DAY 156 - SAN GIORGIO DE NOGARO TO PORTOGRUANO: 20.7 MILES (41,400 STEPS)

25 September, 2011

20.7 miles (Total: 1510 miles) 41,400 steps (Total: 3,332, 601 steps)

One of the things which I am reminded of, having grown up in the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall, is the Italian/Roman love of straight roads, aided no doubt by their construction before the advent of planning appeals. They were straight of course as a security measure, so that an advancing army couldn’t appear from around the corner.  If I was an advancing army I would probably want to appear from behind a tree rather than march along the main road, still the Romans did manage to maintain a pretty big empire, so I will just accept that they knew what they were doing…..

Anyway, when you spend an entire day walking on a straight road towards a distant horizon two things happen: the first is that that you use up your iPod battery life fairly quickly and the second is that you get a chance to think about things that sometimes you don’t when you are watching out for turnings or wondering what is a round the next bend.  My thoughts were these:

That I really wouldn’t want to be anywhere or doing anything other than this right now:

I am totally committed to a campaign in which I passionately believe- Truce. A truce which I believe could transform communities; give respite to the victims suffering in conflict zones and strength the peace-making capabilities of the United Nations.

I spend every waking hour thinking of new ways to advance the campaign and broaden the adoption of the truce.

I never once wake up wondering ‘What am I going to do today?’ I often wake up thinking ‘How on earth am I going to complete what needs to be done today?’

I never once go to bed thinking, ‘What have I done today?’ I always go to bed exhausted, but with the goal of the walk a few miles closer and the goal of the truce a few emails and telephone calls closer.

I don’t have time to worry about where I am going to sleep tomorrow night because I just have to worry about where I will stay tonight. I don’t need to worry about how I am going to walk from (a) to (b) tomorrow because I am too busy walking from (a) to (b) today.

Every call and contact with friends and family from home is a precious moment and savoured to the full. I give thanks for richness they bring to my life in a way that sadly I seldom stopped to think when I was at home.

I notice things when I walk that I would never notice when I am rushing to catch a train or to make a meeting—the people going about their business, their perspectives of the world and life, the flowers in bloom, the colours of the autumn leaves, the architecture and history of buildings.

I am spared the curse of life brought about by an over-emphasis on what others are thinking of what you are doing because I am just too busy doing it. My life is no longer driven externally by the demands of others, but driven internally through a desire to serve others.

Most of all there is in the midst of the physical struggle, uncertainty and vulnerability I have a feeling of been given permission at the age of fifty to be fully freely myself for a season—my gloriously wacky, day-dreaming, stubborn, thoughtful, humorous, caring, unsophisticated, poorly colour co-ordinated, impressionable, reckless, overly deferential, boring, optimistic, generous, uninspiring, loyal and utterly frustrating self and through this to discover the true Joie de vivre which is to finally discover who you are, why you are here and then to go out and pour yourself completely into that purpose for which you were created. This I do.

DAY 155 - MALFALCONE TO SAN GIORGIO DE NOGARO: 21.36 MILES (42,720 STEPS)

24 September, 2011

21.36 miles (Total: 1489.2 miles) 42,720 steps (Total: 3,291, 201 steps)

The walk from Trieste to Montefalcone along the coast was spectacularly beautiful and the weather was warm, but cooled by a pleasant sea breeze.  Moving inland at Malfalcone the temperatures increased and the cooling breeze decreased.  To compound the challenges of the day, what should have been a relatively straight forward walking day of around 18 miles took a frustrating turn.  I arrived at what I expected to be a new bridge across the river and railway line at Cervigona del Friuli, only to discover that it was not yet complete and so I need to re-trace my steps for a couple of miles to a bridging point. Such mistakes and wrong turns are mercifully few and far between, but when they do happen they do sap the will to live as invariably they happen at the hottest point of the day and the rucksack seems to weigh an extra 20 pounds as you go back.

