Day 48 - Isola Farnese to Rome- Saturday August 1, 2015

I slept really well last night with the combo of the window open and the fan, but Russell didn’t sleep much, finding it just too hot.

It is going to be unbearably hot today, 41 degrees with the humidex, and I wanted to get going really early. I tried to tell the lady to just leave us a breakfast and access to the hotel fridge (it was in a locked room and we had put water and lunch materials in there). She said she would do breakfast at 7am. I wanted to leave way before that, but so be it.

She and her husband were up and about and we went to breakfast at 6:50am. That worked out reasonably well, except she didn’t bring our coffee until 7:05am. We were on the road at 7:15am.

Did I mention that Isola Farnese had another Farnese Palace and a castle? This Farnese palace was built in 1516, right around the time he was building his over the top decadent castle in Caprarola. Admittedly, this castle was nowhere near as grand, being more the size of a large hotel, but it just boggles the mind how lucrative the Cardinal favors market can be.

We were walking uphill along a highway to start, about 1 km to the via Cassia. Luckily it was Saturday, so the main traffic when we met was bicycles! That didn’t last long, once we turned and starting walking on the via Cassia there was lots of traffic. We have frequently been walking along the via Cassia at least since Siena. It seems to be the road cars follow to drive the via Francigena in this part of Italy. Here is a picture we took of the via Cassia from an overpass walking to Isola Farnese yesterday.

The side with a sidewalk/best shoulder kept switching as we were walking out of La Storta, necessitating a lot of switching the side of the road we were walking on. I began to think that if we didn’t get hit walking on the side of the busy road, we would get hit crossing the busy road to change sides.

By 8am it was already too hot. It is incredibly humid in this part of the country.

The route notes said that at 3.74km, ‘pay attention to the traffic when the Braccianese joins the Cassia. Cross it and walk on the right sidewalk’. What did that mean? Cross the Braccianese and walk on the right sidewalk of the Braccianese, or cross the via Cassia and walk on the right side of that? There was no sidewalk on either right side. There was a sidewalk on the left side of the via Cassia. We were busy trying to stay on the side of the road that offered the greatest protection. Where exactly was his km 3.74? We carried on.

The route notes said that at km 3.95 we would see the ‘exit sign of La Storta and entering sign of La Guistinia. Remain on the right …’.

I was attempting to follow the route notes, except for walking on the side of the road I felt was safest. I was aware he wanted us on the right side somewhere. We seemed to be tracking the GPS. I was getting very annoyed. The traffic was awful and it was clearly a dangerous place to be walking. At about 5 km on the GPS, we finally noticed that the via Cassia had been two lanes one-way only for about the last 1 km, and now it was suddenly merging with the two lanes coming the other way (ie, it was now 4 lanes), with cars moving at 120km+/hr. The sidewalk came to an end, there was no shoulder on either side, and we were on the left side.  We could see a leaving La Storta sign in the distance. I told Russell there was no way we could cross to the right side, we probably should have walked on the right side of the Braccianese a km ago.

Poor Russell. He’s got little patience to start with and I’m afraid he lost his patience with these crytic route notes about 500 km ago. I was starting to panic because of the traffic, and said, ‘this is exactly why I didn’t want to walk into Rome’. Of course, I was the one who caved and decided it wouldn’t be right to not walk into Rome. A big fight erupted at that point. You know, ‘it was your idea’, ‘why are we doing this?’, ‘we could have gotten a ride with the baggage transfer’, ‘where are we’, and ‘what do we do now’.

I was looking at the route notes, and this was just going to get worse. Even if we went back a km and kept right, we were going to be on highways a good part of the day, with the route notes constantly saying ‘watch the traffic’. We both decided we really didn’t want to do this. We turned around on the one-way via Cassia, going in the direction of the traffic, and soon passed a bus stop. The sign said it was going to the Stazione, and we got on the bus thinking it was going to a train station in La Storta. We had just stocked up on water as we exited the town, and Russell had used up virtually all his change, so we knew we didn’t have 3 euro exact change to pay for what we expected the tickets to cost, but we were prepared to pay 5 euro with paper money. We tried to communicate this to the driver, who got the point across that the bus only accepted bus tickets. How unfriendly is that! Here we are, two pilgrims in a bit of a crisis situation, God knows where, rescued by a bus, and we had no way we could pay for the ride. I thought he was going to stop and make us get off, but he didn’t. Then, I was a bit worried an inspector would get on the bus, but that didn’t happen either. Whew.

