many motorcyclists sped past on the road.

    ‘It’s the Spotify algorithm’ explained Vittorio. He’d liked one hymn and now the internet had decided he was religious. 

    In San Godenzo, I invited my hosts for a coffee and I had a slice of pizza, unsatisfied, once more, with my sweet breakfast. It was 10.30am. 

    I saluted the friendly couple and made my way to the abbey of San Godenzo in Piazza Dante Alighieri where the poet-politician had met with Ghibellines and White Guelfs in his first months of exile in June 1302 to try to forge an alliance against the Black Guelfs who had expelled him from the city.

    The convention brought together the noble families who were expelled from Florence and wanted to plan their return to the city by meditating on revenge. Dante’s name is signed in the attendance list.

    Walking around the abbey, I felt Dante’s political presence. I thought of all the refugees I knew who were committed to activism across borders. My friend Javid campaigned for women’s education in Afghanistan while an Albanian youth group I had worked with had started a campaign against blood feuds. 

    Although the 1302 convention did not lead to action, for more than 30 years, San Godenzo has commemorated this event during the ‘Dante Ghibellino’ festival, with a historical procession through the town streets. The celebrations culminate in awarding the homonymous prize to citizens who, during the year, have distinguished themselves for their civic commitment to San Godenzo, its territory and its community.

    As a political exile, Dante was excluded from a Florentine pardon in 1311, but another amnesty in 1315 would have allowed him to return. Unwilling to comply with the terms of the offer—admission of guilt and payment of a fine—Dante was again sentenced to death, this time by beheading rather than fire, the penalty now also applying to his sons, Pietro and Jacopo. 

    An additional provision stated that anyone had permission ‘to harm them in property and person, freely and with impunity.’ 

    Dante’s refusal reflected not only his great pride but also his better living conditions. While the first years of his exile had been brutal, by 1316 he was now residing in Verona as a guest of the Ghibelline ruler Cangrande della Scala. Having cut ties with his native city, he declared himself ‘Florentine by birth, not by disposition.’ Dante had learned how bread outside Florence ‘tastes of salt,’ but such bread was also not lacking as he sought out more abundant hospitality towards the end of his life. 

    Dante’s ‘overswollen pride’ is reflected in the significant time he spends with the proud in Hell and on the terrace of the proud in Purgatorio. Indeed, Dante presents pride as the foundation of sin by situating it at the base of Mount Purgatory. 

    In Purgatory, he walks alongside the proud souls who are forced to carry heavy loads:

    ‘I, completely hunched, walked on with them….for such pride, here one pays the penalty’

    Dante then reflects on the fleetingness of reputation and fame:

    ‘O empty glory of the powers of humans!
     How briefly green endures upon the peak-
     unless an age of dullness follows it…

     Worldly renown is nothing other than
     a breath of wind that blows now here, now there,
     and changes name when it has changed its course.’

    There is an irony here, since Dante is also explicit about his desire to bolster his reputation through the written word. 

    In Inferno, meanwhile, one of the most realistic conversational exchanges occurs between Dante and Farinata degli Uberti, the great Ghibelline leader in the battle of Montaperti, who died the year before Dante’s birth. Farinata is depicted in ‘the cemetery of Epicurus and his followers, all those who say the soul dies with the body.’ However, he is also guilty of the sin of pride, something we see through his rising out of a burning coffin, stubborn and defiant.

    ‘My eyes already were intent on his;
    and up he rose—his forehead and his chest-
    as if he had tremendous scorn for Hell.’

    Dante uses the meeting to discuss Florentine politics, engaging in vocal sparring. Farinata immediately recognizes Dante as a Florentine citizen from his accent: 

    ‘Your accent makes it clear that you belong
    among the natives of the noble city
    I may have dealt with too vindictively.’

    He then goes on to explain how he was responsible for the exile of many of Dante’s ancestors`:

    ‘When I’d drawn closer to his sepulcher,
    he glanced at me, and as if in disdain,
    he asked of me: “Who were your ancestors?”

    Because I wanted so to be compliant,
    I hid no thing from him: I told him all.
    At this he lifted up his brows a bit,

    then said: “They were ferocious enemies
    of mine and of my parents and my party,
    so that I had to scatter them twice over.”’

    While there is certainly no love lost between Dante and Farinata, there is a measure of respect. Farinata, called magnanimo, ‘great-hearted’, put Florence above politics when he stood up to his victorious colleagues and argued against destroying the city completely.

    ‘But where I was alone was there where all
    the rest would have annihilated Florence,
    had I not interceded forcefully’

    As the literary critic Auerbach has noted, Dante’s realistic and somewhat flattering depiction of Farinata shows his willingness to admire and work alongside his adversaries, something he did by uniting with the Ghibellines during the 1302 convention in San Godenzo. 

    Dante rebuffs Farinata’s insults by boasting that on both occasions when his ancestors were exiled, they returned:

    ‘“If they were driven out,” I answered him,
    “they still returned, both times, from every quarter;
    but yours were never quick to learn that art.”’

    The art referred to here is the art of exile. As Barolini explains, the above conversation references four cataclysmic events in Florentine politics of the thirteenth century, as Florence oscillated between Guelph and Ghibelline control until the ultimate defeat of Farinata and the Ghibellines at the battle of Benevento of 1266. 

    In effect, the dialogue lays out two sets of factional routes and returns. The first set of route and return comprises the 1248 defeat of the Guelphs by the Ghibellines, with the help of Emperor Frederic II, followed by the return of the Guelphs in 1251, after the death of the Emperor.

    The second set comprises the 1260 defeat of the Guelphs by the Ghibellines at the battle of Montaperti, where Farinata led the Ghibellines to victory with the help of the Sienese and Manfredi, Frederic’s successor, and then the subsequent defeat of the Ghibellines and return of the Guelphs following the battle of Benevento and the death of Manfredi in 1266.

