Trapdoors, charismatic mega fauna and Visigoth helmets
Walking in Italy, and planning to walk in the Netherlands
In around ten days I’ll be back in the Netherlands for a madcap week of walking, filming and interviewing, all for my next book “Orange sky, rising water” (I’m not far from finished the first draft!). That feels remarkable given the mess I made of my face and ribs when I slammed into a tree on a quadbike a month ago (more details here). I still can’t wear glasses as my nose has too many broken bits in it, but I’m just about able to write thanks to an experiment with contact lenses.
I cannot wait to be back on the road/on my feet again, discovering and seeing and talking to people: always the best bit of being a journalist. I thought it was a good opportunity to post something that I wrote a year ago about what you see when you walk, and specifically why I love walking in Italy. It kicks off in Tuscany, where we lived until last August and stars my son Luca and my big Rhodesian ridgeback Rita, when she was just ten months old…
“I’ve clearly identified what it is. It’s a trapdoor with a metal bar across it.” This was my son, Luca, pointing deep inside a patch of brambles. A second earlier he had detected a burbling spring hidden in the undergrowth, so I heard him out. I looked down from the track and saw something manmade but barely discernible, dissolving into thorns and darkness.
“A trapdoor? What’s it for?”
“I’ve got an idea,” said Luca. “Nazis. Or Italian rebels.”
“You mean Garibaldi’s Red Shirts?”
“No, rebels against the Nazis.” A short time later he found more evidence. Some strips of torn cloth underneath a budding fruit tree. “Where a parachute landed,” he said, definitively. “Helmets and guns will be down here if you dig deep enough.” He strode off, confident that his case was closed.
This is what you get when you ask a ten year old to do a senses walk, part of his school homework explaining about what he could smell, taste, hear, see and feel. Up until he heard the sprinkling of water and spotted the spring, Luca was more interested in hitting things with a stick and checking out olive trees according to their climbability. Then he started discovering.
He was not entirely wrong. In this valley in Tuscany there have been both Nazis and rebels. Heart-rending stone plaques recording the partisan executions and martyrdoms of the 1940s are dotted around the farmsteads and forests. There were plenty of other notable humans here too: Romans and Etruscans, Renaissance counts and medieval peasants, Goths and barbarians and Vandal generals. The last great military victory of the Western Roman Empire was won thirty minutes’ hike from where we were wandering.
My wife warned Luca to watch where he put his feet, as we had come across a sleepy green whip snake a few days earlier. I tightened the leash on our Rhodesian ridgeback puppy, Rita; ten months old, on heat for the first time, and as unpredictable as she was extraordinarily strong. Every few steps she lunged after a yellow butterfly. It could have been worse; the scabby spaniel from the farm below us was an insistent visitor, obviously smelling Rita’s hormones in the breeze and hoping to be the father of her puppies. Fat chance. She was way out of his league, and that is not just me talking as her father. She is every colour of caramelised sausage and when she runs she sounds like a cavalry charge. She is Charismatic Mega Fauna made real.
This was Italy, a good place to be on the first day of April, the ground carpeted with dandelions, daisies, buttercups and a thousand tiny wild flowers. Wild irises were set to bloom under the olive trees, and hooded crows were swooping low over patches of open ground. Even from thirty yards distance I could see the bees landing on the ramp of their new hive. The mud was marked by boar and deer tracks, and the odd discarded shotgun cartridge was a distant reminder of the autumn.
Critically, this was also spring in Italy on foot. Luca’s fantastical interpretation of whatever was in the brambles was not something that could be done from inside a car. The same goes for what he proudly presented as a Visigothic helmet that he dug up on an olive terrace a year ago, or the sense of place he had gained by wandering about in this valley. This was a living landscape that pulled you in and demanded that you see the lives that went before you, from the plague-infected peasants and the Roman agricultural slaves to the great benefactors of the Renaissance. The terrified teenage partisan being shoved roughly against a tree stump then shot.
I wrote this in and around Tuscany’s Mugnone valley. It is excellent hiking country. The views are breath-taking as you pass through forests of oak, sweet chestnut, beech, pine, and back again. You will see deer breaking suddenly from scrub, the odd family group of wild boar snuffling and grunting their way around bushes, and pairs of blue jays zipline between branches. You will smell pine, rosemary, and the rot of fallen leaves. If you are lucky you might find a porcupine quill. But it is far more than that. Italy, as ever, is a land that offers history and culture with every footfall. Indeed, understanding that history and culture, its society and politics and economics, its way of life, and why it all adds up to this beautiful, hypnotising, maddening country, is best done on foot.
Walking gives you the physical landscape of Italy, its mountains, plains, coasts, its rocks and trees and pastures and rivers. This is all about understanding Italy as a place, as a landscape, as borders, valleys, mountains, rivers, coastlines. As a shape, a geographical expression. You then see the Italy that is easy to miss: details, sites, locations, people doing things and explanations for why things happen. There might be cracked tiles and bad drains, manicured olive groves and a pile of rubbish left to rot. Beach clubs and truck stops, railway sidings and overlooked marble remnants of a civilisation that lived for centuries and has been dead for centuries. A huddle of smokers outside a café and a dutiful Nonna singing softly to her grandchildren. There are sounds too: the hunter’s distant shotgun and the throb of the cicadas, a wild boar’s muddy disturbance and a lizard’s rustle. They are all part of Italy.
This country is also manifestly worth explaining. Nowhere else is the magisterial so connected to the infuriating, the civilisational so in lockstep with the maddening. The country that gave the world Rome and the Renaissance also gave us world-class nincompoops such as Berlusconi and Mussolini. One moment Italy dismisses the world with haughty self-regard, and the next it is checking the ladder on its stockings. Italy is simultaneously a keystone of Europe and its greatest weakness. Its way of life is the envy of the world at the same time as legions of its young flee abroad for opportunities they will never find at home. Italy is emphatically worth understanding, whether it is for your holidays, your interest in the best the world has to offer, or for the security of your euro-denominated pension pot.
For me it is about more than this. I love Italy, I married an Italian, have my Anglo-Italian son who rabbits away merrily in the local language, and I carry the country’s passport. I live here, and own a house (in itself a sizeable bet on the country’s economic viability). So much about Italy is so remarkable, so admirable, that explaining Italy is partly finding out how and why this place functions and has functioned. And yet. And yet. Sometimes aspects of Italy seem less like bugs in the system and more like self-harm. I have the journalist’s urge to want to know why on earth it is as it is, when how it is can be so patently absurd. I need to know where it is going, just as I would want to check the brakes on a vintage Maserati before hurtling along a precipitous coastal road. I need to explain Italy for reasons of curiosity, of self-interest, and of self-preservation. That’s why I walk.
There is so much here! The delight of walking with a kid, of walking in Italy. And also the wonder plus uncertainty (anxiety?) that come with building a life in an adopted country.