As I ordered three scoops of ice cream and an iced-tea in a cafe in Trieste and was handed a bill for 11.6 euro, I began to see that accommodation and living costs are going to become one of the major challenges of my journey though Italy. My skills at negotiating down room-rates have been developed to a very high level during my 154 days on the road, but there is a crucial factor in being able to do so—there must be a surplus of supply and a shortage of demand. When the primary question becomes have you got a room then your ability to haggle is greatly diminished, other than appealing to their generosity after describing the purpose of the journey. During my first four nights in Italy, the average room cost has jumped from 30 euro to 60 euro. I arrived in San Giordani during a festival weekend (Ambiene In Fiesta) and I could only find one hotel with a room at 65 euro, but my mind was opened to a new way of keeping the costs down in Italy as the owner asked ‘Do you pay cash?’, ‘Yes I replied’; “Do you need a receipt?” “No” I replied—“50 euro”.

At the festival, which was a jolly affair not least for the fact that the wine was 1 euro a glass and a small bottle of mineral water being 1.5 euro, I met up with some great young people, Matteo, Valentina and Luis who had travelled in from a neighbouring village. Matteo, who spoke excellent English, helped me order a plate of fries with extra salt from the barbeque stand, for which I splashed out and bought him a glass of wine. He had worked in England, in Preston, for an Italian restaurant, but returned to Italy because of the poor pay—we worked out that he had been paid substantially less than the statutory minimum wage, a common occurrence I was told for mobile labour in the hospitality industry. The weather was another factor – even I, as a committed northerner, recognised that the climate of Preston lacked something when compared to the Italian Riviera. I mentioned to him my story of the hotel and he laughed and said, “That is Italy—cash is the currency and the mafia is the government”. This was an interesting observation because it would go to explain why my first impressions are that the country looks and feels prosperous and expensive and yet it is supposed to be in crisis. The truth is perhaps that the elected government are in a crisis, but the ‘real’ economy is not fully controlled by the elected government and so life goes on and does so surprisingly well.

As I lay in my discounted bed, I reflected on the day and I was reminded of a classic scene from one of my favourite movies, ‘The Third Man’, in which here is a scene, not in the original screenplay of Graham Greene, but added later by Orson Welles, when Harry Lime eventually meets Holly Martins on the Great Wheel in post-war Vienna: “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgais they had murder, warfare and strife. Yet they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had five hundred years of peace and tranquillity. They had democracy and brotherly love, and what did that bring us? The cuckoo clock!”

Viva Italia!

DAY 154 - TRIESTE TO MALFALCONE: 18.7 MILES (37,400 STEPS)

23 September, 2011

18.7 miles (Total: 1467.84 miles) 37,400 steps (Total: 3,285, 881 steps)

One of the things which has struck me forcibly on my walk, is the shifting nature of land borders and government. Coming from an island nation where borders, with the exception of Ireland, have remained unmoved for hundreds or over a thousand years, it is particularly striking.

Trieste is a case in point; it began the last century as an ethnically diverse, culturally and commercially rich city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After World War I and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, it was claimed by Italy, from which time ethnic tensions began to increase with the Slovene and Jewish populations becoming a target for the Italian Fascist mobs. With the Italian armistice, Trieste came under the direct rule of Nazi Germany in 1943 as part of the Operation Zone of the Adriatic Littoral. During that time, virtually the entire Jewish population was removed to extermination camps. Slovenes too were persecuted and fled across the border into Yugoslavia. Trieste became the site of the only Nazi concentration camp on Italian soil and during this time the city was heavily bombed by British and American forces.

After WWII Trieste came briefly under the control of Tito’s Yugoslavia and then, as a result of the Treaty of Paris, came under the protection of the United Nations and was divided into two zones: one controlled by the US (Zone A), and one under the control of the British (Zone B). In 1954 Zone A became part of Italy and Zone B became part of Yugoslavia (now Slovenia). Trieste then found itself on the front line again as tensions rose along the Cold War border.

Six different governments and four different borders in the space of 100 years. Here is the interesting thing though—it has survived and Trieste is thriving again, life goes, buildings are rebuilt, people adapt.  As many parts of Italy are perhaps having a severe wobble because of the economic woes, I would imagine that the stoic response of the average Trieste octogenarian might be to shrug the shoulders and say “seen worse, survived worse” and they would of course be right, but they were the ‘lucky’ ones.