    The abbey where Dante convened with Ghibellines of his own day featured a plaque to honour him and some stunning mosaics that had been added some time after he had congregated there.

    Outside the church someone had hung a banner saying, ‘possesion isn’t love.’

    I walked for half an hour up a hill to the Agriturismo Tenuta Mazzini where I was met by Filippo, the son of the owners who was out foraging for strigoli. He was walking alongside a woman carrying a wicker basket. Strigoli, or stridoli, are a spontaneous grass typical of the Tuscan-Romagna territory. The name comes from the screeches that two leaves emit if rubbed together. It is edible and often used in risotto or salads. It’s especially tender at this time of year, explained Filippo.

    There was a sign forbidding people from collecting mushrooms and chestnuts between the 1st of September and 31st of October but there was no mention of harvesting grasses. What’s more, the seasonal ban had yet to come into force.

    Filippo showed me where there was a local restaurant that served lunch, but the owners had provided spaghetti, tuna and tomato sauce so I made myself a meal that would serve as both lunch and dinner.

    The apartment was spacious with a comfy double bed, quite a welcome contrast from yesterday’s basic amenities and a total bargain at just 45 Euros a night. There was a poster by Matisse and a copy of The Two Cherubs by Rafael from 1513. The latter is part of a bigger painting that features the Madonna holding the Christ Child, flanked by two saints. The figures are placed among the clouds, suggesting that it is a scene from heaven. At the base of the painting are the two winged cherubs, looking up at the scene from below.

    Outside there was a swimming pool that was overhung with wisteria. It boasted a view of the rolling hills. I watched as a nuthatch flitted from branch to branch then disappeared into the distance. 

    A lady staying in the flat next door, Cristina, had brought six cats with her and took them each out for a wonder on a lead. Milu was among the friendliest and we shared caresses on the grass.

    As I caught up on work, including meeting online with my PhD student Olivia who was doing research on asylum seekers’ reception in UK hotels, I recalled Dante’s words about how writing is a way to ‘make oneself immortal.’

  • Over the Misty Mountains: From Marradi to San Benedetto in Alpe

    I said goodbye to Pope Francis, was humbled by the kindness of strangers, and struggled over the staggering mountains.

    It’s common that Italian bars and restaurants have TV’s on in the background, so over a breakfast of a croissant and cake I watched as the news anchor looked back on Pope Francis’ life. There was no doubt about it, he had been an incredible man. 

    Although I’m not a Catholic, for all intents and purposes it seemed he had been a good Pope too.

    I recalled how struck I had been when he’d blessed arriving migrant ships in Lampedusa and washed the feet of refugees. The news reported that migrants, along with homeless people and individuals in prison, had been among those invited to his funeral. Pope Francis had also spoken out about climate change. He would be sorely missed.

    500,000 pilgrims had descended on Rome to pay their respects. Kelsey, who lived there in an apartment by the Colosseum, said that the atmosphere was electric.

    I reflected that Prince William looked handsome with a beard and wondered how the encounter between Trump and Zelensky would go down. I had watched the entire video of his ritual humiliation at the hands of Trump and Vance at the Whitehouse and was left with the feeling that I had witnessed an act of bulling and extreme abuse occur upon the screen.

    11,000 police and security officers had been mobilized by the Italian state. 

    I watched Starmer greet Meloni with a kiss on the cheek and was reminded of the cruel recent UN approval for offshore processing centres for asylum seekers, a policy the UK had borrowed from Italy. 

    Franco appeared from between two baby chairs.

    ‘Buongiorno!’ he saluted me. He was wearing shorts and looked almost German with his fair hair and skinny legs. 

    ‘Buongiorno,’ I replied. 

    ‘Ah yes, the Pope of the people, he was,’ reflected Franco.

    I thought of Dante’s tumultuous relationship with the Popes, many of whom he’d put in Hell where they were buried in the ground headfirst with their feet on fire.

    ‘O Simon Magus! O his sad disciples!
    Rapacious ones, who take the things of God,
    that ought to be the brides of Righteousness,

    and make them fornicate for gold and silver!
    The time has come to let the trumpet sound
    for you; your place is here in this third pouch.’

    In this canto, Inferno 19, the prostituting of the Church-bride by her Pope-bridegroom picks up and metaphorises the sexualized language of previous parts of the Inferno. This canto is the first of several indictments of the Church in the Divine Comedy. Indeed, it picks up on some earlier indications that Dante links the clerical establishment with the sin of avarice. In Inferno 7 he says that he sees cardinals and popes among the misers in the fourth circle:

    ‘ These to the left—their heads bereft of hair—

    were clergymen, and popes and cardinals,

    within whom avarice works its excess.’

    I was captivated by the news but I had to get moving. Today was a long one and starting at 9 was already a bit ambitious, Franco warned me.

    He noted that one of my hiking poles was broken and I followed his gaze.

    ‘I don’t suppose you have any glue or something to fix it,’ I asked.

    His face lit up. 

    ‘I have just the thing’, he said.

    My host disappeared into a back room with the broken pole and reemerged ten minutes later. He had completely fixed it. It was sturdy as the mast of a ship.

    ‘But how did you manage that?’ I questioned.

    ‘Ah, it’s a secret,’ came his reply. ‘A bit of magic and good will.’

    I was beyond grateful. I was also grateful that after I’d finished my third espresso macchiato Franco handed me a fruit juice bottled filled with espresso.

    ‘You’ll need this,’ he said, ‘it’s for the road.’ 

    One of the passes I would cross today was named ‘Hell’s Hill.’

    I tucked it into my bag, delighted.

    I carefully removed a tick from my stomach as I watched a lady place flowers in boxes outside her store from the window. I realized I’d left my glasses and moisturizer at a previous hotel and was grateful for my contact lenses and Vaseline which I applied to my chapped face instead. 

