Friday, July 7: We started our first stage of actually walking the Via Francigena from Ponte a Cappiano at 6:50 this morning, after I’d grabbed a chocolate croissant at Bar Cappiano. It would be 5km to Fucecchio. We walked for a while along the brackish canal on a grassy path. The Via Francigena is not that well-marked so we had to keep reading the guidebook and tracking ourselves on the Via Francigena app. Even though we left early, it was still very humid and the grassy path was wet with dew. We were in full sun the whole way.
We finally arrived in Fucecchio after 5km; we didn’t count on this part of the walk, as we thought our hostel was in Fucecchio when we booked it but then realized it was 5km north in Ponte a Cappiano. So our day was longer than we expected at about 16km or nearly 10 miles.
Fucecchio was called “Arne Blanca” by Sigeric and listed as his stage XXIII. The town’s main crop at one time was figs, and its name derives from Latin for “fig plantations.” A decimating plague rampaged the town in the 14th century; in the 16th century the Medicis began to redevelop it.
We visited the church on the hill, The Collegiate Church of San Giovanni Battista, and happened upon a priest who was able to stamp our passports. The neoclassical church with its austere brick facade was richly decorated inside. We had views of the sprawling landscape from behind the church. The main square, Piazza Vittorio Veneto, was classic Italian.
In the newer part of Fucecchio, we stopped at a cafe for some breakfast. Darina’s hiking shoes and socks had gotten soaked in the dewy morning grass, so she took them off and leaned them against a planter in the square where the sun could dry them off.
At one point I looked up and noticed the shoes had vanished. I alerted Darina. A man was sweeping trash in the square with a broom while a street sweeping machine was moving slowly down the street. They had already gone by us and it didn’t seem possible the machine could have swept the shoes up because there were barriers around the square. We asked everyone around if they’d seen someone take Darina’s boots, but no one had.
Darina hurried over to the driver of the street sweeping machine and asked (through Google Translate) if his machine had sucked up her shoes. The man with the broom even came over to see what they were talking about. He must have been the town idiot because he acted as if he didn’t know a thing about the shoes. She asked the machine driver to open the back of his truck and look for her shoes, but he said he had to finish street sweeping for another hour; he promised he’d return and open it then. We finally gave up because we couldn’t wait around forever. All of this had taken 2 hours of the day already. Darina didn’t care that much because she was happy to walk in her Tevas, but she wanted to know the truth of what happened to her shoes.
Darina had spotted a camera on the outside of the pharmacy so she went in and asked them to replay the video of the square. There on the video, she saw the man with the broom vigorously sweeping her shoes into the street sweeping machine. What I would have given to see that video! It cracked me up just picturing it.
What a comedy of errors! It was like something you’d see in a Charlie Chaplain movie. So hilarious. Every time I thought about it the rest of the day, I cracked up laughing.
We were ready to shake off the town of Fucecchio as soon as possible, after the incident yesterday with our misplaced hostel, the trains and the exorbitant taxi, and today with Darina’s hiking boots.
We crossed a bridge over the Arno River, which flows 241km from the Apennines through Florence before emptying into the Tyrrhenian Sea near Pisa. We walked behind a paper factory then along another dyke.
It was a miserably long hot slog along dykes and flat boring farmland to get to San Miniato Basso (6.7 km). We saw some Danish pilgrims sitting on a bench and we followed suit by resting on another bench before climbing the steep climb to San Miniato.
We took what was apparently a new path of the Via Francigena into San Miniato (elevation 147 meters, pop. 27,585). We could see the town looming high above us and thought it terribly daunting. The zigzag climb was hot and uphill and we wondered if there were a set of steps because we were getting close to the town rising straight up before us. Suddenly we saw there was a elevator that took people up to the town! It was a gift from the heavens for sure!
The high hills of San Miniato made it a prized fortress of the Lombards, who built a castle here in the 11th century, when it briefly surpassed Florence in importance as the Tuscan capital for the Lombard Holy Roman Empire.
