When in Rome...
A winter spin from Pisa through Florence and Siena took in steaming hot springs, icy roads and a blown out tyre in Tuscany, arriving into Rome in time to heckle the Pope's Christmas mass.
We were sitting soaking our feet in a steaming pool of fart-scented water on a hillside over a steep ravine in Italy, and it was the week before Christmas.
The moon began to rise above a fairytale castle perched on a rocky outcrop on the opposite side of the valley floor, and some ancient bells marked the hour, and a bird’s cry echoed across the gorge towards us. A dusting of snow lay in the shaded side of every field.
All was magic. There was frost on our breaths.
It had been a hard climb to Bagno Vignoni and we had come in search of these eggy waters: the whole region we had been cycling through on this pre-Christmas spin from Pisa to Rome was littered with place names full of Bagnis and Termes and we knew we were in an area full of hot springs, so we had taken a steep afternoon detour to take the waters.
After a bout of indignation on my part to discover that the best of this natural phenomenon was diverted through paid luxury spas, leaving just a trickle of warm water in the public domain for the non-paying amongst us, we took off our shoes and soaked our icy cold feet in the warm water. It was just below zero degrees and the last of the weak winter sun had faded.
As we sat overlooking that magical valley, we knew it couldn’t last forever and we had to get back in the saddle. Mark had found an AirBnb some 10km away but we were unsure as to which direction we were headed.
Mark pointed across the valley to the fairytale castle. “Ha! Imagine if that’s where we were staying,” he said lightly.
“What’s the name of the town where you booked again?” I asked. Mark opened his phone to check.
“Emmm, Castiglione d’Orcia, it says here.”
“Well, that’s a castle,” I said. We looked at each other. If we had that climb ahead of us, it was time to go.
Sure enough, our destination turned out to be the village surrounding the castle on that crazy peak. The roads that had seen no light that day were already icy and as we puffed our way up a series of switchbacks towards Castiglione d’Orcia, snow lined the roads.
Eventually, nearing the top, there came a climb that was both too icy and too steep to cycle, so we admitted defeat and pushed our rented bikes the last few hundred metres into a village that wasn’t any less fairytale in close quarters. Workmen were hanging Christmas lights in the tiny village square and a small market had all the ingredients we needed for a square meal in the apartment we had booked, once part of the home of the village doctor.
Bang!
The next morning we had barely made a further 10km, first slipping and sliding back down to the main road, when the tyre on Mark’s rented bike went with a loud bang.
For cost reasons, this was the first time we had experimented with rental for a trip instead of packing and flying our own bikes. Mark had already had a puncture, and it turned out that the rim on his wheel had developed a jagged edge, eventually bursting the actual tyre.
We were in a bit of a bind. Through some googling, we discovered that the town of Montalcino was popular with mountain bikers in the summer and had a bike shop which appeared to be open. But how to get there?
After a stressful hour of considering our options, we decided to push our bikes and lock them out of sight at a small exit road, and then hitch back to Montalcino. After a bit of a wait, we managed to get a lift. But in Montalcino, the bike shop attendant was anything but friendly. When we asked him if he had the required parts, he simply looked us up and down, said no, and turned around and walked away.
We were a bit non-plussed: it’s certainly not the reaction you’d get in a bike shop in Ireland. We went outside and conferred, and decided we were going to have to be a bit more pushy because there was literally no other bike shop for many kilometres and we risked having to abandon our route entirely and bus to a city.
Returning to the shop, we managed to get across to the unfriendly attendant just what a situation we were in: after much sighing and making it clear that we were an unwelcome pain in the neck, he eventually put in a call to another bike shop in a larger town, and arranged a delivery of the parts we needed, but not until that afternoon.
Serendipity and the White Whale
The Three Princes of Serendip is an ancient Persian fairytale involving three brothers who make a series of life-saving deductions through happy accident: 18th century English writer and art historian Horace Walpole coined the term “serendipity” to describe unplanned fortunate discoveries.
Serendip is actually an old name for Sri Lanka, and in a happy coincidence of its own, this is a country that Mark has cycled in and may get around to telling you about in these pages.
Sitting in Montalcino that day feeling slightly sorry for ourselves, our accidents didn’t seem particularly happy ones. At the very least, we had to accept that we were not going to make much distance that day: by the time we would get back to where the bikes were stashed and make our roadside repairs, it would be late afternoon and getting dark.
Over a long lunch, we hatched an alternative plan and booked into accommodation in a village not far from where our bikes were stowed. This turned out to be right next to one of the most impressive natural hot springs in the region, Balena Bianca, the white whale, so called because of its vast mound of mineral deposits set with natural turquoise steaming pools.
