Wednesday November 8. Fossanova. 22.2 km.

A most important story, about chestnuts. As you may know, the hill forests of Italy nearly all feature chestnut trees. Chestnuts used to be one of the main staple foods of Italian hill peasants, the contadini. You can grind them into flour, boil them, bake them… and keep them through the winter.

Rocca Massima is a hilltop village that we haven’t visited, but have looked at perched high up above the path near Cori (first photo). Rocca Massima, like many other hill villages, has a chestnut festival each autumn. But sad things happened this year. First the chestnut trees got a blight. Then the rains came at the wrong time. So Rocca Massima had to bring chestnuts in from elsewhere in Italy for its festival, and they were sadly not up to standard. Nothing but nothing compares to the local flavours - that is the heart of the Italian approach to food.

Today’s walk was lovely, with a lot of steep stuff at the start and mucky valley stuff towards the end. For a bit we were walking on one side of a canal with a flock of sheep and goats, bells tinkling, on the other side. The shepherd was using two crutches to hobble along, and his two dogs were keeping him company, the sheep and goats just following slowly behind.

Tonight we have rooms in a dependency of Fossanova Abbey. The Abbey church is the largest Cistercian church in Italy, built in the 11th and 12th centuries on the model of the French Cistercian churches. Totally plain and unadorned inside and out. We went to the 5 pm mass. The congregation knew the sung responses and their voices echoed gloriously. The Cistercians would have chanted (the German Cistercian monks of Heiligenkreuz have won several awards with their recordings of chants) but today the Fossanova Abbey is looked after by a small group of other monks, and Mass is said, not chanted. Saint Thomas Aquinas died in this Abbey in 1274. Here are two pictures of it, the first in the late afternoon and the second at night.

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Sat Oct 4. London.

19 days walking on pilgrimage paths for a total of 395 km or 245 miles on foot (not that arduous - an average of 20.7 km per day, and lots of ‘rest days’ staying put in one place). All of that undone in 1.5 hours on a Eurostar train. I’m not entirely sure what conclusion I’m drawing from that comparison, but I’m back where I started, in London. On my way to my lodgings (I’m staying in a Buddhist retreat centre) I decided to visit the first visitable place to cross my path, which turned out to be the Foundling Museum. Horrified by the sight of infants being abandoned on 18th c London streets, a prosperous seaman, Thomas Coram, spent 17 years raising awareness and funds, as well as obtaining royal permission to build London’s first children’s charity. Opened in 1739, the Foundling Hospital continued its work until the 1950s, and actually is still active as a non-institutional resource, under a different name. Here is a photo of it in 1935. So many similarities to ...

Fri Oct 3. Lille.

I had a lovely day in Lille. In fact, all my days on this trip have been lovely! In the morning I went to the very large Palais des Beaux-Arts. This museum holds the largest collection of works of art of any French institution outside Paris. The collection started at the time of the French Revolution as the works of art of the nobility and of the church were confiscated, and continued on apace due to various enthusiastic municipal governments. By 1892 the collection was so large and important that the Palais, its current house, was constructed in the centre of town. The first fun aspect was the recent work of the Swiss artist Felice Varini who used the museum’s interior as his canvas. The oldest works of art are in the ‘basement’, beautifully displayed. Look at the marvellous three dimensionality of this (flat) marble plaque sculpted by Donatello (c 1435) showing Salomé dancing for the head of John the Baptist. And modern technology brings statues alive by giving them back t...

September 5

I landed at Heathrow this morning at 6 am, a very inconvenient time to get a room and rest! But my student residence accommodation includes a common room with handy couches for a short snooze. The neighbourhood abuts on Regent’s Park, complete with gorgeous flowerbeds. The Queen Mary’s rose garden in Regent’s Park. My neighbourhood wandering took me to the Wallace House which used to be one of the homes of the marquesses of Hertford. The Hertfords were fabulously rich, mainly from extensive land holdings, and in the 18th and 19th centuries avid art collectors. They obviously had Trumpian home decorating tastes. Here are two of their many clocks, all of which need frequent ‘fine tuning’, it appears. I particularly liked two 18th c British paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds in their collection: Mrs Carnac and the hauntingly strange Strawberry Girl.

Celia Walks

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