San Miniato is known for the white truffle. Trufflers go out during the night with their dogs and walk through hidden paths between the trees to find the prized truffles. Lucky for us, the first cafe we found in the shade, Piccola Osteria del Tartufo, specialized in white truffle dishes. It turned out to be an excellent stop. We got bread, cheese, sour cream, & thinly sliced white truffles topped with honey. We also had Aperol spritzes. Everything was refreshing and delicious. We were so hot and tired that we sat there for a long time enjoying the accomplishment of our first day of walking about 10 miles in high heat with no shade. However, we still weren’t at our destination for the night.
The friendly waitress allowed us to leave our packs in the restaurant so we could walk up to see the Duomo of Sant’Assunta, where we also got a stamp. Its asymmetrical San Mathilde clock tower was originally part of the medieval fortress.
The waitress at the restaurant also called us a taxi because we needed to take one to the bus stop at Ponte a Elsa so we could get two more buses to Gambassi Termi. We were skipping the stage from San Miniato to Gambassi Terme because it was a rough 26 km with no services.
The funny thing was that when they called us a taxi, it was Antonio, the same guy who had charged us 30 euros yesterday to drive us from the train station at San Miniato Basso to Ponte a Cappiano. He had quoted 20 euros today for the same distance he drove us yesterday. We could only assume it was because Italians had called him. I guess he figured he could take advantage of us English-speaking pilgrims.
We waited for the 3:40 bus 🚎 to Castelfiorentino and then switched to another bus to Santamaría a Chianni, basically 1.4 km north of the town of Gambassi Terme.
We jumped off the bus at about 4:30 in Chianni, right across from Ostello Sigerico, a very nice and well-run pilgrim hostel in a former monastery next to the medieval church of Santa Maria Assunta. It was the 20th stop made by Sigeric, the archbishop of Canterbury. They had drying racks for our clothes in the courtyard and a pilgrim dinner lined up for 7:30. We could even take a tour of the attached Romanesque church after dinner.
It was nice to meet some fellow pilgrims because we hadn’t seen many thus far. We met Pauline from Netherlands. She had been walking since near the border of Switzerland and France. We met an Italian man who was actually in the Osteria where we ate in Ponte a Cappiano the night before; he recognized us and he had, unbeknownst to us, appeared in our photos. He was walking long distances at breakneck speed. We also met two friendly young Italians who were trying to become actors. María Giulia Toscano (25) had played a bit part in Romantiche, and she was hoping to act in another movie soon. She and her friend had tried to do two stages of the Francigena from Fucecchio to San Miniato to Gambassi Terme in one day, and María had twisted her ankle so they were going home earlier than they planned.
After dinner we were able to go inside the Romanesque church attached to the Ostello.
Overall, it was a perfect ending to our first day of walking.
Steps: 25,347; Miles: 10.75. Day 1 Stage Walk: 8.95 miles (14.4km).
Weather: (San Miniato) Sunny. Hi 89°, Lo 66°. (Gambassi Terme): Sunny. Hi 82°, Lo 66°.
The Via Francigena (pronounced Fran-chee’-gina) is an ancient road and pilgrimage route that runs from Canterbury, England, through France and Switzerland, to Rome and then to Apulia, Italy, where there were ports of embarkation for the Holy Land. In around 990, Archbishop Sigeric journeyed from Canterbury to Rome and back, but only documented his itinerary on the return journey, taken in 80 stages averaging about 12 miles (20 km) a day, for a total of some 1,100 miles (1,700 km).
This is the story of our attempt to walk the stages from Lucca to Rome, which are, in total, about 255.07 miles (410.5 km). Since we had to cut out stages due to time constraints, our actual goal was to walk 211.77 miles ( 340.8 km).
Running tally (Day 1): 8.95/211.77 miles (14.4km/340.8km).
~ wander.essence ~ 
You must be logged in to post a comment.