DAY 161 - CASTELFRANCO VENETO TO VICENZA: 24.8 MILES (49,600 STEPS)

30 September, 2011

24.8 miles (Total: 1593.9 miles) 49,600 steps (Total: 3,480, 401 steps)

My feet had not recovered at all from the marathon (and a half) of walking from the previous day before I need to set off and do it all, well nearly all, again. I managed it, but only just and the price was a bit of an ugly mess on my foot, especially the left foot and last three toes, which because of the extra wear on my shoes, seem to react very badly when I push beyond 25km per day.

I begin to wonder how many layers of skin I have to loose in blisters and whether I will run out of Elizabeth Arden No 8 cream to replace it. I am beginning to face up to the fact that a new pair of shoes may be required and I suppose being in Italy ain’t such a bad place to look for footwear – although functional footwear in size 11-12 rather than fashion footwear in size 8-10 is more hard to come by.

There are bound to be regrets on any venture of this nature and I think one, which I may well be in danger of, is of rattling too fast through northern Italy in order to reach Milan by October 10^th so that I can make it to Rome for some important meetings. I have walked in the shadow of the Dolomites from Trieste and have now arrived in Vicenza to discover that I am looking out on the foothills of the Alps. Just the mention of the word sends a shiver down my spine and through my feet. But more importantly I am walking through and close to cities and towns which have shaped our civilisation in the West, such as Venice and Trente, without so much as a glance.

I was grateful therefore, to be completely unable to walk on Saturday 1 October and instead was forced to take a day off in Vicenza on my way to Verona. I met up with a wonderful mutual friend, Paulo Benedetti, who is a doctor in Vicenza and he took me in the car up to Piazzale della Vittoria,  overlooking the city with the Alps rising in the distance. It was an incredible sight as I learned about this amazing city which I was just about to hobble through. We sat in the shadow of the Church of St. Mary of Mount Berico as the bells peeled, having a real cappuccino, and talking politics and Roman history. Paulo knows more about both topics, so I was the net gainer of the conversation.

Vicenza was a wealthy commercial town with strong influences from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which came after the Napoleonic times. It was heavily bombed by the Allies in WWII and many classical buildings were destroyed as well as over 2000 local residents killed. Incredibly Vicenza is now home to a garrison of the US Army, which will expand to about 15,000 troops and support personnel over the next few years. Their influence is very substantial on the local community as they account for 10% of the local population and their presence is not universally welcomed. It makes you wonder what our dear friends the US military have in mind by maintaining such a force in Italy where the acute need is not for an army of soldiers, but an army of entrepreneurs and accountants to spur on the economic recovery. Still it’s their money, but the Italians are surely right also to say it is their country too and seventy years or so after WWII and twenty five years after the end of the Cold War, might be as good a time as any for everyone to move on and adapt to the current political and security landscape.

Paulo and I then talked about politics and British attitudes to Europe—he informed me that the Emperor Constantine was actually crowned as Emperor under the City walls of York—I obviously missed that part of the history lesson. I has also thought that Constantine had converted to Christianity and had then changed the Roman Empire into the Holy Roman Empire with the church at its heart. I hadn’t realised that Constantine wasn’t a Christian, far from it.  His mother had converted, but he remained a pagan to the end of his life. His decision to embrace rather than persecute Christians was a political calculation because persecution just seemed to be making the Christians more popular; so he decided that it was better to have them ‘inside the tent…..’. Being a rather brutal man, in the mould of his predecessors, he then proceeded to ruthlessly persecute the opponents of Christianity and heretics.  Though of course in doing this, he was to have the blessing rather than the opposition of the established church—c’est la vie—as Del Boy would say.

Moreover, I learned that when the Romans actually left Briton in AD 400 or so to concentrate on their problems at home, the Brits dispatched an Emissary to Rome to beg them not to leave fearing that they would fall prey to the savage Picts—I then returned back to the hotel to watch the keenly fought match between Scotland and England, in the rugby World Cup, and saw the English front row and began to question whether the emissary wasn’t actually from the Picts—still England got through by the skin of its teeth on both occasions.