| Before we start I must thank 3 people who
made this trip possible: Liddy, for putting up with and believing in me, Glyn for giving
loads of bits of gear and clothing to keep me warm and cosy and Invitation to Tuscany for
actually coming up with the readies to keep me alive on the way. Some people said that
cycling down a pilgrimage route, in the footsteps of a man who had walked it a thousand
years before, was in some way cheating. If he walked, I should walk. That purist reasoning
didn’t impress me, I thought it risked turning an interesting meander through Europe
with a bike and a sketchbook into a guilt-ridden search for the ‘true way’.
Arguing with myself that if my thousand-year-old pilgrim had had a bike he wouldn’t
have shied away from using it, I opted for the more pleasant way of getting to Rome.
I intended following the itinerary laid down by a
cycle-less man a thousand years before, a Bishop of Wiltshire called Sigeric, who walked
down to Rome in 994 to pick up the ‘pallium’ and be made Archbishop of
Canterbury. His trip took him approximately two and a half to three months and, upon his
arrival in Rome, he whizzed round 23 churches, popped in for lunch with the pope and
promptly set off back towards Canterbury. Luckily for us, he wrote a list of the places he
stopped at – "Iste sunt Submansiones de Roma usque ad mare" – listing
them from Rome backwards: all I had to do was reverse the order and work out where the
places were - and whether they still existed today.
I’ll tell you the names of the places he stopped at
later - for now let me just paint his general direction: straight down. If you were to
draw a line with a ruler from Canterbury to Rome, apart from a couple of strange wiggles
crossing the Alps and the Apennines, Sigeric pretty much followed the ruler.
Crossing near Calais he set off towards Reims, continuing
through champagne country towards Besancon. From here he could cross into Switzerland (not
that it existed then) and prepare to cross the Alps at the pass of St. Bernard, then
called Mons Jovis (Bernard hadn’t even been born).
Once in Italy his path takes a curious bend to the left,
finally crossing the Apennines into Tuscany near Piacenza. This was due to the pass of
‘Mons Longobardorum’, that was developed by the Lombards, being placed well
inland to avoid first the Byzantines and later the Arabs. Once in Tuscany it was back to
the ruler - a straight line down past Lucca, into the Elsa valley, through Siena, onto the
Cassia and down to Rome. All in all close on 1800 kilometres – a long way to walk but
no joke on a bike either.
As I lay in my tent just outside Canterbury on the eve of
my departure, I wondered if I would end up cycling for a week and then, after searching
desperately for a fault on my bicycle to preserve my honour, giving up, phoning-in defeat
and returning on the train.
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