Hiking for Chestnuts

I am a member of a new Italian/international trekking club, Intertrek, which is a spin-off of two established hiking organizations: the State endorsed Club Alpino Italiano, responsible for marking and mapping out Italy’s various trails; and Boscaglia, or the “Deep Walking” organization, affiliated somewhat with the Slow Food movement in that, rather than regarding hiking as a competitive sport, a race to the summit, as it were, this group seeks out trails that invite day-long to week-long meanderings, welcomes detours that encourage participants to identify flora and fauna, pick mushrooms and berries, gather chestnuts , smell the roses, suck the honeysuckle. We at Intertrek are a hybrid group of primarily (make that all) middle-aged walkers of the old school. Think Rousseau or Wordsworth (don’t think Proust, he was sick)—the knapsack, the sketch book, the bird watching log.

Last Sunday we had planned an ambitious hike from Patrico to Porelle and up to the summit of Monte Fionchi--all hills beyond Monteluco, the mountain that slopes down toward Spoleto and is connected to Spoleto through the Roman aqueduct the Umbrian town is known for. Monteluco can be a one-hour steep climb to a summit boasting one of the best restaurants in the region, Ferretti with its ravioli con porcini and limone, grilled meats, and spina…or open tap of Umbrian fine wines. Monteluco can also dazzle with its multi-peaked winding interior, among the peaks, Monte Fionchi and mysterious points in between. There’s an actual hermit who lives deep in the hills behind the hills one usually frequents, living in a handbuild hermitage at the end of a stony path one had best walk, because driving—if not impossible—is a sure danger to any vehicle’s chassis. Monte Fionchim a good four hours past the chosen lunch spot--the agriturismo Patrico--and Patrico a good four hours' walk from Ferretti , which in turn is a good hour’s walk from Spoleto’s aqueduct, promised to be a challenge to even the indefatigable Yoga teacher among us, but alas we did not make the trek because of sudden rains.

We may be middle-aged, but we are not lazy or even the kind of industrious yuppie who looks forward to any excuse to spend Sundays in bed with the New York Times or Repubblica. Torrential rains merely had us negotiating through cell phone text messages: Okay, maybe not Monte Fionchi, but why give up walking altogether? We could do something dolce/easy…an hour in the rain. Who was up for it?

Everyone was up for it, wherever that hour of walking would be spent, an hour was just an hour, and as long as the ground was level enough, not too rocky, not too slippery, we could even possibly stand hiking in our ponchos a couple of hours, maybe three, maybe four.

The place Boscaglia veteran Pierluigi chose for us was an “anello”—a ring, ranging from Pompagnano to Pampagnano in a perfect circle through various quaint and even some abandoned hill towns—among them Cerqueto and Castagnacupa, or “gloomy chestnut” where this very Sunday chestnuts were being harvested under the loveliest trees you have ever seen, centuries old surely, noble and sheltering. We could take a leisurely hike around the anello and detour here and there to fill our knapsacks with chestnuts that we would soon roast for San Martino—when the nuovelle wines are decanted. Traditionally one eats roasted chestnuts with the new wines.

Adriana was the one to say outright: Pierluigi’s idea of a four hour hike would more than likely wind up being a seven or eight hour one. Not because of “deep walking” or even “slow walking” but because of some perverse need in him to show us all what stuff we are made of. A psychological trick really: Tell the hikers they need only walk four hours and then after four hours, begin the litany of “we are almost there, we are almost there” just another oretta…or little hour.

The problem with this pleasure hike turned out not to be rain. The rain stopped miraculously as soon as we got started. The steady sun began to bear down on us, even hot for an October morning. The problem was the motor-cross competition that had chosen as its circuit the very trail we had stumbled upon and had torn up the ground, leaving great gullies and churned up rock. They were masked, robotic-seeming creatures from a netherworld in their bold colored space suits, astride their cacophonous machines bearing down on us at every turn, threatening to overcome us, drive us into the ground, the very roar of their imminence sending us careening into the thorny side brush. This is not restful, we kept telling each other. This is not peaceful. Something HAS to be done.

It occurred to us all that every walk has its own living allegory: our day’s walk was the walk not chosen; the menacing masked men who heaved over the undulating paths like demons of the machine age were ours to overcome. We were judicious enough to argue that motorcyclists also need their trails and their paths, though this was the second Sunday hike in two consecutive Sundays that we had felt persecuted by these faceless fellows on their merciless machines. We relaxed in the knowledge that surely they would stop somewhere for pranzo at 1:30. In just another oretta, we could claim the land as our own and walk undisturbed.

It was on the road leading down from Castagnacupa toward the ghost town, Catinetti that we began the fascinating process of stomping on the spiny husks we found along the ground to break them open and discover inside—the burnished shell of the chestnut, two or three clustered in the cushiony interior of that strange barnacle-like outer layer too prickly to touch with a bare hand, yet so yielding to a single stomp of a waffle-soled hiking boot. These were not ipocastane, or horse chestnuts, but the good kind, the fat marrone, the kind to roast on an open fire and eat straight out of the shell, or let boil in wild fennel, which we would pluck from a field near Pompagnano.

Perhaps time stood still because of the chestnut and our sudden primitive need to fill our knapsacks with them, as though hording for winter, the kind of nourishing fare that would preclude us from ever having to deal again with such conundrums as the modern supermarket. The sun began to recede and the sheltering trees cast their shadows on the endless road that would lead us back where we began, but even so, what was the hurry, and who would, who could leave these wondrous nuts to rot? There was the sense, that if we took our time, took as much time as we possibly could, gathering the bounty of chestnuts, some new possibility for living would meet us at the end of the road. The century would clear of its menacing machines, and sudden aggressive noises; time would become elastic, if not still, the sunset holding out for us to get wherever we were going when we got there.