We were expecting the bus to go down via Cassia. No such luck, right after we got on he turned left and drove for about 15 minutes in another direction before arriving at the ‘station’. It wasn’t a train station, it was a bus ‘station’. Not a bus station with a lot of buses going here and there, just a couple of other buses, and none were there at the moment. Out came the translation service on the phone. He seemed as if he really didn’t want to help us, but I was very persistent. We had no idea where we were, or how to get to Rome from there. He seemed to warm up to our plight, and even got his own cell phone out and was showing me a map of the bus routes. That might have been useful if I had some small clue where we were and where we wanted to go. He gave me a ‘this is impossible’ look, and left the station with us still on the bus. He drove a bit, stopped at an intersection that didn’t have a bus stop and told us to go down the street and take the 905. Cars behind were honking. We thanked him. Another angel on the via francigena.

We walked down to the first bus stop we came to, which had a bus 905 stop there. I saw a store a bit further down the road and I went there while Russell was trying to find the schedule for the 905 with his phone. I bought a bottle of water and asked the people in the store how we could get to Rome. We had sort of figured out that we must be somewhere in the suburbs of Rome.  Thankfully there was a girl there that was fairly good in English. She looked at my cross and asked if I wanted to go to the Vatican, and I said ‘yes’. She then got a piece of paper and wrote out detailed instructions. Take the 905 to Cornelia Metro; take Metro A from Cornelia, in the direction of Anagnina, to Ottaviano. I asked if she had bus tickets, and she said you pay to the machine on the bus, 1.5 euros. That is what we did on the bus yesterday, so I got lots of change and went back up to the bus stop.

Russell had figured out the bus was every 30 minutes. After a total of about 25 minutes since we had been dropped off the first bus, we boarded the 905. Once again there was no way to pay cash, you needed a ticket. This time we didn’t bother offering to pay cash, but we asked the bus driver to please tell us when we were at Cornelia, and he said he would. We sat at the very front of the bus beside the driver.

This bus ride went on and on. There was standing room only on the bus, it was so packed, and I was getting a bit nervous a supervisor would get on at any moment. At one point Russell said, I think our seats are for old people, and I said, ‘well, what are we?’

We missed the Cornelia metro station because the bus driver thought we wanted the Cornelia bus station, but it didn’t make too much difference. Russell figured we were only a couple of km from the hotel anyway, and I said ‘why take the metro? We were going to walk 24km to get here.’

We took the metro anyway, rather than trying to figure out where to go, because we didn’t have a half descent map and our brains were pretty much fried at this point. We got off at Ottaviana and came up out of the metro, and used the route notes map to get to the hotel. Way to go Beppe.

Beppe booked our night in Rome at the Alimande Hotel, and it is a very lovely hotel, right beside the Vatican. The air conditioner in our room works perfectly, the hotel lobby is air conditioned (major added bonus), the room is very spacious and well laid out, and the breakfast buffet is excellent – they even have bacon and scrambled eggs – Russell was in heaven. I’ve encountered a few ants in the bathroom, but nothing like the swarms of them in the carpet at Viterbo. It’s about 10 euro a night more here, and I wish I had booked our extra nights in Rome here, except I didn’t know about this place in advance. We went to find PapavistaRelais, the place we thought we were going to stay today and where I booked the extra nights, so we would know exactly where to go tomorrow morning. We walked the entire length of the street (fortunately it’s only about three blocks long), and couldn’t find it. Beppe had said it was across the street from the Alimande, and there was a restaurant right across where we asked if the waiter knew was it was, and he didn’t. It took a while but we finally found it. There was nothing but a big wooden door, with a tiny apartment buzzer for the place. Very obscure.

We arrived at 10am, checked in, got the royal tour of the hotel, asked the fellow about going to swim in the Mediterranean tomorrow, and he gave us some suggestions. We then had to wait for an hour for our room to be ready, so we went to the outdoor patio area of the 4^th floor lounge for patrons and had a snack (we had bought yogurt and two oranges to go with the hotel’s croissant for breakfast, but felt it would rude to eat them in front of her when she insisted on getting up and serving us breakfast). We started to plan what we wanted to do while in Rome. 

We need to go to Piazza PioXII to the opera Romana pellegrinaggi for our VF Vatican stamp, and our certificates. 

Fortunately, I figured out in advance that was precisely the same place we had to go to pick up our Omni Rome passes. After we had a shower and changed, we walked there and got all that business done. Interestingly, not many people at the office knew about the via Francigena. Two ladies working there overheard our requests and told the fellow we had waited in line to talk to send us to see one of them (another line to wait in- oh well). We got our credenzia’s stamped with the official Vatican stamp and we were issued our lovely, very official looking, certificates of completion of the Via Francigena. The lady seemed very nervous, or serious, about filling in the certificates, but in the end she gave us each a high five and congratulated us on our efforts.

We also got our Rome passes, and are booked for the Vatican Museum Tour, the Vatican Gardens tour, and a visit to St. Peter’s Basilica on Monday, August 3^rd. On Tuesday we will do the hop on, hop off bus thing, and on Wednesday we will visit the Coliseum/Palatine/Roman Forum and Galleria Borghese, plus the Castello Sant’Angelo and Basilica of St. John in Lateran and Cloister (if we have the time and energy).

