We are driving in a medieval hilltop village in Tuscany. The driver stops the car in the middle of the street (the street is only about 12 feet wide: it is all middle) and he points up an ancient moss-covered rock stair well. “The hike starts here,” he says.
The steps are somewhat odd in that they don’t particularly lead to anything. They end in a kind of road, a grown-over two-track that seems to function more as a property line than a road. In any case, they haven’t led to a plateau. The route ahead continues upward.
First weekend in October and it’s rained the previous day so even though the sun is shining now, the ground is damp and the air chilled. Just the week before Rome felt sweltering. But today autumn is in the air. The air, the certainty of fall, calls to mind past fall hiking rituals, which in Alaska were often wet: the Goldmint Trail up in Hatcher Pass or the Lost Lake Trail down in Seward. We never seemed to be on those trails in summer, only fall, always wet. Today is expected to be dry, but for adversity we have an awful lot of uphill travel. My mind is supplying a Van Morrison soundtrack:
You just might feel like singing autumn song
You just might feel like singing autumn song.
We are not on a trail. It’s a road, or once was, surely no car could use it now. To prevent the road from washing away completely, at some point a layer of rock fill had been added. Among this rock fill are shards of colorful tile or pottery, which I imagined to be salvaged from excavation sites.
We rarely know where we are. There is very little signage and when it does exist it is usually just inscrutable numbers and arrows. Once we see a minuscule sign for mountain biking. The terrain is steep and rocky. Aisha says, “So this is where mountain bikers come to practice their deaths.”
We have a set of written directions, but following them is not easy. This is not due to the fact that they have been translated from Italian, but rather to the language, which I first thought to be vague and at some point changed my view: the words began to look timeless and mythic:
Pass on your right a country house.
Go straight.
The trail enters a wood.
There is a mill grinding stone on your track.
It was like following breadcrumbs of words. After many wrong turns we deferred to our GPS.
Although we did not see any people we came upon a burro in a fenced field. It was very curious, friendly. But all we had for it were Aisha’s words, “Hi baby, hi baby.” It was, by the way, a spectacular field with terrific views of the countryside from which we had ascended.
Finally we did see a person, a hunter. He had five wet dogs, two muddy spaniels and three others of indeterminate breed. The hunter was not young and was attired in tweed and leather. Slung at his back was an elegant shotgun, highly polished. He looks like a gamekeeper out of an early twentieth century British novel. He greeted us almost tersely; he was hunting cinghiale, wild boar. We had seen the word on menus. Aisha’s most fervent wish was to not encounter one of these in the wild. We did not.
At the junction with a metal crucifix, take the left branch and keep
climbing. Shortly after reaching a pine wood, the trail starts descending.
Finally we crested some kind of ridge and soon in the distance we could see where our hike would end: Lake Trasimene.
We found a spot for lunch with a view of the lake. Grapes and olives, although we had not understood in advance that we would, in fact, be walking much of the day through olive groves and vineyards. Pecorino cheese and bread. A shared piece of chocolate. Plenty of water.
After lunch was easier, gravity now our ally, and it would be almost impossible to miss the Lake, although still possible to miss the rendezvous spot with our driver.
Reach a first house of the village with a garden and continue on the tarmac road.
Now the walking was very easy. We stopped to take the last of our water at an archaeological site, an “ustrina” designed by Hannibal’s engineers. These appeared to be large bricked-in holes, perhaps fifteen feet deep and thirty feet in circumference. Over the top were enormous iron grates of latticed iron. There were two of them and we sat on a bench in the adjacent vineyard. We had assumed these were enormous cisterns for storing water. Later we learned these were elaborate cremation sites to dispose of the bodies of the dead soldiers.
Historical aside: Lake Trasimene is the site of a famous battle of the Punic War (217 B.C.) between Hannibal and the Romans. When he left Carthage, Hannibal’s army consisted of 100,000 soldiers and 40 “war elephants.” He crossed the Alps with these beasts. Hannibal’s army “won” the battle of Trasimene, killing 15,000 Romans. Our driver told us so many were killed said the lake ran red with blood. Ultimately Hannibal did not defeat the Romans, but neither did they defeat him.
When I was in grade school I learned a song that went:
Hannibal, Hannibal, Hannibal, Hannibal,
Hannibal crossed the Alps.
This has stuck with me all these years–I couldn’t tell you why–and now I couldn’t get it out of my head.
We were looking forward to having a beer at the café at our pick-up point, but nothing was open. It was lakeside resort now we were in the off-season and the place had an aura of sad abandonment and an empty trash-blown parking lot. When our driver found us he only had one question, “Did you see the burro?”
I count this among the perfect days of my life (I would find find out Aisha did not feel quite the same; all day long she held onto a secret mantra: “Don’t whine, don’t whine, don’t whine.”) I didn’t know. Because she did not whine.
In the car as we drove back to our hotel I thought of another of my favorites by Van Morrison, “Coney Island.” It ends like this:
I look at thes side of your face
As the sunlight comes streaming through the window
In the autumn sunshine
And all the time going to Coney Island I’m thinking
‘Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?
Wouldn’t it?
