by Guy Stagg
Then it was night. The fourth day.
Later I dreamed that I was bound in chains, that I was buried in a tomb. I dreamed that I was drowning and woke to the sound of rain.
It was still raining when I left Viterbo and headed south from the city. In the Cimini Hills I got lost in corridors of eroded sandstone. Every sign pointed the wrong way, every footpath sent me off course, and the urgency I had felt earlier in the week turned into a weary impatience. The rain retreated and the skies cleared, but I paid little attention to my surroundings, desperate now to reach the capital. So I did not notice the towns along the route – not Vetralla, not Capranica, nor the glistening lip of the Lago di Vico. Day three was done. Fifty-five kilometres to go.
On Tuesday afternoon I came to the town called Campagnano di Roma. The parish youth centre was a bare building made up of classrooms, changing rooms and strip-lit corridors. On the top floor was a gallery where pilgrims could stay – an altar at one end, hidden behind flax curtains, and foam mats piled at the other. Here I met a pair of women in their early twenties. Francesca was tall, her neck slender and her head floating loose like a balloon. Cecilia was smaller, hair cropped short except for a ribbon running down from the temple. Both women had graduated the year before last and drifted ever since – temping, volunteering, housesitting, babysitting and petsitting. One morning Francesca decided to come on pilgrimage. Of course Cecilia was free.
They left Siena a fortnight ago, covering twenty kilometres a day. ‘But tomorrow we will be in Rome,’ said Francesca. ‘I don’t believe it.’
An hour later we went to a cafe near the youth centre. Inside, the air was powdery, the smell mixed from baked dough and burnt sugar. Mirrors lined the walls, and when I caught sight of my reflection I felt embarrassed by the scruffy clothes, the patchy beard. All winter I had walked blind to my appearance, but that evening I felt selfconscious. Yet there was relief in this – in seeing myself through a stranger’s eyes.
Cecilia scowled at her reflection, while Francesca ordered three plates of pasta and focaccia and chips. Then we ate together, the two friends telling stories from their journey. They talked a mixture of Italian and English, interrupting one another and laughing the whole time. Their stories made no mention of religion – not sin, not prayer, not the Pope’s inauguration – and when I asked why they were walking, Francesca shrugged.
‘Sometimes I think I could walk forever,’ said Cecilia. ‘Like the walking makes me free.’
They wanted to know about my own pilgrimage too. I explained that I had set off from Canterbury on New Year’s Day and crossed the Alps in midwinter. I discussed the homeless men I befriended in Ivrea – Stefano and Aldo, Il Papa and Il Bagarino – and the boatman who drunk-drove me over the Po. Cecilia asked what was the worst part, so I mentioned the week of rain in the Apennines. Francesca asked what was the best, so I mentioned that same week, when the clouds lifted and I saw Tuscany for the first time.
She laughed. ‘And why are you a pilgrim?’
I thought back to Giacomo’s list of questions. Did I beg for my food? Did I pray while I walked? How many miracles had I seen along the way? Compared with Cecilia’s more improvised approach, they seemed absurd. I was tempted to claim that method for myself, but instead I told the truth. I said that I had been ill and hoped the journey would help. As I spoke I realized my words had no weight, no stigma, no shame. I was afraid to share them, yet they could not hurt me.
When the cafe owner learnt that we were hiking to Rome, she would not let us pay, insisting we take away three little boxes of biscotti instead. Francesca clapped her hands, announcing that it felt like Christmas.
‘I won’t sleep tonight,’ she said. ‘I’m too excited for tomorrow.’
It was late when we returned to the youth centre. In the upstairs gallery Cecilia played with the foam matting – making a fort, a wigwam, a temple – while Francesca leant from the window, rolling cigarettes and ringing her friends in Rome. I stood in the corner, grateful and amazed. This evening had been the most ordinary since Canterbury, yet that was its magic. Unlike the pilgrims in Siena, these women treated walking as something to be enjoyed rather than endured.
I laid out my sleeping bag and crawled inside, but an hour later I was still awake, listening to the two women’s movements. I could hear them tiptoeing round the gallery, hear them whispering one another quiet, hear the gasps of stifled laughter. Domani, domani, I heard them say. Tomorrow was the last day.
