Monday Dec 11. Tricase. 27.4 km.

In a newspaper this morning the sad news - the province of Lecce comes in as number 71 out of 107 Italian provinces for quality of life. One of the reasons - garbage collection. Here where I am now, well south of Lecce, it is quite noticeable that there is a lot less garbage on the roadsides. It makes a big difference to the pleasure of walking!

Today was a perfect walking day - sun but not too bright, a gentle wind, t-shirt temp of 13 degrees. The path was interesting - I got separated from it three times, but the detours weren’t long. A bit of road walking, some farm tracks, and some narrow paths. Olive groves, fields, some woods, and gorgeous views from time to time with the snow-topped Albanian mountains in the far distance across the Adriatic Sea.

Hard to see, but the mountains in the far distance are in Albania.

The cacti look like sculptures at times.

An old olive tree

Tricase is a smallish town with a pleasant old centre. It also is home to the oldest tree in Italy, a 900 year old oak tree. It was already huge when Emperor Frederick II came through (him again! He definitely seems to be one of the major figures in historical tales here) and the story tells that he sheltered under it together with 100 of his knights. Today it is all fenced off so you can’t get right up to it. Sad, but a good precaution given the tree tragedy in England where a « tree-of-the-year » winner, an ancient sycamore standing in lone splendour at Hadrian’s Wall, was chopped down in an act of vandalism about two months ago.

Good night!

Comments

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

Search This Blog