What a hoot of a day! The list of things that made it great is not necessarily long, but the magnitude of joy they delivered makes for a standout day.
We are still juggling our walking, stays, rain schedules. Awake this morning at 5:30, checking weather, distances and elevation changes on our apps, still working toward optimization of our journey. It is fun to have the complete freedom to alter plans to adapt to conditioning, conditions and attitudes. For certain, today we are walking from here, Trevi, to Poreta, about 8 or 9 miles away via the route of the “Way”.
Breakfast is served here at Hotel Trevi, and it is a good thing. Last night’s dinner was quite sparse due to lack of groceries and restaurants And lack of cooking facilities in our windowless hotel room. Breakfast started at 7:30 and we were there in the ancient road bed with vaulted arched roofs converted to an elegant if not a bit oppressive dining room to take full advantage. Cereal, yogurt, bread, croissants, juices. Delicious. We were eating to make up for our lack of dinner yesterday. As we were nearing the end of our meal the young woman attending us brought out two slices of a cheesecake like desert covered in berries. Groan. If we had known that was coming we might have tempered our eating. Too delicious to leave. We delightedly consumed it.
Back to our room up the stairs to grab our stuff and we were back down and through the dining room to the street.
Absolutely gorgeous sunny morning. It was a day of high traverses with steep climbs and descents. The air felt very cold, which was a relief while ascending roads through the olive groves that seemed too steep for a car or truck to utilize.
Just below Trevi we came across a man less than 30’ from the road we were walking spreading netting below some olive trees. Behind him was a large battery wired to a along pole. With a little nudging from us he grabbed the pole. As the end emerged from a tree we saw metallic fingers projecting from it. He turned it on and the fingers started wiggling. He raked the tree with it and the olives fell into the net. Picking his crop. Judging the time to lay the nets then rake the trees and the vast number of trees in view, this was going to be a very long harvest.
A mile further from Trevi we heard the noise of a big machine. It was reminiscent of a septic tank pump truck vacuuming poop. We switchbacked up the steep road toward it, the sound getting louder until it was deafening.
We found an older man sitting in the cab of a large vacuum truck with a younger man operating a hose and vacuum pipe behind it. He was leaning over a plastic box about four feet square spraying water from a garden hose to liquify a caked, thick brown material and sucking it up with a 2 inch diameter metal pipe hanging off the truck. There was about six or seven of these containers lined up down the side of the pullover next to the truck.
Through the noise I yelled, “Is this poop?” He shook his head no and kept on spraying and vacuuming. It didn’t smell. What was it? Judging by the rate of liquifying and sucking and the number of bins in front of him he had a full day of deafening work ahead of him. Were these bins of affluent from septic tanks of the twenty residents above us?
We left them to their loud work and continued up the steep hill ruminating on the situation. A sign at an intersection pointed further up a side road and said “Olive Mill”.
Oh. Is this the sludge left after the oil is pressed from olives? Bet so.
We started a steep uphill climb of about 600 vertical feet. Cars on this?
Halfway up I got a call from an Italian phone number. It was the place we were staying in tonight at Poreta. He spoke no English, I no Italian. I said “WhatsApp” and he said okay. I tried to send him a written message that I could have my phone convert to Italian, but it came back. He doesn’t use WhatsApp. We decided he probably wants to know what time we will arrive. I had the translation app tell me how to say “We will arrive between one and three,”. I called him back and recited my lines. We had guessed correctly. “Buono. Buono. Ciao.” And he hung up. Onward.
At the top of the climb the road began a level traverse for half a mile and ended at one of Francis’ hermitages high above the valley below. In the intervening centuries it has been greatly expanded with a church and abbey and protective walls. Heavily treed inside the walls and out.
The arched entry had a wooded gate chained shut and an annoying, loud dog barking continuously. There was a mechanism to ring a bell to alert the nuns inside they had visitors. We were loath to ring the bell, figuring if they wanted visitors they would have come from the racket the dog was making. We could see the abbey about 100 yards away inside the magnificent grounds behind the gate but no activity. We decided to let them be and turned downhill and away.