Next morning I followed a strand of suburb into the city. My route skirted between pastures and paddocks, wild horses and farmed cattle, low hills, knotted woodland, bridges, underpasses, lay-bys and roundabouts, and by midday I was hiking on pavement. After twelve weeks of walking my heels felt flimsy, my shoulders raw, yet Rome was so close that there seemed no point in resting.
The villages on the outskirts were waymarked with little tags of gold, blue and white, sprayed onto lampposts and signs, guiding pilgrims for the final stretch of the Via Francigena. During the first two hours I counted the markings; after that I counted petrol stations; when the road ran beside a railway track, I counted train stations too. Yesterday evening Cecilia had told me that, once she and Francesca arrived at the track, they would take a train for the remaining distance. Nothing to see now, she warned, just a fifteen-kilometre traffic jam.
As if to prove her wrong, I began looking for evidence that I had finally reached the capital – a famous landmark or familiar street name. But all I noticed were the drab sights of the city’s outer fringes: billboard posters advertising supermarket bargains; playgrounds set on squares of threadbare grass; apartment blocks crowned in satellites, aerials and air-conditioning units; vacant plots pieced with broken bottles and crushed cans; chains of wine bars and snack bars, of tabacchi and panetteria, of fruit stalls, fast-food outlets, and pawn shops swapping gold for cash, their slatted shutters spoilt with graffiti. Thirty, twenty, ten kilometres to go, and still I was walking, walking.
The architecture shifted back through the centuries. I passed an office block with a facade of fluted columns. I passed a house with chunks of masonry set into its base. I passed a church with a columned portico and walls of pitted pink. Since midmorning the route had been level, but around teatime it lifted onto the foundations of an older city.
By five o’clock the roads were clogged with cars. Commuters hurried along the pavement and my rucksack took up too much space. I kept following the waymarks as they skipped down a wall of stone slabs. Blue, blue, white. Blue, white, blue. White, blue, and a streak of gold – and then the markers ran out.
As the road tipped downhill, the pavement tapered away. Ahead the traffic was locked four lanes wide, but a yellow arrow at my feet pointed through a gate in the wall. So I opened the gate and went inside.
The wall bordered a park, with dust tracks ascending to a summit half-hidden by pine. I took the nearest track and started climbing.
Crossing the park, the noise from the road softened. As I rose towards the summit, the city’s commotion was subdued. Then I reached the crest of the hill and the woods fell away. Beyond the sinking treetops I could see Rome clear in the evening light.
All day I had walked on the flat with no sense of scale. Now an entire capital was spread out beneath me. For some reason – the heat, the height, the fumes from a million exhausts – it looked as if the buildings were hovering off the ground. I could see apartment blocks shuffling over one another and streetfronts trembling like a curtain caught in a breeze. The roofs were a jigsaw of tile, slate and tar, of raised terraces and hanging gardens, of bell towers and clock towers and spires capped with crosses. Above them all was the shining dome of St Peter’s, suspended from the earth.
I thought I should celebrate, clench my fists and pump my arms, or raise my hands and cheer. But the atmosphere in the park was tranquil – that brief interval between the end of work and the beginning of evening – and my excitement soon ebbed into relief. So I watched the buildings slow
and settle, and then went down into the dusk.
It was past eight when I limped into Testaccio, a scruffy neighbourhood on the southern edge of the old city. In Siena I had been given the address of a local convent with a hostel for pilgrims, but I did not learn its name until I arrived, Spedale della Provvidenza di San Giacomo e San Benedetto Labre. Benoît-Joseph Labre. I shouldn’t have been surprised: Rome was the city where he died. Yet I remembered how the saint’s story had haunted me, that evening in early January, and wondered if I had walked nineteen hundred kilometres to brush up against the place where I started.
The convent had long windows, tall doors, and high stucco ceilings. Its walls were blanketed with white, giving the whole building a cushioned sense of calm. A few nuns floated in the corridors, but otherwise the place was still.
On the second floor was a set of dormitories with a kitchen next door, where a middle-aged woman was preparing food.
‘Here at last, here at last! I thought you might never come!’