We figured out that the nicest, cleanest, easiest Mediterranean beach to get to by public transit was at St. Marinella. We got up Sunday, had breakfast, checked out of Alimande, checked into PapavistaRelais, took the metro to Roma Termini, got our train tickets from the automatic ticket machine with the assistance of a very helpful young lady we thought was an employee of Trenitialia (St. Marinella didn’t register as a destination from Roma Termini without some skill and effort, and she knew how to do it). A lady buying her tickets at the next machine gave me a nod and said ‘be careful’, so I knew then she wasn’t an employee. I told Russell to check the tickets very carefully, and all went well. Of course the helpful person ended us asking us for money for the help, to which Russell refused (he still thought she was an employee), but I told him to give her some money (Russell has all the money), and he gave her a euro. She saved us having to wait through 100 customers in the queue for tickets from the ticket office, and she was pregnant.

We got to the beach at around 11am. We got off the train, walked a block down the street out of the station, turned right and walked a long block down that street, and we were there. We rented an umbrella and two chairs on the beach for 30 euros. This included the use of a shower (which only had freezing cold water), but it was very handy to get all the salt and sand off. They didn’t have any lockers, but the fellow that sold us the umbrella spot put our bags in their private room where they stored drinks for the snack bar (ours were the only bags in there).

We had a wonderful time. The bottom was a beautiful, sandy beach, the water was very clean, and we were very cool in the water. Russell estimates there were 1500 umbrella’s on the beach. 

There were hotels all along the beach, with restaurants/bars, and vendors selling bathing suits, shifts, hats, and all kinds of beach paraphernalia. I forgot my flip flops and the sand was boiling hot, too bad no one was selling flip flops for a euro or two – missed marketing opportunity. This is quite different from Canadian beaches, but as I pointed out to Russell, most beaches in Canada (certainly at Provincial Parks), charge you to use them.

It was almost too hot to go to beach today, but we were both very pleased we managed to fit in a swim in the Mediterranean. The first train back to Rome left at 16:51, and we took it. We got back to the hotel around 18:45. It was a miracle we found two seats together on the train, and another miracle we managed to get on the first metro car that went by at Roma Termini to get to Ottaviana. There was a horde of people at the metro station waiting for that car!

When you walk the Camino, there is a whole ritual to perform when you finally arrive at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostella to complete your pilgrimage. There isn’t any documentation I have found on a ritual to perform in Rome. Today, in St.Peter’s Basilica, I touched the foot of the bronze statue of Saint Peter

and now I feel our pilgrimage to Rome along the via Francigena is complete.

Honestly, we can’t believe that 48 days of walking have elapsed! The time has just sped by. We walked 787 km of the total 1,054 km, and climbed 18.2 km (Note that we have figured out that the GPS has an error on the meters ascent resulting from bobbing up and down while walking. This is the first time we have reported the ascent corrected for the estimated error. The unadjusted ascent was 19.7 km.

It will take weeks, months, perhaps years to fully appreciate the personal and spiritual significance of walking this ancient pilgrimage route. On the positive side: the scenery was magnificent; we visited/experienced/ walked past endless sites with major religious, historical, cultural, and archeological significance; we experienced some thin places; there were highly spiritual moments; we felt a special bond with the other pilgrims we met along the way; we were blessed by the grace of angels along the way, saving us when things were really grim; we stayed in some very nice places; met some very nice people; we very much appreciated having Beppe to rely on; we enjoyed the food and wine of Italy; and, after raining on and off a little bit on the first two days, it never rained when we were walking.

Reflecting on the blog, I hope I haven’t over accentuated the negative. However, the walk was made extremely difficult for a number of reasons: it was far too hot to have been doing this now (we have no control over the weather); the amount of climbing was far more extensive than I ever envisioned; the vast distance we had to travel between access to cold water along the way was a major challenge, especially in this heat and with all the climbing; we were prepared for a lot of road walking, but not for the considerable amount of walking along roads where the conditions were really dangerous; and, the lack of way marking in some locations, and the conflicting way marking in other locations combined with the poor translation of the route notes from Italian to English (maybe the Italian version was hard to follow as well?) ended up in a lot of wasted time and effort, both trying to figure out where to go and getting back on track when we got lost.

It will take time to come to fully appreciate all the lessons we have learned from this experience, and to recognize as spiritual the many moments we didn’t appreciate at the time because of the weight of the physical challenges we faced at the time.

We did enjoy it and are glad we did it. For anyone considering going on a pilgrimage, the camino is much more pilgrim friendly and physically easier. The via francigena is very challenging, but very rewarding.

This is our last post on the blog.