These first 10 days of walk in Italy were, on one hand, very beautiful, and on the other one, very difficult. They were very beautiful thanks to all the friends I met for the first time of after a long time we hadn’t seen each other, for the time we shared and for the love I received and I gave. It was wonderful to see how this “strange” experience I am living is arising so much enthusiasm and the curiosity of many people: their support repayed the loneliness and the fatigue. And I also learned new things: for example, do you know that the hikers in Piemonte should thank all those volunteers who go doing ranze runze? This means that they go cleaning and fixing the markings on the trails… Carlo taught me this very nice word! And Accob too does ranze runze on the Via Francigena, even if his tools are a bicycle and the markings he leaves on the trail… that’s true, because the ways don’t get marked by themselves!
On the other side, these first days of walk, that are about the 10% of the total, put me on the test. This surely is a very different experience from the Camino Francés, where the keyword is compartir. A part from the people I wrote about and from my family, I cannot really say that there are many people with whom I could share. A few km from Susa, we asked for information to a boy and he simply told us: “I didn’t really believe that somebody walked the Francigena”. And indeed, during 6 days on the Via Francigena I’ve never shared the bedroom with anybody else than Alessandro, and I met only 5 other pilgrims while I was walking. But, contrary to the current position, the Francigena (at least for what concerns the part I walked) is not very expensive: on 6 stages I had to sleep in a B&B only once, paying only 20€ for a studio flat. All the other nights, the hospitality was granted to the pilgrims on donativo (the Spanish way of saying free offer). By the way, it is also true that people still look at the pilgrim with curiosity, or maybe better: like a “strange” person who wanders among fields that he doesn’t know… as the word “pilgrim” means. In terms of education, awareness, dissemination and promotion, there still is a long way to go, but the heritage that we have is very rich and the way is walked mostly by foreigners who are better aware of this than we are.
A last thing that is very clear to me, after these first ten days is that, for me, getting older means learning to deal with the stress of the separation, from my relative, for whom I’m worried, of course, and from my husband, who I miss in the same way I would miss a harm… In short, my 30th year gave me realization that I can no longer walk with my backpack emptied of the worries about my home, like I did in 2008…