As an icy dawn arrived early the next morning, we packed our bikes, grabbed our towels and headed down a steep forested path rank with the odour of sulphur, literally metres from the apartment we had stayed in.
La Balena Bianca is a very popular tourist destination in summer, but we had it all to ourselves. It was still dark in the steam-shrouded woods, and well below zero, as we stepped gingerly into our togs.
More magical serendipity. There’s no way of recounting these memories, really, and you’re just left with immense gratitude that you have had the wherewithal to form them: that you have had the good fortune to be at that place, in that time. Life is often pretty magical, but sometimes it’s the happy accidents that make the biggest impression.
A rich and beautiful tapestry
A cycle through Tuscany in the quiet off-season means enjoying all that spectacular region has to offer with few tourists or cars on the roads. Gone was that sense of performative service found in areas heavily dependent on seasonal tourism. Instead, Italian preparations for Christmas were underway: families reunited in their local eateries, little old ladies price-checked entire shopping trolleys of Panettones. One day we found ourselves the only other diners in a restaurant where the local police force were having their extremely tipsy Christmas lunch.
We had already been through Florence, and the even more incredible Siena, and further along, we would spend a night in Viterbo wandering its Christmas market.
It may have been that day after Balena Bianca that I looked down into a valley of neat patchwork fields of olive trees and vines, some fields frosted, some golden, some furrowed earth.
Two hunters walked through the fields below, their dogs scouting ahead. As they walked, a pheasant squawked and flushed from the undergrowth ahead of them, and I had a sudden impression of the scene as a kind of medieval tapestry: a hunting scene with clear, crisp air robbing it of scale, perspective and the passage of centuries.
Siena, we agreed, was even more beautiful than Florence, with an otherworldly vibe to it, alchemical symbolism engraved into its ancient stones. Its famed sloping town square, the Piazza del Campo, was awesome.
It was only after we returned to Ireland that we watched the incredible documentary about Il Palio, a horse race which takes place each summer in the famous square: bribery is rife, the horses have to go to church to be blessed, and the riders whip their horses - and often each other - with dried bull penises. All very Italian, we agreed. Aesthetics and passion and tradition and machismo come first.
In Siena we stopped into the Basilica of San Domenico, where the apparently incorrupt head of St Catherine of Siena is in repose, unmarked by time or the inconvenient decay that so regularly spoils the features of us less holy mortals.
St Catherine died at 33 of over-rigorous fasting. Although she was laid to rest in Rome, the natives of her home town took exception and managed to secure quite an important relic to take back to her birthplace, and so her head is on display in a church built on a rocky outcrop above the town.
Large signs told us that St Catherine is not a fan of the selfie and that photography was forbidden.
So we took a good look at her face which, in all honesty, may not be quite as incorrupt as one could reasonably expect. We politely refrained from loud complaints of false advertising and, maintaining a respectful hush, rushed outside to a nearby café while the memory was quite fresh - fresher than the esteemed saint’s leathery features, truth be told - and quickly took out a notebook and drew her from memory.
Mark’s drawing was to scale: in it, the saint’s head appeared as minute and surrounded by ornate religious architecture. For mine, I had zoomed in a little to try to capture more of an anatomical study and the result was more lifelike, dare I say it.
Imagine Ötzi the Iceman but with a dinky little head dress on, in a golden box. These drawings, on the pages of a cheap lined spiral-bound notebook, can’t be photographed to show you now because I seem to have mislaid them.
A very Vatican Christmas to you, too
At some stage on the cycle, in a haze of beautiful scenery and cold noses, stuffed with pastries and pasta dishes and part-fuelled on my part with espressos, we crossed from Tuscany into the district of Lazio, and began to worry about what it would mean to approach a city as large and as legendary for its traffic chaos as Rome.
Truly, we had not really planned this trip all that well. In fact, it was a pretty spur-of-the-moment decision. College had finished up - at that time, I was lecturing part-time and so my work schedule was roughly speaking in line with Mark’s - and, with my kids set to go to their dad for Christmas that year, I was facing into a slightly dismal festive season without them.
We booked flights, and rental bikes in Pisa, and then life got busy. So it was actually on our way to the airport that we first started looking up routes that we could cycle.
Luckily, all roads really do lead to Rome.
Through another round of serendipity, we found that the road we were cycling was actually the route of the Via Cassia, a Roman road dating to the second century BC. As with everything in Italy, where the staggeringly ancient is commonplace and woven through daily life.
Old roads often plot sensible courses based on natural geographic features, and the largely quiet Via Cassia was no different. We even got to pass the ancient Etruscan necropolis of Sutri, its caverns carved from the living rock visible from the road.
