Sing, and walk onwards.
- Saint Augustine, Sermo 256
Today is day 8 since starting again in Aosta, day 70 since Calais, and day 100 overall walking from my birthplace in Leeds, England towards my home in Italy! A very special day!
I was the only one staying in the one-room hostel in Cavaglià last night. When I woke up in the morning it was still dark - and I assumed that was just because the shutters were closed. But when I opened the door to leave I got a real shock: it seemed that summer had ended overnight and autumn had arrived! The sky was dark, and the streets were wet with rain!
I crossed the road to return the key and have breakfast at the café, and while I was in there it began to rain quite hard. I read the newspaper and waited until the rain slowed to a gentle patter, then donned my rain jacket and hat, slung my backpack over my shoulders and headed out.
On the way out of Cavaglià I passed the cemetery church of Santa Maria di Babilone, towering high above the cornfields.
Before I had been walking long, the rain began to fall harder again. I sheltered under the eaves of a barn in the hamlet of Maiole for a few minutes, watching the rain fall. Eventually I decided to keep walking, and the rain soon let up.
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| First rice paddies! |
One of the farms along the way had set up a pilgrim rest area with a picnic table, but I didn't stop as it was all wet! I carried on through fields of corn, rice and soy, bordered by irrigation channels.
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| The life cycle of corn... |
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| It seems even the husks are used for something! |
It's harvest time for corn (maize), and some of the fields had already been cut; machines could be heard grinding corn in farm buildings, and once or twice I had to step off the track to make way for an enormous combine harvester.
I came to the point where the motorway A4, the main highway between Turin and Milan, cuts right across the ancient route of the Via Francigena, which now has to make a crazy zigzag path to get across the motorway and under a high-speed railway line.
All this backtracking had tired me out, so I accepted the invitation posted outside a farmhouse and sat down to take a break on one of the chairs on their lawn, miraculously dry thanks to the shelter afforded by a magnolia tree.
I started walking again and crossed the Canale Cavour: an 83 kilometre long canal dug between 1863 and 1866 to take water from the Po river at Chivasso and carry it across the plains for agricultural use irrigating the fields before discharging into the Ticino river at Galliate.
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| Canale Cavour |
Smaller irrigation channels ran through the ditches by the roads I walked on, creating an environment much appreciated by wildlife; I spotted a rabbit, a red squirrel, herons and egrets, and heard frogs croaking and leaping into the water, though I didn't actually see any.
The houses on the outskirts of Santhià began to appear, and soon I was standing under the 13th-century bell tower of the town's main church, the Collegiata di Sant'Agata, the name Santhià actually being a corruption of "Sant'Agata".
Inside the church is a 16th-century polyptych depicting several saints, by Gerolamo Giovevone.
The crypt below, along with the bell tower, is all that remains of the original 12th-century church. Behind the apse is another church and the decrepit "Royal Carabinieri" barracks.
Another sight of interest in Santhià is a house with a round 14th-century tower. It was part of the structure that housed the court of the Dukes of Savoy when they took refuge in Santhià during the 1630 outbreak of plague in the big city of Turin. It is still an ordinary house, and in fact there are mailboxes in the tower, and garbage bins outside! 😆
After a short break in Santhià to eat some fruit and cheese and give my feet a rest, I carried on along the town's main pedestrian street toward the train station, crossed over the railway tracks via an overpass, and followed the main road and the canal out of town, passing a little chapel dedicated to the patron saint of pilgrims, San Rocco.
I continued through fields of rice and corn, along country roads, for a couple more hours, crossing the Cavour canal again and passing a traditional cascina or walled farm complex of the type once common in the Po Valley, where big extended families of farmers lived together and worked the land. This one had been abandoned in favour of a mid-twentieth-century concrete house constructed beside it, no doubt much more convenient to live in, and cheaper to heat in winter!
The yellow pilgrim cutout told me I was arriving in San Germano Vercellese, and in fact the dome of the town's church had been visible for some time. I was glad to get there before the dark rainclouds that I could see in the distance! A sort of rainbow effect edged the clouds on the side of the sky opposite the sun, not very visible in the photos!
I passed under the train station and into the centre of the town, visiting the church of San Germano, known for its fine pipe organ built in 1775. The church and a nearby clock tower which was originally a part of the town's fortifications are the only historic monuments in the town.
San Germano Vercellese appeared to be something of a ghost town, at least at two o'clock in the afternoon. I had been hoping to get an ice cream, or some kind of snack, but the town had only a couple of cafés and one restaurant, and they were all closed and dark inside. Many of the houses stood empty and abandoned. Perhaps San Germano Vercellese shouldn't have closed its pilgrim hostel, making it impossible for walkers to stay overnight and patronise the local places of business? The walkers on the Via Francigena may not seem very influential at the moment - but neither did the walkers on the Camino de Santiago, twenty years ago!
As it is, there is nowhere to stay in San Germano, and so I walked back through empty streets lined with crumbling buildings to the train station, and travelled four minutes on the train back to Santhià.
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| Deserted streets of San Germano |
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| It looks like the yellow pilgrim also took the train! 😄 |
I had actually checked into the pilgrim hostel in Santhià when I passed through the town at lunch time. There was a volunteer on duty at the information point for the Via Francigena and the Cammino di Oropa on the main pedestrian street, Via Nuova Italia, and he stamped my pilgrim credential, took down my details and assigned me a room - or rather, an apartment! The pilgrim hostel in Santhià is made up of a number of little apartments, each with its own dormitory, sitting room, WC, shower and laundry room, and, as Giancarlo pointed out to me, they don't put strangers together, but assign each group of walkers their own apartment. I booked on my own, so I got my very own flat! All on a by-donation basis: you pay what you think it's worth, or what you can afford. In the true spirit of pilgrim hospitality!
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| The pilgrim information office |
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| Thr hostel is right at the foot of the bell tower |
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| Entrance to the hostel |
Laundry is normally hung outside, but it keeps raining on and off! I got stuck inside the supermarket in a rainstorm and had to wait until it stopped to come back to the hostel... fortunately I got enough food for dinner, in case it starts again!
Cavaglià - San Germano Vercellese 21 km
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