Friday Dec 8. Martano. 30.5 km.

A lovely day for walking: sunny and 13 degrees. A long 30 km walk, but along small lanes through interesting fields, in a landscape that brought to mind the La Mancha of Don Quixote. Instead of tilting at windmills, he would have had to exercise his imagination on stone trullis here though.

This trulli has its own outside fireplace. Maybe it was lived in at one time?

Trulli architecture getting more sophisticated.

Trulli morphing in to a farm complex!

Stone everywhere.

And maybe I’ve just seen too many, but one or two old olive trees seemed to be telling me stories. Under this one obviously a famous knight in armour is wont to stand guard…

I had to take a photo of this - it was so extraordinary. A vegetable garden OUTSIDE walls!!! The farm labelled itself as organic. I wondered if the owners were maybe Canadian expats?

Starting out today everything was quieter than usual. I soon found out that it is a holiday to celebrate the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. An internet search informed totally ignorant me that this day celebrates the fact that Mary herself was conceived without carnal sin, and therefore was released from the stain of sin throughout her life. This seems to have been quite a subject of debate over the centuries-was she also released from the stain of original sin (that is, Adam and Eve?) And if so, then why does the Church also celebrate her Redemption? All of this is quite beyond my understanding.

The highlight of the walk was the small village of Acaya. In the fifteenth century the village was fortified with walls, and in the sixteenth century the old castle’s fortifications were modernized. At some point, the village was designed in the most rigorous fashion: six streets parallel in one direction and six streets parallel in the other direction, all perfectly uniform. A French example of such planning that I know about, Richelieu, was designed much later, in the seventeenth century. I am curious to try and find out more about Acaya.

Sixteenth century gate into Acaya

Streets of Acaya

And Acaya’s castle

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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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