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!

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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.

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 ...

Saturday September 6

I have given myself today and tomorrow in London before starting the walk. A good thing because I’m having technical difficulties getting on to the AirB&B site that I need to access for my Monday night accommodation… Today I had a lovely walk to Canary Wharf along quiet streets bordering the Thames. The tide was high and the water a bit agitated, but the sun was warm and the strollers happy. Over 25,000 bombs fell on this area of London in WWII as the Germans fully recognised the importance of maritime trade to British resilience. Some warehouses have survived (or been rebuilt) and the extensive blocks of post-war flats are very attractive (and very very expensive.) I had a pleasant break in a sixteenth century pub, the ‘Prospect of Whitby’, where Charles Dickens would come to listen to dock folk - original flagstone floors and a pewter counter on the bar. From the waterfront balcony patrons in earlier days could watch as pirates and smugglers were hung from a gibb...

Celia Walks

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