Road to Home Day 75: Garlasco - Pavia

Pavia vermiglia, ecco la strada, persa
a' tuoi confini in un silenzio duro,
Che più risponde a mio tormento
di fuga, il mio desio di lontananza.

- Ada Negri, poetess of Pavia (1870 - 1945)

Today's stage brought us to one of the biggest and most beautiful cities on the Via Francigena: Pavia!

A grassy path beside an irrigation canal took us from Cascina Toledina, just outside Garlasco, to Gropello Cairoli, by way of a very impressive cemetery which, from the outside, looked like some sort of exotic caravanserai!

We crossed the Canale Cavour and found ourselves in Gropello, where we stopped only long enough to visit the churches of San Giorgio Martire and San Rocco.

In the 17th-century church of San Rocco

...more like San Rococò!!!

Just after the town we passed through a farmyard where a tractor unloaded newly harvested corn into a hopper for grinding in the mill.

Once again the day was an alternation of rice paddies and cornfields. In the next village, Villanova d'Ardenghi, we sat on benches by the football field for a rest and a snack, and were soon joined by the two American walkers from New Hampshire we had met the previous day. They picked up the Via Francigena in Orsieres, Switzerland after walking the Tour de Mont Blanc for eight days. So this flat walking is pretty easy for them, and though they are older than us, they walk much faster!

Shortly after leaving our rest spot we were joined by Canadian walker Brian Slattery, who reads my blog and was happy to meet me in person! He has been walking various routes through France and onto the Via Francigena in blocks of a few weeks every year, and is ending this year's section in Pavia this evening. We walked the rest of the day together, stopping for a beer at a bar by the Ticino river to celebrate his final day on the Via Francigena this year!

Villanova d'Ardenghi

Catching up to Brian

Taking a break with Brian

We had taken a shortcut along the cycling route of the Via Francigena to avoid the muddy patches we had been warned of in the Parco Ticino, but after the bar we went back to the pedestrian route and it was fine for the rest of the way into town: a very pleasant stroll through the trees and along the river bank. The dome of Pavia cathedral, the third-largest in Italy, soon came into sight above the trees; we arrived in town right underneath the covered bridge. It is, unfortunately, a post-war reconstruction of the medieval bridge that was destroyed in 1944; but it is still a beautiful covered bridge!

At the covered bridge we said goodbye to Brian, whose accommodation was in the city centre, and turned the opposite way, into Borgo Ticino, the neighbourhood across the river from the centre, to find our accommodation with the nuns of Santa Maria in Betlem.

Santa Maria in Betlem

The church of Santa Maria in Betlem was built around the year 1130 outside the walls of Pavia, at the entrance to the city in Borgo Ticino, across the river Ticino from the city centre. Its name derives from its location on the pilgrimage route to the Holy Land, and from the fact that the church fell under the authority of the bishop of Bethlehem, rather than of the bishop of Pavia... who was reportedly not very happy about this situation! 

The adjacent Oltreticino Hospital housed pilgrims, the sick and the poor; in 1383 the hospital was merged with the nearby hospital of Saint Anthony the Great, and in 1808 it was closed. But it has now been reopened and restored to its original function of housing pilgrims on the Via Francigena!

And not only pilgrims: the hostel is open to all, and was packed with students in town to attend Pavia's famous university, one of the world's oldest continually operating universities, founded in 1343. The academic year is just beginning and these students have come from abroad and not yet had time to find lodgings. And two of the women in our dormitory were teachers from Sicily, assigned a teaching post at the opposite end of the country with only three days' notice!! They were desperately seeking a flat to rent in Pavia but said it was very hard to find one. 

After showering, washing out a few things under the fountain in the stone sink of the hostel garden, and finding space for our backpacks in the crowded women's dormitory, we set out to explore Pavia.

Pavia

Pavia is one of the most historic cities on the Via Francigena, and there is no way I am going to cover all that history here! I will however note that the city has ancient Celtic/Ligurian origins, and became a Roman military outpost, named Ticinum after the river Ticino, during the Second Punic War against Carthage in 218 BC. The present town is still set up on the basis of the Roman grid system centring around the intersection of a cardo (now Corso Strada Nuova, the street on which we entered the city) and a decumanus (now Corso Cavour and Corso Mazzini). 

