The Via Francigena

Among the great medieval pilgrim roads the Via Francigena is unusual in that its course is known from a single dated document rather than reconstructed from scattered mentions.

One traveller, eighty stages

In 990 the archbishop of Canterbury, Sigeric, went to Rome to collect the pallium, and a member of his party wrote down the stages of the return as a numbered list of about eighty overnight halts. That list, preserved in a British Library manuscript, is the backbone on which the modern route is laid. The numbered stages walkers follow today descend directly from one archbishop and one journey, which is a far narrower documentary base than the Camino rests on and makes the modern road as much a scholarly reconstruction as a survival.

Waymarked unevenly

Rome was the senior pilgrimage of the Latin west before Compostela existed, and the road carried northern traffic to it for centuries before the Reformation and then the railways emptied it. Its twentieth-century revival has been uneven by country: waymarked most completely across Italy, least so in France, so that the walker experiences a road that is a continuous tradition in some stretches and a recent invention in others.

The highest point on the road to Rome is the Great St Bernard Pass at 2,469 metres, and there is a building on it that has been receiving travellers continuously for something close to a thousand years.

The pass was Roman, carrying a road and a temple to Jupiter Poeninus, and it remained the principal crossing between the Swiss plateau and the Aosta valley. It is also lethal in winter, exposed, and was long infested by robbers. Bernard of Menthon, an archdeacon of Aosta, founded a hospice at the summit in the eleventh century, and the community of Augustinian canons established to run it is still there. Their obligation was and is to shelter anyone who arrives, and the canons and their servants went out into storms to find travellers, which is the origin of the dogs. The St Bernard breed was developed at the hospice for exactly that work, and the animals are still kept nearby, though the rescue role passed to helicopters decades ago.

The pass is snowbound for much of the year and the road tunnel now takes the traffic, so the summit is quiet in a way it has not been for two millennia.

The Via Francigena as a whole owes its modern existence to two things. Sigeric's eighty stage itinerary of 990, which fixes an actual line, and the Council of Europe, which declared it a European Cultural Route in 1994, seven years after doing the same for the Camino. Italy has developed its section furthest, with the Tuscan stretch through San Gimignano and Siena the busiest, and the northern sections remain thin on accommodation by Camino standards.