An emotional journey along two routes walked for centuries by Europe’s pilgrims: the Cammino di Santiago and the Via Francigena. This book is for all of those who have travelled these roads or who dream of travelling them.
On the road to Santiago, like the Via Francigena, travellers share their bread, doors are left open, necessities are few, every gesture is free: to walk is to discover another way of being. Wayfaring accordingly becomes an extraordinary means of self-exploration.
Tens of thousands of people travel on foot every year along the Cammino di Santiago and Via Francigena. New pilgrims repeat the centuries-old tradition of the sacred journeys, seeking new responses to age-old questions. The old routes – which preserve the deep memory of a continent – tell us who we were and how we could be.
Against the backdrop of the landscapes that frame Europe’s most ancient streets, Luigi Nacci describes the true cammino, that long journey which exhausts, breaks and transforms. The journey in which our deepest emotions emerge with unprecedented force: fear, disorientation, nostalgia, disillusion, wonder and mirth.