    And with that, I set off back into the mountains. I saluted Franco. He left me his number in case I needed anything. He had been another ‘trail angel,’ as Kelsey called them.

    Though I had enjoyed by brief interlude from the 24-hour news cycle during my cammino, now I listened to the BBC World Service as I ascended out of the town. The Pope’s funeral was about to start and I was curious about how it would be covered. 

    It was a sunny but fresh day and I’d known better than to wear shorts. It would be cold up in the mountains and so I’d put on my trousers.

    There was no two ways about it, the ascent out of the city was steep. My back and shoulders hurt today as well as my feet. Today was going be a beast. I could feel my calf muscles twinging to life. I’d done some gentle stretching the night before but this was a burn.

    The sweat dripped off my nose and my hands slid, sweaty, on my poles. I had only been going for 20 minutes!

    A few mountain bikers past who I saluted – it was a sport I’d never tried. Someone had laid stones at the bottom of a line of trees like a familiar cairn. 

    I’d felt on the edge of tears for the last few days. Maybe today would be the day.

    I drank water liberally since I was counting on stopping at the Hermitage to restock on the way.

    I was religiously checking directions. I really didn’t want to add time to what would already be a super long day.

    The radio informed me that there had been a bishop in Rome for over 2000 years and that there were 1.4 billion Catholics in the world. Pope Francis had spoken out against the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. He had said that ‘a pastor should never lose the smell of his flock.’

    50 heads of state and ten monarchs were in attendance. 40,000 celebrants filled St Peter’s Square and 100,000 more were crowded before large screens on the Italian side of the border. The Vatican was, after all, its own city state.

    Someone said that the Argentinian Pope had even been able to do the impossible, make Brazilians forget their football rivalry and connect across the border. He had been a champion of interfaith dialogue.

    Then came the 10am news bulletin. Trump’s administration had deported a two-year-old to Honduras in breach of due process. Of course he had. This is what I hadn’t missed about listening to the news. I felt sick at the thought to it and recalled the poem:

    ‘First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
         Because I was not a socialist.

    Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
         Because I was not a trade unionist.

    Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
         Because I was not a Jew.

    Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.’

    I followed the first of two detours that had been designed to avoid landslides, adding about two kilometres to my route. I dodged another group of mountain bikers, one of whom was topless. 

    It was very muddy on the path and I was immensely grateful for my poles to help me avoid a slip. Franco, you angel!

    There emerged a big rain cloud and the wind picked up.

    The radio continued with its commentary of Pope Francis’ funeral. 130 delegations were in attendance. Putin was not. He would have been arrested by international warrant if he’d set foot on Italian soil.

    Pontiff, I leaned, means ‘bridge builder’.

    In other news, North Korea had launched a new missile ship. What a world.

    A group of scouts came hiking towards me in the opposite direction. They saluted me cheerfully. Their backpacks suggested they were campers. I hoped for them as well as for myself that the rain would hold.

    I lost signal as I approached the Hermitage of Gamogna where an order of sisters lived and prayed. I passed two such nuns, one of whom was wearing a wooly hat, and they invited me to enjoy the church. The complex, a sign informed me, had been founded in 1053.

    I took off my cap as I entered the simple stone building and took awhile to sit on a pew and rest. It was incredibly tranquil. Before I left, I signed the prayer book.

    ‘With the wish of peace to all refugees and that I may complete this cammino,’ I wrote.

    I ate half of my controversial tuna and cheese sandwich in the pretty courtyard and refilled my water tank from an outside tap by which there was an abanonded toothbrush. I also drank half of the coffee that Franco had so kindly prepared for me. 

    Yum.

    A French couple were having a picnic and a couple of other hikers were making their way up to the church.

    It was 12.30pm. I followed the. prominent Cammino di Dante signs up to a field that was cordoned off with barbed wire – that’s not very nun-like, I thought. Then I crawled under it. My anorak was snagged. Would I regret this?

    I looked back at Oliver’s messages and texted him, waiting for his advice. There were footprints; somebody had come before.

    The woodland I entered was dotted with little wildflowers that looked like miniature violet pansies, and here was the familiar sprinkle of primroses.

    I exited the patch of woodland through another barbed wire fence, but this one, I noted, had a gate mechanism you could cross through and a sign that clearly indicated that livestock were grazing. I must have missed the gate in the previous fence. The nuns were ok after all. 

    Oliver had helpfully signaled to me where the path goes right off the road – it would be would be easy to miss – and up, up I went along a dirt path. 

    It was now 2 o’clock and I was about halfway. I was hungry. I ate some more of my sandwich. I was so grateful Franco for fixing my pole. Today’s hike would have been near impossible without it.

    The brooding clouds delivered the first spits of rain. I crossed a field with the sign, ‘Attention, wild bull!’ and crossed a pass called ‘Hell’s Hill’.

    I followed a man who was walking slowly with stick behind his back. We kept pace. I was about ten metres behind. The path was now lined with a brown brush-like plant. 

    It was still two hours to the waterfall. I wouldn’t get there before six, I realized.

    I was straddling the border between Tuscany and Emelia Romagna as I walked, observing stunning sweeping panoramic views of the mountains which were many shades of green. I stopped to observe from mushrooms sprouting on a log. Enrico would have known how to identify them. 

    A hawk swept across the landscape, crying out. This was the only sound I heard as I started the descent. 

    The cloud hung heavy in lines over the mountains and as I walked, slabs of sedimentary rocks came unstuck from the cliffside. I was trotting again down the steep bank. Patches of a new plant appeared. Was it a kind of hellebore?

    Now, as I passed a small permaculture plantation where two hippy-like women were chatting, I could hear the waterfall of Acquacheta. And then there it was: I got the first glimpse of the roaring tundra which spouted water from the top of the sky.