Our route took us downhill, paralleling the wall. We had no idea it was this big. Massively tall and going on forever. When we finally reached the low point of this circling barrier our trail dropped straight downhill, leaving behind our cloistered nuns. We could hear a chainsaw in the distance behind the wall. Probably why they couldn’t hear the dog.
We descended, then traversed for half a mile on a narrow trail through the olive trees. Here we found an idyllic grassy, flat, sunny spot for lunch, overlooking the Spoleto Valley far below. A hard roll with cheese and that ultra thin sliced meat and a shared apple.
When we had climbed the next ridge and looked back we now got a view of the size of the walled hermitage. It was huge. The wall enclosed probably 20 acres. See pictures below.
We began a decent to our destination, Poreta, undulating downward past a castle/fancy hotel and through the ever present olive groves. On the Spoleto valley floor we found Poreta, a hamlet made up of about five or six buildings.
We turned right into a courtyard and found a little store behind glass doors. The door was ajar, but no one was inside. The inside was a little disheveled, but had packaged food on shelves and some fruits and vegetables that were past their shelf life, mold growing on some. It smelled of cats.
Sally guessed rightly that was not the #8 that we were looking for. We returned to the street and found #8 on the left with the name “Villa de Cardinal” on the stone wall encircling the large property.
We walked up the long drive to the villa and snooped around. We could hear a lawn mower operating somewhere close on the property.
Soon the proprietor, a lively man in his sixties came into the courtyard and led us into his office. He was boisterous, smiling and would have been a hoot to get to know if we could have understood each other. We used the translation app to conduct the business, and then he lead us to our room and left.
I was feeling very tired, my shoulders uncharacteristically hurting and body generally aching. We had a few rolls with cheese left for dinner, but we needed something to eat. He had told us Rosa, the woman that ran the shop we had stopped at would cook us pasta if we liked or there was a restaurant down the road.
After a time we ventured out to Rosa’s store again, but it was locked with no sign of anyone. We walked down the road and found a farm to table compound where a Range Rover had just pulled in. We followed the signs to the restaurant and entered a building, yelled Buongoirno. The startled driver of the Range Rover appeared, surprised to find us in his house. He kindly guided us to his restaurant, speaking broken English and explaining the area and that they didn’t open until 7:30pm.
We decided to wait until 4:30 when Rosa would be in her store and ask for a pasta meal and buy some other foods.
At 4:30 we found Rosa, a mid 60’s, short, plainly dressed, woman. We grabbed some cokes and cookies from the shelves, the only foods to be had that didn’t require cooking and ordered a pasta dinner with cheese and sausage meats. I asked if we would eat it here in her store. She shook her head no and I heard the words dormitorio, Cardinal and trenta and seis. Food at 6:30 in our room. Got it.
We had an hour an a half. We used it to consider possible distances and routes dodging the coming rains.
At 6:25 I turned on the feeble light outside the villa door and anticipated the arrival of Rosa. Nope. At 6:40 my phone rang. She said the food was ready. I hustled over to her store again. She had a large serving bowl full of pasta immersed in tomato sauce, our meat and cheese, oranges, packages of crackers and napkins all in a shopping bag for me to carry. She totaled up our previous unpaid purchases and the meal. €33. I gave her €35, thanked her profusely and left. A few steps away I realized I didn’t have her photo, returned and asked if it was okay to take a selfie with her. She said okay. On my way back to the villa I couldn’t stop laughing. This arrangement and situation was so improbable, so quaint, so charming. A mid sixties woman goes home and cooks a pasta meal for us and delivers it to us in a bowl, in the dark without speaking the same language in a villa in a deserted tiny hamlet in the Italian countryside. This is what we came here for.
Back at our room we inhaled the delicious food. My fatigue and pain melted away as I ate. I felt like a balloon being inflated after having all my air leak out. We finished every bite.
I did my blogging, looking at the previous day. Sally did some planning, looking to the days ahead.
Contentment.
Inside the gate with dog
Huge enclosing wall
On the trail
Getting an idea of the size of the hermitage
Castle now fancy hotel
Descending into Poreta
Rosa in her store
Outside of store
Me and Rosa 
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