The woman’s name was Gabriella. She had a golden face and a twittering voice. Gabriella was a volunteer, cooking meals for pilgrims when they reached Rome. First, however, she moved a chair into the middle of the kitchen and told me to sit. Then she placed a metal bowl beneath the seat, filling it with water from a stoneware jug. Finally she asked me to take off my socks. The knuckles were scabbed and the flesh flecked with dead skin, yet I did not feel ashamed, only the deep calm that lies on the far side of tiredness.
Gabriella knelt to wash my feet, rinsing them in the bowl, rubbing soap over the arches and soles, and cleaning the suds with more water from the jug. My toes prickled, stung, turned red, and went numb. At one point she asked whether I knew any prayers, and before I could answer she began to recite, Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli . . . I murmured the words back to her, our voices falling into time . . . sia fatta la tua volontà, come in cielo così in terra.
When the prayer was done she kissed my feet, dried them with a towel, and poured away the spent water. Then we ate together.
There was a poster on the kitchen wall, showing a boat with a cross-shaped mast – the image I had seen in a dozen churches since Calais. The words Annus Fidei were printed beneath. I asked Gabriella what it meant: a year of faith. It was the Pope’s idea, she explained. Pope Benedict’s. He wanted a year of evangelization, a year of renewal. ‘If you make a pilgrimage to Rome, you are forgiven.’ Gabriella paused. ‘Like a jubilee.’ Another pause. ‘You know this word: jubilee?’
What was the term Danilo had used? Jubileus. I could not remember the translation, something about thanksgiving, or peace, or debts being forgiven.
I shook my head.
‘OK,’ said Gabriella, ‘so I will explain.’
On the first evening of the fourteenth century a small group of pilgrims gathered in St Peter’s Square. They were sent here by a wandering preacher who claimed that anyone visiting Rome for the New Year would have their sins absolved. The story spread, and by the end of the week thousands stood outside the basilica.
Vatican officials were surprised by the sudden crowds. However, rather than turn the pilgrims away, they put the Veil of Veronica on display – the cloth that wiped the blood from Christ’s face during the Passion.
Two weekends later, as Pope Boniface VIII watched pilgrims processing past the Veil, he noticed an elderly gentleman carried on the shoulders of his family. When the Pope asked the man’s age, he replied that his first visit to Rome was a century ago, in the year 1200, when he was carried on his father’s shoulders. On that occasion, the man claimed, every pilgrim to St Peter’s had their sins absolved.
Scholars were sent to the archives to confirm the story, but no evidence was found. Yet the Pope did not want to disappoint his visitors, so that February he proclaimed an annus jubileus. From now on the first year of the century was a holy year. All pilgrims to Rome would be granted a plenary indulgence.
The theology went something like this:
Because of original sin, no amount of virtue can earn us a place in heaven – only God’s grace does that. However, to reward good behaviour the Church encouraged belief in Purgatory, an intermediate stage of purging between this life and Paradise, where earthly offences were punished. It was a compromise between two competing visions of the divine: a just God and a merciful one. But it also allowed penitents to quantify their sins, even price their guilt. Time in Purgatory could be reduced through acts of penance such as prayer, fasting, almsgiving and pilgrimage. This remission, measured in years, was called an indulgence. A plenary indulgence cleared the entire penalty; a lifetime of wickedness wiped clean.
The papal bull announcing the Jubilee claimed that Boniface was reviving an ancient tradition. In fact nothing like it had been seen before. Although a previous pope, Urban II, offered a similar indulgence to knights on the First Crusade – to spare them from sins committed while fighting for the Church – that was a one-off. Boniface’s Jubilee was open to anyone and was repeated every hundred years.
Come the spring, ten thousand pilgrims were pouring into the city each day: noblemen and merchants, clergy and laity, artisans, labourers and beggars. The walls of Vatican Hill were broken open, and the Sant’Angelo Bridge – the pinch-point over the River Tiber – fractured.
On Maundy Thursday Pope Boniface greeted the pilgrims from the balcony of St John Lateran, reading out a list of Church enemies who were forbidden the plenary indulgence. This included supporters of the White Guelph faction in Florence, such as Dante Alighieri. The poet was among the pilgrims to Rome in the Jubilee year and later set The Divine Comedy on that same Maundy Thursday. Unsurprisingly, his poem criticized the growing scope of papal indulgences. Canto XVIII of Inferno even compared the pimps and seducers thronging the eighth circle of hell to the Jubilee pilgrims mobbing the Sant’Angelo Bridge.