    Dante references this impressive waterfall explicitly in the Divine Comedy. In Inferno, canto 16, he writes,

    ‘And even as the river that is first
    to take its own course eastward from Mount Viso,
    along the left flank of the Apennines

    (which up above is called the Acquacheta,
    before it spills into its valley bed
    and flows without that name beyond Forli),

    reverberates above San Benedetto
    dell’Alpe as it cascades in one leap,
    where there is space enough to house a thousand;

    so did we hear that blackened water roar
    as it plunged down a steep and craggy bank,
    enough to deafen us in a few hours.’

    A young couple were cuddling on a bench beside the torrent and a family with two children were accompanied by a golden retriever. 

    ‘Let’s wait for mamma,’ said one of the children to the other, ‘it’s too slippery.’

    As I contemplated the abundance of water, my own tears finally came. I let gulped down sobs as I slid my feet through the boggy path. 

    I was alone and I realized stopping for a rest on a stone bench just how much my feet hurt. I had another bite of my sandwich. It was 4.30pm so I still had a good three hours of light. I pulled out my laptop to check where I was staying and let the happy family go on ahead of me.

    Once I was back on the trail I passed another couple. A woman cried out, 

    ‘Mamma Mia, the water shines like a crystal!’

    It did. At the bottom of the cascade the water collected in iridescent turquoise pools.

    Each time my stick got stuck in the mud I thought of Franco once more with enormous gratitude.

    Now wasn’t a good time to be alone with my thoughts and I was reassured by the cries of the children ahead. One of them had written ‘Forza Milano’ on a rock using a stone as a pen.

    I passed another smaller waterfall and a refuge to my left. I was entering a zone for protected fish, a sign informed me. 

    I crossed two rickety bridges and tried to ignore the cramps in my feet which were becoming intolerable. I was an hour from my hostel still and the path was now largly up.

    I passed a little girl with Barbie and a man on a vesper. A couple were taking a sausage dog for a walk. If they could do it, I could.

    As I arrived in the village, I passed two elderly bearded men who were selling eggs and honey. I had never been so happy to see a recycling bottle bank which announced that I had made it to the town.

    I passed a campsite up the windy hill and finally made it to my accommodation for the night, Ostello il Vignale. It was very basic, a room of bunkbeds with a shared old-school drop toilet and very thin blanket that would do little to keep me warm during the night. 

    The church bell sounded out six and with that, exhausted emotionally and physically, in the words of Dante when he is overcome in canto five of Inferno,

    ‘I fell like a dead body falls.’

  • What Goes Down Must Go Up: From Brisighella to Monte Romano

    It was a difficult day of walking starting with an overdose of gypsum followed by an unforgettable evening of hospitality and a sky full of stars.

    I got up at 7am to a lovely message from my American writer friend Joyce who said she was headed to a ballet version of Frankenstein. I was jealous! Frankenstein, so misunderstood, is among my favourite books. Misread as a horror story, Mary Shelley’s novel is nothing if not a deeply romantic reflection on man’s search for connection and love. 

    Shelley writes,

    ‘If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.

    If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country; America could have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.’

    As I wrote in a recent article in The Times, I try to follow this logic with my own research as much as I can: taking my time, respecting people and not rushing to conclusions. 

    Indeed, part of the motive for this cammino was to take time to reflect on my research practice as a social scientist. 

    As I’ve been listening back to audio recordings of interviews with refugees on my way, I feel I’ve been able to hear their voices with a new attentiveness. I was taking care of myself and my own need to be outside and wonder. This would, I hoped, help me to care for other people. 

    For me, individuals’ wellbeing and not the political machinations of the world have always been my primary interest. One of my favourite quotes is from the French writer, Boris Vian,

    ‘What interests me isn’t the happiness of all people, but that of each one.’

    ‘Ce qui m’intéresse, ce n’est pas le bonheur de tous les hommes, c’est celui de chacun.’

    I had tried to carry this spirit with me on this adventure that was also, in many ways, a self-reflective ethnographic exercise.

    I headed down to breakfast where the cappuccino machine spat out my drink. The hosts were gracious and said I didn’t have to pay for the disappointing spa. 

    The morning was fresh but sunny. As I packed my bag, I was disappointed to learn that one of Alina’s glittery socks that I’d washed and put out to dry the night before had disappeared over the balcony. A pigeon flew into my glass door repeatedly. I closed the curtains hoping that might help.

    I drank a whole bottle of fizzy water and ate a cheese sandwich for the road. Yesterday at the supermarket, I’d purchased a Red Bull energy drink which I tucked into my sack. I was still quite tired. I didn’t feel like walking today. I had even contemplated getting a taxi, but Italians don’t really do taxis and part of me had to continue. I’d see how far I got.

    There was a Sardinia flag on one of the houses that lined the road, and I passed a man who was fitting new shutters on his house. A fancy-looking restaurant had hung wine bottles from an olive tree outside and the door was decorated with a sculpture made from cork. 

    The Dante trail takes you right through the heart of the medieval town of Brisighella. The cylindrical turret of the tower of Orologio, built for military purposes in 1290, dominates the sky above the majestic town hall.

    The butcher’s shop, or macelleria, was doing a roaring morning trade and a boutique called Woman included, among the tempting items in the window, a beautiful crochet top and leather boots.

    The road up out of the town was closed and so I had to take a scenic detour up some very steep steps that were about half a metre tall. I heaved myself up and the sweat was soon pouring from my forehead down into my eyes, rendering me partially blind. Leaving my bikini behind with Alina’s one remaining sock clearly hadn’t been enough to lighten the load of my heavy bag. 

    Succulents were nestled into the rocks and a purple flower called tassel grape hyacinth sprung out of the verge. It looked alien with its prongs – something like the covid virus. As I passed the church, the butterflies were back out in full force.

