In 2007, I flew to Rome to walk with my son across Italy and through the Balkans. In sublime understatement, you might say the pilgrim bug had bitten him, hard – he had walked from Canterbury and was on his way to Jerusalem.
On our third night out of Rome, just on dark, we made it to San Cosimato, too exhausted to scale the steep steps straight up the hill into the town to scout for bed and food.
Night was falling fast. We walked on, winding around the narrow road overlooking a small river. We came upon a closed looking restaurant which to us was in the middle of nowhere. We asked for pasta and happily for us they fed us. We asked for a camping ground. They shrugged. We asked for ‘tente’. More shrugs. Our fingers made the shapes of church steeples. We asked for a hotel. They shook their heads.
Delirium took a sharp, silent turn. I don’t know what our faces looked like but they were enough for the owners to take pity on the pilgrims and offer us their verandah for the night, tiled and clean.
We pitched our tents in the dark beneath the full-bellied moon, tying the ropes between the legs of a wrought iron table and the rosemary plants.
And there we slept, while around the corner of the same verandah, with merry abandon, a steady flow of Italians ate their supper.
Well I slept. Ben couldn’t resist a night of drinking with the Italians.
On Walk & Write Camino you will be spared the verandah!
One of our previous participants, Sue Gunningham, described our accommodations like this:
“A magnificently restored centuries-old miller’s cottage, a nobleman’s house, a restored village hospital complete with chapel.
“Each accommodation was more amazing than the last – four poster beds, open fires, sherry decanters, Spanish cakes and views of lush green rolling hills and stone bridges.”
Cheers to that!
Ultreia, we keep going.
Stephanie Dale is an award-winning journalist, author, researcher and founder of the International Wellbeing-through-writing Institute. In 2014 she launched The Write Road, a wellbeing-through-writing initiative for rural and remote Australians. She is passionate about pilgrimage, and in 2017 initiated Walk & Write Camino for pilgrim writers.