Aerial view of Pavia clearly showing the cardo and decumanus

The ancient Roman brick sewer system is still in place underneath the city, and was still in use until around 1970! 

Six centuries after the Romans took over, the city was burned to the ground in the uprising that followed the appointment of Romulus Augustulus, when still a child, as the last Roman Emperor in AD 476. Only 12 years after the devastating fire, the Ostrogoths conquered and rebuilt the city, even providing it with Roman-style baths and an amphitheatre. 

The Ostrogoth Kingdom held the city against the Byzantine armies in 535, but, following a three-year siege, in 572 it fell to the Lombards, who renamed the city Papia, which later became Pavia. Lombard kings commissioned the building of the city's beautiful churches in Romanesque style. 

After two hundred years of Lombard rule, Charlemagne's armies defeated the Lombards in 774 and made Pavia a part of the Holy Roman Empire. Emperor Frederick Barbarossa was crowned King of Italy in Pavia, in the church of San Michele Maggiore, in 1155. 

San Michele Maggiore

As we emerged from the church of San Michele, a man who was walking by stopped to comment on the sandstone carvings on the facade. He made sure we had seen all the highlights inside the church and told us we must go and see San Teodoro, the most beautiful church in the city, in his opinion. As he was out taking a stroll before dinner, he offered to accompany us. And so we had our own guided tour of the church, later extended to include the cathedral and an exhibition of historic photographs of Pavia in the Broletto, former city hall, now partly used by the University and partly as an exhibition centre. 

In the church of San Teodoro is an amazing fresco illustrating the city of Pavia as it was in 1524, at the time of the Franco-Spanish wars.

Another fresco was discovered beneath this one, which was detached and moved to the counter-facade, so that both versions are now visible. 

On the other side of the nave, fragments of a Roman mosaic floor may be seen, under glass and a couple of metres lower than the current floor level; they were discovered when installing a heating system in the church!

The church has plenty of other treasures to offer, such as the capitals of the columns, richly carved in true Lombard style, and the fresco cycles illustrating the lives of Saint Anne and Saint Theodorus, the first bishop of Pavia.

Opposite the church in the small square stands a building that was once a brothel. Our improvised tour guide told us an amusing anecdote: the brothel operator and the priest of the church obviously didn't get along, and the priest excommunicated the brothel owner, who retaliated by commissioning a rather lewd pair of nude sculptures to be put up on either side of the door of the establishment, facing the church!

The sandstone has been worn smooth by the elements over the past three centuries and the sculptures are no longer as rude as they may once have been, but it is amusing to see how saints and sinners faced off on either side of the little square for all those years!

Our self-appointed guide took us next to the cathedral, which is impressive in size but fairly plain and unadorned inside.

The cathedral and the tower

The cathedral of Pavia was begun in the 15th century but not completed until the 20th century. The twin cathedrals of Santo Stefano and Santa Maria Maggiore, collectively referred to as Santa Maria del Popolo, stood on the area currently occupied by the cathedral from their construction in the sixth and seventh centuries. They were rebuilt in Romanesque style in the 11th and 12th centuries, but were then deconsecrated and progressively demolished as the construction of the new Renaissance cathedral advanced, though a large part of the 11th-century crypt of Santa Maria del Popolo was preserved. 

The 11th-century civic tower that stood next to the cathedral collapsed on 17 March 1989, killing four people and injuring 15. Following this accident, the government of Italy closed the tower of Pisa in 1990, until it could be reinforced, to prevent a similar fate from striking this much better-known and frequently visited tower! 

The tower in Pavia was not rebuilt, and what remains of it is preserved in a fenced-off area. 

Our guide left us at the Broletto, a complex which was originally the city hall but is now an event and exhibition venue. The current exhibition is of historic photographs of Pavia, showing the original bridge, with washerwomen doing the city's laundry in the Ticino river beside it. After viewing the exhibition and walking around the square, we returned to our hostel for the evening, crossing the covered bridge at sunset.

Garlasco - Pavia 22.5 km