    Then I was back on the path which took me into a national park. It featured an open-air geology museum on the old site of the quarry of Montecino. I was in the land of gypsum, the second hardest mineral after talc on the Moh scale of mineral hardness, or so my geologist mother had informed me. She’d kill to be here. On holiday in Tunisia she had swooned over the abundant gypsum. ‘The desert rose’, she’d called it.

    The Gypsum Vein is a small mountain range characterized by one rock only, Selenite. It marks the landscape of the Apennine foothills of western Romagna. This, in turn, is made of just one mineral: shiny, soluble, slippery gypsum. 

    The landscape’s origin dates back to about 6 million years ago when the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean were separated and the sea water evaporation caused the formation of several strata of crystals that are the origin of today’s ravines. The solubility of gypsum produced a tessellation of caves and sinkholes (it is almost ten times more soluble than limestone), making it an area of great geological interest to Europe. The site had given rise to fossils from over five and a half million years ago: of rhinos, monkeys, hyenas, antelopes and crocodiles. But a sign made clear that fossil hunting was not permitted here. The park was to be enjoyed, not excavated. 

    I passed a French couple who I wished a bon chemin and stopped to locate my cap to ease the sweating situation. I had only done two kilometres but I was exhausted. 

    I exchanged voice notes with Alina whose mother’s house in Ukraine had been hit by a missile the day before. We shared thoughts on the mistaken assumption that refugees are somehow running away from something rather than staying to fix the problems in their countries of origin. 

    This brushland was a new kind of scenery for me. Something like broom scraped my arms as I walked and two mountain bikers came hurtling down the hill:

    Occhio! ‘Watch out!’

    ‘But are you by yourself?’ one man stopped to ask me. 

    I was, I replied for the umpteenth time. With every time I was forced to declare it, I felt more and more alone. 

    I whistled back at the birds as I climbed up the dirt track road which soon turned to gravel. An orange peel left by a previous hiker was being devoured by ants. 

    I offloaded my empty Red Bull can in a bin in a parking lot that was next to a sign with an arrow that simply read Carne – ‘meat, this way!’

    The valley had been slashed and hacked as if it had been visited by the devils in Dante’s infernal circle of schismatics.

    I could hear the sound of children laughing and soon arrived at a scout camp which was surrounded by sculptures. One resembled a dragon; here was a lizard and, there, a tortured woman who made me think of the Bernini sculpture of Persephone turning into a tree to escape violation by Hades. The statue is housed in the Galleria Borghese in Rome.

    Two years ago, on a tour that I had taken with refugees, led by my brilliant friend and curator Stefania, one woman had said the sculpture reminded her of the sexual violence that her and others had experienced in Libya en route to safety in Europe. How she wished she could have turned into a tree. 

    The sun had gone in and it was nice and cool under the trees. In the panorama, the pine trees sprung up like bishops in a chess game.

    Several scouts filed towards the camp heading in the opposite direction to me. My Granny had been a scout leader, known as Akela after the character in The Jungle Book, but I’d never been a scout myself. Though I grew up in the city, my love of the outdoors had been instilled by my mother and father through our regular walks in the ‘Country Park’, a beautiful stretch of parkland some fifteen minutes’ drive away from our house. There was also, nearby, an old quarry where occasionally, with friends, I’d swim. Once I got a fishing hook caught in my foot. That hurt alright!

    My feet hurt now alright, and I was relieved to reach a stretch of downhill. But looking at the map I was reminded that what goes down must go up. Today would not be easy.

    I put on some music to elevate my mood. The song, Despacito, poignantly rang out and I sang along to the Spanish lyrics. On my most recent trip to Cuba, I had teased my friend Jo by requesting the song repeatedly from the ubiquitous itinerant street musicians. 

    The hills undulated like pencil sharpener shavings strung out across the landscape.

    The yellow broom smelt magnificent, and pinecones littered the path. The poppies opened up their petals like the wings of a butterfly. It was 1pm now and the sky was smudged with clouds. I passed a monkey orchid and bushes of juniper. 

    I didn’t have time to check out the Museum of Olive Oil but I was making up time on the gentle downhill patch. To look down was to see a furry black caterpillar curled in a ball; to look up was to see the vineyards dusted with buttercups.

    I proceeded past a sign saying the road was broken up ahead only to find that yet another landslide had torn into the cliff face. Luckily, I was able to hop over the barrier and traverse the crevasse on the left hand side. I put on Fleetwood Mac.

    The combination of smoked salmon and tzatziki was so, so good as I stopped for lunch, looking out over the vines. I noticed a worrying hole in my shoe. I still had quite a long way to go but I wanted to take a nap. This plan was thwarted by a tractor that emerged spraying pesticides.

    A car sped past. But where had it come from? The road was broken? Oh well, I’d missed my chance to hitch a ride.

    Some pigeons perched on an electricity wire. A delicate trace of honeysuckle decorated a laurel tree.

    And now came the ascent once more. I noticed the various signs signaling that European Union money had been invested in the area and passed another landslide, though this time the road was still navigable.

    My feet ached and I stopped to take some ibuprofen. Now I was listening to an audiobook that Alina had recommended, The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert. It was about botany. I thought of my grandfather who I had never known, but who had been an academic at the University of Manchester. A doctor of blue green algae or cryptogamic botany, he had apparently been a walker too. The family legend went that he had even been shortlisted for the Edmund Hillary Everest expedition. In my dad’s house there still hung a beautiful black and white photo of him at the summit of Mont Blanc.

    I tried to channel that spirit as I ploughed on with painful feet. I tried smaller steps – that hurt. I tried longer strides – that hurt too. A tiny spider hitched a lift on my thumb nail. Desperate for some company in my hour of need I played some opera music. The highs and lows of the singers’ voices matched the ups and down of the path.

    My phone signal had gone so I couldn’t call anybody for motivation. The rocks weren’t massaging my feet now, they were hurting them. I’d only done 12.1 kilometres but the incline had been 72 floors.

