Road to Home 2023 Day 74: Mortara - Garlasco

We step off the path, but not necessarily the Way. 

- Lea Page, Between the Path and the Way: a 1000-mile journal (2023)

I stepped off the path ten days ago in Mortara, and now I'm stepping back on, right where I left off!

I took the train back to Mortara, where I met up with my friend and habitual walking buddy Mariella. 

We walked a grand total of 1.5 kilometres from the train station through the centre of Mortara and out the other side of town, to the Abbey of Sant'Albino.

The Abbey of Sant'Albino

In the second half of the fourth century after Christ, Bishop Gaudenzio of Novara had two chapels built on the Via Francigena about a kilometre and a half outside the walls of the city of Mortara. Both of the chapels, consecrated to Saint Peter and Saint Eusebius, were in use for four hundred years, with adjacent pilgrim hostels providing an essential stopping point on the Via Francigena; illustrious guests who stopped by on their way to Rome included the future Pope Leo in the year 440, Richard of Kent in 522, and Pope Paul I in 757. In the Spring of 773 the entire Frankish embassy stopped at the Abbey on the way back from a meeting with Pope Adrian I in Rome, and of course Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury stayed here on his way back from Rome in 990. Pilgrims over the centuries have left behind documents and inscriptions, some of which are still visible in the bricks on the southern side of the presbytery; the oldest remaining graffiti dates back to the year 1100!

Frescoes by Giovanni di Milano (1410)

Medieval graffiti

After four hundred years of use, the chapel of Saint Peter fell into disuse and was abandoned, but the chapel of Saint Eusebius went down in history as the place where Charlemagne's Franks defeated the Lombards on 12 October 773. The exploits of two Frankish paladins who perished in the battle and were buried in the Abbey, Charlemagne's cup-bearer Amelius of Alvernia and his royal treasurer Amico Beyre, are celebrated in the chansons de geste popular around the eleventh century.

It was after this battle that the British abbot Albin Alkwin, a counsellor to Charlemagne, had a monastery constructed adjacent to the chapel of Saint Eusebius, to which the Emperor had donated a large amount of land. Father Albin went on to become Bishop of Vercelli, and it was in tribute to him that his monks re-dedicated the Abbey to Saint Albin of Angers, a bishop who died in the year 550. 

The Abbey was rebuilt in the 11th century, and the bell tower was reconstructed in the 13th century after it was destroyed in battle in 1253. However, the monastery fell into decline after the year 1290; it was dissolved by Pope Pius II in 1464 and became a commandery: a church under the control of an order of knights. 

The church was rebuilt in Renaissance style in 1540 on the orders of Abbot Pietro Antonio Birago. Almost three hundred years later, the commandery was suppressed under Napoleon, and local farmers took to using the adjacent monastery buildings; the property was broken up and sold off. For the duration of the 19th century, the majority of the property was owned by the Pavesi family of Mortara. The last Countess in the family left it to the Hospital of Mortara in her will, and in the 1960s the monastery became the property of the local public health unit. Since 1996 it has been owned by the City of Mortara, which restored, renovated and reopened the Abbey for the celebrations of the Jubilee year 2000. 

Fortunately for us, the city has restored it to its former purpose as a pilgrim hostel on the Via Francigena! We shared the church hall that serves as pilgrim dining room and dormitory with Eva, an American walker who began the Via Francigena in Canterbury on August 5 and writes a blog called Eva on the Via, and Daniel from Belgium, who has been walking the Via Francigena in stages (like me) and started his current stage in Martigny on September 13th.

 

Abbey custodian and pilgrim hostel operator Franca unfolded our beds and served us dinner at the long table in the hall. She stamped our pilgrim credentials, collected 20 euros from each of us, and announced that she stopped serving breakfast at 7 and wanted everyone out by 7:30. That was fine with us! We went straight to bed and so it was no problem to be up and ready to go.

I was glad to have Mariella's company and pass the time chatting on this rather uninteresting stage of the Via Francigena. More cornfields and rice paddies, in some of which giant combine harvesters were at work. More irrigation canals and crayfish; one of them had got out of the water to take a walk on the Via Francigena!

In the village of Tromello, we met Eva and Daniel outside a café, and we all went in and had a drink together. 

In Tromello

On the way out of Tromello we found a book exchange set up by someone with a spelling problem.... but the books inside were surprisingly erudite. Two ladies who met through a book club could not pass up such an opportunity; we each picked up a book to read in the hostel in the evening. I chose a 1997 pocketbook edition of Dacia Maraini's Bagheria because it was particularly lightweight, while Mariella took, for the same reason, a collection of aphorisms by 18th-century German illuminist philosopher Georg Lichtenberg.

As we only had another 5 or 6 kilometres to go, we stopped for a leisurely lunch break by the canal, during which we spoke to a family on bicycles who wanted to know more about the Via Francigena, and a couple from New Hampshire who were walking it. Upon arriving in Garlasco, we stopped at a gelateria to complete our picnic lunch with a delicious dessert!

Garlasco

A town with pre-Roman Celtic origins, Garlasco was fortified with a castle in the 14th to 15th centuries, destroyed and rebuilt in 1524. All that remains of the castle is a single tower, along with the base of the walls incorporated into nearby buildings. 

Garlasco town hall

More recently, in the 1960s Garlasco came to be known as "the Las Vegas of Lombardia" because of its bars and nightclubs. We saw little evidence of this walking through the town in the afternoon, so I can't say if it is still the case. 

We continued through the town centre and back into the fields to Cascina Toledina, where we are guests of the Exodus Foundation, a non-profit association which provides assistance to young people who have problems with addiction or have been in trouble with the law. The goal is to help them reintegrate into society and gain skills making them eligible for employment. The community where we are staying in Garlasco is in an old farmhouse with 10,000 square metres of land, on which the members of the community grow fruit and vegetables. The pilgrim hostel is run in collaboration with volunteers from Accoglienza Pellegrina, the volunteer pilgrim host association that Mariella and I both belong to. 

However the volunteer currently on duty wasn't feeling very well, so she left us on our own for the remainder of the evening; that was fine with us, as we had our new books for company!

Today's accommodation: Casa del Pellegrino Exodus