And so on our last day of cycling we found ourselves merging with quiet back roads at first, making our way through a hilly suburb with beautiful views of the city, and once in Rome proper, then discovered that it’s possible to cycle along the banks of the mighty River Tiber. It might have been one of the easiest entries to a capital city we have ever done. We had booked ourselves into a little apartment in Trastavere, a swanky neighbourhood of narrow cobbled streets full of bars and restaurants.
But first, Mark insisted on a little detour to the Vatican.
Now let’s be clear: neither of us are religious, or remotely sectarian in nature. But Mark does occasionally say “your people” jokingly when referring to Protestants.
We sometimes keep ourselves entertained by dividing the world into the culturally Catholic and the culturally Protestant. Calling your mother “Mam” or “Mom” is Catholic, while “Mum” is Protestant. Most Cadburys chocolate is Catholic except Tiffin bars, while other Protestant chocolate includes the Fry’s peppermint cream bar and the Terry’s chocolate orange. In Northern Ireland, there are some communities where Mark is instantly treated with hostility, sticking out like the Catholic sore thumb he most clearly is, I would argue. It’s a harmless in-joke.
In any case, he argued convincingly, the Vatican at Christmas is something to be seen. And so we made a quick detour to the capital of the Holy Roman Empire as the sun set on Christmas Eve. We eventually arrived at our accommodation on one of those ludicrously picture-perfect Trastevere laneways after dark, with the sound of choirs at Christmas Eve mass coming from a little chapel up the street.
We spent the evening exploring Rome in a daze, wandering the Circo Massimo, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Trevi fountain, and turned in late.
But there’s no rest for the wicked.
Bright and early the next morning, Mark was up and hyping me up for Christmas mass at the Vatican.
When in Rome, and all that. “You couldn’t be here and not see it,” he said.
I have to say that I had a strong visceral response to the Vatican. And it wasn’t one of spiritual ecstasy. It actually made me nauseous. These are buildings designed to inspire awe and to assign power, to diminish you as an individual and to promote subservience, I thought as we queued to get through a security barrier to gain access to the Piazza San Pietro.
Outside on the broad Piazza Papa Pio XII, street hawkers, mostly Nepalese, sold trinkets. There were Roma beggars missing limbs, and ice-cream parlours selling every flavour including a blue Viagra variety: “ the Pope’s favourite,” a seller told us with a wink. This stuff is timeless: the less fortunate of the world, drawn inexorably to the hustle presented by all those wealthy travellers.
But inside the Piazza San Pietro, underneath the balcony from which the Pope would deliver his Christmas message, a special VIP seating area had been created. Being ushered to their seats we could see dark-suited husbands; on their arms, wives in fur coats and stilettos, bearing all the plastic surgery hallmarks of more money than sense.
If Jesus had actually been present, I thought, and if this pageantry was supposedly a testament to his legacy rather than to monuments of human power and money, then all of those VIP seats would have been given to the destitute denied access outside the security gates.
Fair to say I expressed all of these thoughts quite vigorously and loudly. “Oh yeah, well tell me what happened to Pope Benedict!” I remember saying.
When Pope Francis finally appeared, a tiny dot in white, the effect was underwhelming and I was still in muttering-loudly mode.
“Hummena heh mena hummanena…..Buon Natale,” he concluded, to riotous applause.
Mark was right: it was a sight to behold. Even if it gave me a hefty dose of misanthropy. Later, as we left, a young feminist protester ripped off her top to reveal bare breasts scrawled with some illegible slogan and began screaming something futile and heartfelt: she was quickly surrounded by a regiment of the Swiss Guard, subdued and removed.
The closest we got to Il Papi was the cheaply printed calendars sold for €15 on Piazza Papa Pio XII. We didn’t buy one. But in the Christmas spirit of peace and goodwill to all, I posed with an example. You’d never know what murderously pagan thoughts I was having at the time, would you?
I don’t know if our Christmas Italian Job says anything about our cycling habits other than a tendency to strike it lucky and to turn things that could be misfortune into further opportunities to experience new and exciting things.
At this remove, it probably doesn’t matter all that much, other than that we know we can handle cold and icy roads, something that may come in useful for the journey ahead.
But it’s one of the many cycles that has persuaded us that a cycle around the world is something we want to do.
If all roads truly lead to Rome, we may even find ourselves drawn inexorably back there: only time will tell.
Hold her steady and keep it between the ditches!
My dad is the holiest catholic I know 😉he’s a big fan of a fry’s chocolate cream he’s not going to be happy with this 😂😂😂
Broad Beans are protestant - Lemmy says so - Prod Beans! ;)