    A chapel to the Madonna spurred me on for a while, then I collapsed by some abandoned farming equipment. I would take some paracetamol too. Shit, how would I fare tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that?

    I watched a hawk sweep across the sky and contemplated it a while. It hovered then soared down in a flurry of feathers which were dark on the outer edges and a lighter brown in the middle. It screeched into the sky. I hear you, I thought. This was the sound of my foot cramps. 

    I put my feet up on my bag and closed my eyes. God, it felt good to be horizontal. It was nearly 4pm. In my body I felt fine. It was just that my stomach was still playing up and my feet were aching.

    I carried on, listening to the sound of the hawk and dogs barking in the distance. I was rewarded by a spectacular 360 degree view of the mountains which was framed by wild rosemary and thyme and blue daisies that exited the ground in little puffs of mauve. 

    The pain killers had taken the edge off, but every step still hurt and I had another two kilometres to go. There was a brief flirtation of rain, just enough for me to cover my bag and myself, but then it passed as swiftly as it had arrived.

    I pushed down hard on my hiking poles to relieve the pressure on my feet.  By 6 o’clock, I told myself, I’d be there. I ate some pistachio nuts and carried on my way. Panting like a dog, I dodged muddy puddles here and there and noticed an interesting orange fungus on a tree stump.

    A sign informed me that I was in Ca’ di Malanca where on the 10th of October 1944, Italian forces had clashed with German soldiers. There had been 42 fallen partisans. It was humbling. 

    The forest opened up to reveal spectacular views on either side. I saw some parasites on an oak tree and thought of Paolo back in Ravenna and his ink. What a man he had been. 

    Now the path led across a sheer rock face littered with boulders with precipitous drops on either side. I thought again of Dante’s hike through 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.’

    Attention is drawn here to Dante’s weight to stress he is a human being visiting the underworld. I hoped Dante had had good boots.

    The sun was now illuminating the mountain tops in a vibrant green. Then, I could hear a dog, I saw a car and my heart started to lift. Here was Enrico, my host for the night who had promised to meet me. 

    I couldn’t have been more happy to see him.

    He showed me that across the ridge you could see Ravenna and, see that last line? That was the Adriatic sea. On a clear day you could see the mountains of Croatia.

    I immediately liked this man who was accompanied by two adorable dogs, Mia and Cilian.

    Enrico was a keen geologist and star gazer – to love planet earth is to love space after all, he explained. He was one of the patrons of the Observatory that sat atop a nearby hill. When they’d built it, they’d found an unexploded bomb from the war.

    Together we passed Monte Romano, a tiny village composed of just ten houses, and arrived at his home. It was folded into the hills in the middle of nowhere. The view was breathtaking. You could see Mount Falcone which I’d crossed from Florence in the snow, and here were the origins of the Arno and Tiber rivers.

    It was moving to see how far I’d come. Perhaps I could do this after all. 

    ‘And you’re doing it without the threat of the death penalty over your head like our dear Dante,’ Enrico reminded me. We laughed. 

    Enrico’s wife had left to pay her respects to the late Pope at 2am that morning and so it was just me and Enrico who enjoyed an aperitivo on a little balcony as we watched the sunset. He had grilled aubergines with the local oil into a delicious sauce to make bruschetta. The olives melted in my mouth. 

    That night we ate tagliatelle with mushrooms he had foraged from the surrounding woodland with pepper he had brought back from Madagascar and discussed all things geology and stars beside a roaring open fire. The mushrooms were called St George’s mushrooms, since the best day to collect them was St George’s Day.

    Enrico also prepared me a delicious baked potato with rosemary and some grilled cabbage and tomatoes which were served with pecorino and some local squacquerone cheese. It was all delicious. 

    The house was as stunning as Enrico’s cooking, with original brick walls and beams that crisscrossed above us protectively. There was an antique clock, oak furniture and a near perfect pencil depiction of Dante’s death mask which had been rendered by his grandmother’s sister for a project at school.

    And then Enrico shared with me one of his prized possessions: a striking photograph of the comet Hale–Bopp which was visible from earth in April 1997. It had been one of the brightest seen for many decades. 

    I can still recall my mum’s excitement. 

    ‘A comet, a real-life comet in the sky!’

    I had been ten at the time. It was one of my most vivid childhood memories. It won’t return for well over 4,000 years, had marveled my mum. I wished she were here to meet Enrico. 

    The dogs were under the table and I tickled one of them with my weary feet. It felt luxurious. Enrico shared with me a poem he had written about comets:

    Our existences flow rapidly.

    Like swift wandering comets

    That move

    In cold, empty spaces.

    Distant projects,

    Guarded in the dark

    Suddenly called

    To the light.

    Beauty and love

    They light up and burn

    Around this Sun.

    For each, the orbit is different,

    But it inexorably brings us

    Back to a place that reason cannot understand.

    Enrico had been the translator for Thomas Bopp, one of the astronomers who had discovered the comet before it became visible to the naked eye, on a visit to Italy during which he had signed his photograph. The photo, he proudly shared, was also featured on numerous book covers.

    ‘Comets now have names of computer programmes,’ he lamented, ‘not astronomers or lovers of the sky.’

    This man was a true lover of the sky, just as Dante had been.

    Before I went to bed, Enrico took me outside to see the stars and took my photograph beside his favourite oak tree. I felt honoured. And naturally, I recalled the last lines of the Divine Comedy in Paradiso:

    ‘As the geometer intently seeks
    to square the circle, but he cannot reach,
    through thought on thought, the principle he needs,

    so I searched that strange sight: I wished to see
    the way in which our human effigy
    suited the circle and found place in it—

    and my own wings were far too weak for that.
    But then my mind was struck by light that flashed
    and, with this light, received what it had asked.

    Here force failed my high fantasy; but my
    desire and will were moved already—like
    a wheel revolving uniformly—by

    the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.’

