Don't always keep your eyes on the ground; look up to the heavens from time to time
- advice for pilgrims, from a friar at the Sanctuary of La Verna
A quiet and uneventful day walking through the woods and the countryside.
The morning began with homemade apple cake and instant coffee in our cute little apartment at B&B Olimpia, though we stopped by the village café as well, to buy croissants and sandwiches for later. Here we realised that there was more to Chitignano than we thought - we had not yet reached the town centre when we stopped at our B&B. Chitignano has a beautiful town hall, where we stopped to get our pilgrim credentials stamped, as well as a post office, a bank machine, even a football field - with a plaque commemorating the visit of Pope John Paul II, in 1992, I think it was. A pope has been to Chitignano!
We followed the road out of the town and then turned off onto a very pleasant path through the woods, coming out onto a winding gravel road. When I spotted a very large white dog sitting beside the road outside a farmhouse, I waited for Mariella so that we could walk past the dog together. But the dog was not aggressive - he was friendly; so friendly, in fact, he didn't want to leave us. He walked with us for several kilometres, always leading the way.
When we came to the hamlet of Poggio d'Acona, we stopped at a picnic table in a small park to eat our croissants and take a break, hoping the dog would tire of waiting, turn back and go home. But he was a very patient dog, sitting waiting for us to finish eating, or wandering about the square setting all the local hounds off barking. We asked some passers-by, who could tell us the dog's name and the fact that he had a habit of following people, but couldn't tell us his owner's phone number. We first found Sangro outside a farm holiday establishment, so I found the number on the internet and tried calling, but no-one answered. I checked the dog's collar - no dog tag with name or phone number. So we walked some more kilometres together. But there was no way I was going to take Sangro all the way to Rome, so I took a closer look at the website of the farm holiday establishment and found a mobile phone number: "Do you have a large white dog?"
Sangro's human came bumping up the dirt road in a Fiat Panda (the old kind), somehow managed to stuff Sangro into the back, thanked us and drove off. Problem solved!
It was easy to explain to him where we were: right under Valenzano Castle. Built as a watchtower by the Longobards in the late ninth or early tenth century, it may have been an Etruscan tower on an old salt road well before that. This historic castle is now a place where you can stay overnight - unless you are on a pilgrim budget, that is!
We followed a broad dirt road through the woods, a little muddy at times, then climbed a hill and came out onto a paved road right beside a church, where we paused to eat lunch in the sun on the steps.
We continued on to Giuliano, where we left the Via Romea Germanica walking route and followed the cycling route to save a couple of kilometres. I'm not sure it was really worth it, because the trail was probably just as pleasant as the ones we had walked through the woods earlier in the day, whereas we had to walk a kilometre on a busy highway into the town of Subbiano, and for the first few hundred metres there was no proper shoulder to walk on. However I strapped my flashing lights onto my hiking poles and put on my flourescent yellow cap, and we made it safely into the town, stopping at the co-op for groceries on the way to our holiday rental apartment, La finestra sul fiume.
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| Our apartment is on the first floor of the yellow building |
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| View of Subbiano castle from our balcony |
Chitignano - Subbiano 18 km
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