It’s true that the event helped re-establish Rome’s status as the capital of Christendom, but this was evidence of weakness as much as strength. Given that Jerusalem was no longer in Christian hands, there was something desperate about the celebrations, because the papal city was a poor substitute for Palestine. However, nine years after the fall of Acre – the last crusader state in the Holy Land – the Jubilees gave Europe a new pilgrim centre.
In the following centuries the Pope’s festival was revived many times, becoming the greatest spectacle in a golden age of pilgrimage. His indulgence was also recycled for scores of major and minor feasts – this was the Annus Fidei I had seen advertised on all those posters. And, said Gabriella, as we sat together that first evening in Rome, seven centuries later the Holy Year was still popular.
When I woke the morning after arriving, my legs were stiff and my feet bruised. It took several hours to leave the convent, and several more to find the guesthouse where I was staying that weekend. The guesthouse was attached to a monastery, Monastero di San Gregorio al Celio, which overlooked a broad road running from the Circus Maximus to the Colosseum. I got there at twelve, went back to bed, and slept almost twenty hours – a plunging sleep so deep that I woke with no memory of where I was, but stepped from my bed feeling reborn.
Next day was Good Friday. In the afternoon I went to buy a second pair of boots and a second set of maps. That evening the road outside my monastery was lined with pilgrims: old men from Mexico with trimmed beards and baggy suits; young women from the Balkans with patterned scarves wrapped round their heads; a family from Poland with seven children in blazers and skirts; and another family – French, I think – their sons in matching football strips.
The evening was overcast, but the clouds drew away with the edges of the day until there was nothing left in the sky except a taut, twilight blue. The air cooled, the traffic thinned, and then I stepped outside to join the pilgrims.
Everyone was queuing at the Arch of Constantine. Police patted down the queue, except for a group of German nuns who were waved straight on. Then they spread out in the Piazza del Colosseo, on the far side of the arch. To t
heir right was the Colosseum, a great cliff of chambered stone lit by the gentle pulsing of lamps. To their left was the Palatine Hill, with a ruined Roman temple at its base. A stage had been built on the temple’s foundations: a throne in the middle and twin rows of torches stage right, fixed to form a burning cross. More torches crazed the lip of the stage, above a bank of decaying brick. Below the bank, near the foot of the hill, security barriers kept back the crowd. Children stood beneath the barriers, their arms looped through the rungs, holding leaflets and rosaries and candles in coloured cups – all waiting for the Stations of the Cross.
Night fell. The piazza filled. Choristers and priests circled the stage. The rest of the audience was in darkness, a pool of shadow lapping against the Colosseum walls. I stood between an elderly couple dressed for a funeral, reading tiny black Bibles with tiny black torches, and a pair of men dressed for the beach, shaking their shoulders and rubbing their hands. It was too dim to follow my order of service, and I was too nervous to talk with these strangers, but soon I grew tired from waiting and my thoughts began to drag.
After two hours the audience went quiet, as a police light flashed from the road and a convoy of cars approached the Palatine Hill. When a limousine parked beside the stage, the two men nearest me started shouting: Viva il Papa! Viva il Papa! Others joined in, now cheering, now clapping, until the mood in the square swayed from mourning to celebration. VIVA IL PAPA! VIVA IL PAPA!
It was nine o’clock. Pope Francis had arrived.
Over the top of a few hundred heads, I saw a figure dressed in an ivory frock coat, stepping out from the car and mounting the steps to the stage. As he reached the throne, the shouting grew louder, the young men in front of me whooping and whistling. I wanted to join in, but when I opened my mouth no sound came out, and once more I felt like an imposter.
Eventually the figure raised his arms and the audience was quiet. He began to speak, his voice weaker than I expected, welcoming us with a few exhausted phrases. Then a pair of actors started reading the fourteen stations, every station followed by a commentary, a selection of prayers, and a chorus of the Stabat Mater. At the same time, cinema screens on either side of the square cut between the faces in the audience. When Jesus fell for the first time, the camera jumped to a woman who had been crying. When Simon of Cyrene lifted his cross, to a man with eyes squeezed shut. When Veronica wiped the blood from Christ’s face, to a line of children tugging their parents’ clothes, desperate to leave, desperate for the loo.