  • A Divided Sky: From Oriolo dei Fichi a Brisighella

    Today’s mix of sunshine and rain left me in a melancholy mood which was not alleviated by the hotel’s awful spa.

    I woke up to a horrible dream which put me on edge. And, typical: I’d left my mosquito repellant with Kelsey to offload some weight and now, in the night, they had assaulted me. It was my own fault – it was a balmy evening and I’d left the window open to hear the cicadas.

    I received news from Stefano and Donatella that Oliver’s memory was returning and shortly after he sent me a Whatsapp message. Thank God.

    The aftershocks of yesterday’s drama were still hitting me. 

    The rain fell lightly on the vineyards surrounding the agriturismo, la Sabbiona, which had a swimming pool and children’s play area for the summer. There was a bench made of wooden crates from which you could enjoy them, though something like a large football net obscured the view.

    Over breakfast, I got chatting to Chris and Carey, a retired American engineer and teacher couple from Colorado who were vacationing in the region. We discussed Trump and their plans to keep travelling until his four-year reign was over. I thought of the schismatics and sewers of civil discord in Dante’s Inferno who are punished by having their body parts mutilated. 

    ‘Who, even with untrammeled words and many
    attempts at telling, ever could recount
    in full the blood and wounds that I now saw?…

    And then, were one to show his limb pierced through
    and one his limb hacked off, that would not match
    the hideousness of the ninth abyss.

    No barrel, even though it’s lost a hoop
    or end— piece, ever gapes as one whom I
    saw ripped right from his chin to where we fart:

    his bowels hung between his legs, one saw
    his vitals and the miserable sack
    that makes of what we swallow excrement.’

    The prophet Mohemmed shows his entrails to Dante and Virgil while on the left stands his son Ali, his head cleft from chin to forelock. Some other souls have their heads on backwards. That might be more suitable for Trump, I thought.

    Breakfast consisted of homemade juices – I chose raspberry and grape – that came in plastic cups (Italians really like their plastic cups) and a range of home-baked pastries. There were some pretty flowers in a little boxes set out on the table in a line. Perhaps there would be a wedding. I realized as this thought transpired that I was thinking in Italian – un matrimonio.

    I was eager to get back on the cammino after a couple of days of not walking but I was also tired. Yesterday had taken it out of me, even if I had slept all night. I had a headache and my stomach was playing up, so I took some paracetamol.

    As I set off, I was rewarded with the familiar sight of olive, rosemary and fruit trees. When I passed guard dogs, now I greeted them familiarly, converted by my experience in Forlí.

    The lizards were back and the thistles, poppies and sticky weed. Some wild verbena sprouted on the roadside. 

    A sign announced that we were in the land of ‘flavours and wine’.

    Once I’d passed the little church of Sant’Apollinare, which had been reconstructed in 1946 after bombardments in World War Two, I passed onto a dirt road where poems had been pinned upon the tree barks and lamposts. One called ‘crickets’ by Nino da Oriolo read:

    ‘In the red of evening

    The crickets serenade the moon

    In a row with elms they stand on top of the hill,

    They greet my day of work.

    I feel them close,

    They live in my land,

    They live in my sun,

    They feel my wind,

    We enjoy the pleasure of living.

    In silence they accompany me on my way.

    I am not alone, we are not alone.’

    I felt alone today, though now I had met Giordano, Marcello and Oliver, the guardians of the trail, I had a new appreciation for every marker on a tree or lamppost to which they had put their generous hands. I recalled how Giordano and his son both had strong, thick fingers like tree branches.

    I tried to religiously keep my feet dry as I navigated the mud which was embroidered with tractor tracks here and there. 

    Marco, who I had met at Fattoria Chiocce Romagnole, who had set off on the cammino from Ravenna, had written to warn me about the roads which were muddy and diverted in several places, and today, as I walked along, knocking over the daisies with the tip of my boot, I felt some comfort knowing that they had walked before me here.

    The path weaved in and out of the vines. A butterfly decorated some dog excrement and a man ate a brioche on a stationary tractor by the side of the road. The sun was strong up in the sky. 

    An explosion of poppies lined the margins of the path making me think back to the schismatics and of war. 

    My feet felt surprisingly OK. My shoes had fully dried out and I’d applied blister plasters preemptively before setting off. The wounds on the top of my toes had hardened into scabs. 

    It seemed like the world and his wife were mowing their lawns today in Oriolo. From everywhere emanated the smell of freshly cut grass. 

    A message from Kelsey arrived to say that the UN Lesbian March she had been organizing for this coming Saturday had been cancelled because some 250,000 people, including Trump, were expected to descend on Rome for Pope Frances’ funeral. Even from the grave it seemed he had it in for the gays. 

    I missed Kelsey. 

    Back on the tarmac, there appeared a pretty terracotta farmhouse to my right the colour of my bathroom and huge thistles the size of small children lined the road. 

    After an hour, I stopped for a caffé macchiato at Manueli restaurant which featured pretty frescos on the walls. My back was already sweating into my t-shirt. I contemplated stopping to write awhile but decided to continue on. Writing and walking had come to be, for me, one and the same. 

    I crossed the river Manogue and spied a lizard that had been run over. Its skin and guts were spilled out onto the pavement. It was an iridescent hue, green and blue, like an oil spill.

    A dusty blue Fiat Panda sped past and a lady in a straw hat who was cultivating romagnole artichokes wished me a buon cammino. 

    Everything in this region is ‘Romagnole’ – there’s a deep sense of pride. 

    A peacock strutted across the road next to a tractor as I passed over another river following the Via della Uccellina – the path of the little bird. 

    I looked back at the city of Faenza from where puffs of industrial smoke rose into the sky, merging with the clouds which were pooling grey and white. I’d visited Faenza with my Reading Dante with Refugees class and remembered vividly Sahra dancing on the stage of the spectacular theatre. I pinged her a message to see how she was getting on.

