Via Francigena 2017

The Camino de Santiago is very well marked. There are frequent yellow arrows, signs, cement posts, etc. It is easy to find your way with no guide book at all. Whenever you start to think “hm, I wonder if we are still on the Camino, maybe we missed a turn” you look up and quickly find a yellow arrow, reassuring you that you are on the path. The VF is not yet like that. There are some signs and most, but not all, turns are signposted. But there are very few markers between turns. 

Today we were on a path that was hardly marked at all. But, not to worry! GPS tracks to the rescue. There are smartphone apps that will record your walk in a “track” that is named something like fidenza-to-fornovo.gpx. Various guidebooks have done this for the VF and you can download the tracks to your phone. On your phone you use a track following app (we use one called Track Navigator) which loads the track and helps you follow it.

The photo is a screen shot of Track Navigator. It shows the track, or part of it. You can zoom in or out as you wish. The yellow arrow shows you where you are. The track you have already followed is orange and the track coming up is blue. The display shows how far you have come and how far you have to go.

But here is the great part. If you are strolling along not paying attention and get more than about 30 feet off the track, the app says “Off track” and continues to say it every minute until you get back on track. This happened 4-5 times today since the track was pretty much unmarked. If you watch the app carefully you can see the turns but if you don’t it warns you.

Without signs it can be stressful to know if you are going the right way but with the track navigator you always know you are on the right path.

The reason this track was so poorly marked is that it is a variant track that has been replaced by a newer track that avoids some roads. But the new track is two miles longer and we didn’t want to take it.

We have tracks for the whole way from Pavia to Siena on our phones and start the appropriate one each day. You can find on the web the tracks all the way from Canterbury to Rome on the VF.

Technical note: a GPX track is a text file in XML format. It has various housekeeping information and the bulk of it a series of “points” where each post has a latitude and longitude in degrees. There are expressed as fractional degrees using six places of accuracy which is enough to specify the point to within one foot. The point also has an altitude. It is pretty easy to modify these with a text editor. You can easily combine and split tracks this way.

This is the standard VF graphic. The guy is wearing what seems to be a baseball cap rather than a pilgrim style hat. Presumably because of the demands of a icon image. Also he has a cane rather than a staff or hiking pole. The woman is wearing a kerchief, unlikely, we have seen few of them on Caminos. Also she doesn’t have a pack. So, lots of compromises to make a recognizable icon but still not bad, if you ignore all the details.

Or crepe. 

At the restaurant in Fidenza. Kind of an alligator or snakeskin pattern. 

This photo was at desk. The hotel has been fixed up some since the photo was taken. It might have been an earthquake.

We previously mentioned that 900 pilgrims had stayed in Orio Litta in 2016. Danilo Parisi keeps careful stats and took about 1200 pilgrims across the Po in his boat in 2016. Many pilgrims go around and take the bridge, but we have no idea how many. But the 1,200 and 900 are close. We might guess that 2-4 times that many pilgrims on the whole VF so 2,000 to 4,000 a year. These are just guesses but the VF has a lot of room to grow.

We met A (that is all we remember of his name) at the hostel in Orio Letto. Then we met up again on the trail the next day (above).  He is Italian. Wouldn’t you say he looks like a pilgrim? He chose to walk to the bridge to cross the river Po. We took the ferry (see previous post).