Roughly 5 million tourists flock to Italy's Amalfi Coast each year, many of whom choose to stay in popular towns like Positano.
A walk across Italy in Garibaldi’s footsteps: from Ravenna to the coast of Tuscany
20.05.2024 - 12:51 / theguardian.com
Crickets leaping round our feet. A butterfly at the rim of my hat. Burrs on our socks. Smells of fern and pine. The rhythmic rasp of the cicadas. And, ranged around us, a never-ending green. Cypress and cedar. Peaks and parched pastures. The combed vineyards and the dark oak thickets. Moving through it all, feeling right inside it, sticky with it even. Like any other animal. This is what we love and why we do these summer walks.
We set off from the railway station in Ravenna. Heading for the coast. Not the Adriatic, just five miles away. But the Tyrrhenian, on the other side of the Italian peninsula. The remote bay of Cala Martina to be precise: it’s in Tuscany, about halfway between Genoa and Rome.
Why? It would be so much wiser to choose one of the well-known trails: the Via Francigena, the pilgrim route from northern Europe down to Rome, or the Via degli Dei (Way of the Gods) from Bologna across the Apennines to Florence. Just download the dedicated app and each day’s walking is planned out. Where to stay and where to eat. All the paths are properly marked. We won’t get lost. But Eleonora and I are masochists of the unbeaten track. We want to find our own way through.
To give our summer shape, we’re following Garibaldi, the Risorgimento hero. It must be an obsession. In 2019 we reconstructed his July 1849 retreat from Rome to Ravenna, through Umbria, Tuscany and Le Marche. This summer’s walk will follow the sad sequel: his army lost in the Apennines, his friends captured and shot on the Adriatic coast, his wife dead, the hero was smuggled away from his Austrian pursuers by local patriots, then passed from hand to hand back across Italy, eventually escaping in a fishing boat from the south Tuscan coast to the safe haven of Liguria. For him, it was all desperately dramatic no doubt; for us, there’s the fun and challenge of trying to follow, at the same speed, in the same month of the year, August. Under the solleone, the lion sun.
First, across the coastal plain from Ravenna to Forlì. These are arrow-straight paths along gurgling irrigation ditches. There’s a busy hum of insect life and, beneath it, the quiet vegetable urgency of these long hot days: sunflowers turning to the light and vine tendrils reaching for ripeness along the trellis. Very soon we realise we’ll have to carry three litres of water each day, not two.
Then the climbing begins. Forlì to Castrocaro. Castrocaro to Modigliana. This area suffered heavy flooding a couple of months back. Along the Montone River, huge chunks of bank have disappeared. And our path with them. We have to ford a flow of greyish mud. I curse and love it. I love the feeling of being in the world, however slimy. Eleonora is less enthusiastic. Every evening we
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