    It was relatively flat on the path though I was surrounded by undulating hills. The landscape reminded me somewhat of Le Marche where I had spent several summers at my friend Harriet’s house enjoying quality time with University friends. 

    I listened to some gentle Indie rock as I sweated under the midday sun.

    A big white car pulled out of physiotherapist’s office which I found odd to be located in the middle of the countryside. 

    The livid poppies made it look like the hill was aflame.

    The trees were embracing one another on either side of the path to make a tunnel.

    As Brisighella came into view before me, there were quite a few cars on the road. 

    Pink, yellow and purple irises bloomed from a garden to my right. I felt the rub of the end of my second toes inside my boots. 

    Throughout history, different cultures have attached meaning to the length of toes, including the second toe. The Greeks, known for their appreciation of beauty and mathematical harmony, considered a longer second toe, also known as Morton’s toe, as an aesthetic ideal. Greek sculptures, such as the Venus de Milo, often depicted figures with Morton’s toe, further perpetuating its cultural significance. French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi studied Greek and Roman sculptures, which resulted in the Statue of Liberty’s longer second toe.

    As the mountains came into view beneath a purple sky which was heavy with rain, I thought again of items I could get rid of before the climb ahead. My hoody perhaps? Or my deodorant?

    Olive trees marked the perimeter of the vineyard and a familiar cuckoo sounded out.

    I stubbed my swollen toes on a crack in the road and stopped for lunch, looking back over Faenza and forward towards the towering peaks. I bit into a blood orange which burst in an ecstasy of sugar in my mouth. I was tired and I wanted to take a nap but the rain was coming, so on I went. The sky was divided in two: here in front it was dark and brooding, the colour of a whale; there behind me it was light, the colour of delphiniums. 

    As I continued, the road collapsed down to the left. The hills were cut with ridges and valleys like slices of an apple. 

    A blackbird sang out and the leaves on the trees began to rustle in the light wind.

    I had come to recognize the smell of oncoming rain. The butterflies had disappeared and, was that thunder I heard in the distance?

    The overcast sky made the hillside look emerald green rather than the more vibrant pea green of earlier in the day. A ruined brick house emerged from among the foliage.

    After about ten minutes of walking downhill, I realized I had missed a turning but I decided to proceed down the road along via Carla. I would pick up the trail later on.

    I stopped to cover my backpack at the touch of the first drops of rain, outside a house with peppermint green shutters. A huge beetle crossed in front of me and my phone pinged with the offer of a discount from a takeaway back home.

    At a junction where there was a Cammino de Dante sign, I stopped briefly to converse with a woman called Stefania who was pruning her roses. She greeted me warmly and I petted her dog, Pepe. She said I was the first person she’d seen pass this year. A man in overalls asked me if I’d come from England to salute the Pope.

    ‘I’ll let you go before the rain comes down any stronger,’ she said, ‘do you need anything, water?’

    She was particularly impressed that I was tackling the cammino alone as a woman.

    ‘You must have strong legs and a strong will!’ she said. 

    A bonfire in a farm to the right reminded me of one of my favourite Italian books, La luna e i Falò (The Moon and the Bonfires) by Cesare Pavese.

    ‘We all need a homeland,’ reads one line, ‘if only for the pleasure to leave it.’

    A tractor on the right was mowing in between the vines and the rain was starting to hit hard. I was rushing, trying to arrive at my destination, which was suitably called Modus Acquae, for a four o’clock zoom meeting.

    An impressive railway bridge on the right marked my entry into the city along with some tennis courts and recycling bins. 

    The river Lamone was opaque and surprisingly low given recent rainfall.

    I passed beneath the railway bridge and by some apartments with pretty flowers on the balcony and decorative windmills spinning in the breeze.

    A billboard advertised a pork festival, another steel sign announced that I’d arrived in the city of olive oil. The town sat in a nest of hills.

    I popped into a big Conrad supermarket to stock up on dinner and lunch for tomorrow and giggled at the significant section of Italian Mills and Boon novels which had titles including ‘The Seduction of Fire’ and ‘Undeniable Alchemy’. I treated myself to some smoked salmon, strawberries and dark chocolate.

    I made it just in time for my meeting with five minutes spare to untie my braids for a more formal look. It was about the presentation of some research on asylum appeals to the English judiciary. As part of the project, I’d observed 100 asylum appeals – an experience that had left me with a profound sense of moral injury at the injustice of it all. 

    After the meeting, I visited the hotel’s spa which had nothing on my blissful experience at the Hotel Granduca in Campigna. In fact, it was pretty awful. The view encompassed some orange tape, a ping-pong table and some camper vans that were stationed in the car park. The sauna was tepid at best and only one of the three jacuzzi functions worked. 

    Back in my room, I peeled the blister plasters off my socks into which they had unhelpfully melted and took a Coke Zero from the mini bar. There was no question about it, I was going to lose my second toenails from the rub, rub, rub of my boots. 

    The rain bounced off the cover of the swimming pool and an ant scurried across my balcony to find shelter. I would have to email my local book group to let them know I would miss tomorrow’s session on Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a migratory novel that I’d loved.

    I felt a bit lonely as the rain stopped and the evening sunlight poured into my room. I looked out into the courtyard at an abandoned skateboard and starkly pruned tree. A Spanish girl in a princess crown was showing another how to ride a bike,

    ‘Go, Maria, go!’

    I checked my phone to see a message from Alina and another from Oliver. Alina’s news was bad: her mother’s house in Ukraine had been hit by shelling. The news from Oliver was good: he had been discharged from hospital and was finally home. 

  • 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. 

  • ‘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 19th 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. 

  • 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. 

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    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.’

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    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.

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    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?

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    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.

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    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. 

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    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.

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    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).

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.’

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    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?

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    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. 

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    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.  

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    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. 

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    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. 

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    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. 

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    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.’

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    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.