⚜ Avvisi

Day 0 - Cathedrals & inanimate friends

Dear avvisi readers,

After a sleepless night, a delayed 7 a.m. flight to Pisa, and a train packed with Australians, I made it to Lucca. That’s it with electric, aerial, mechanised or horse-powered locomotion for 20 days. From tomorrow, only my feet will be taking me places.

I want to set the scene for the upcoming days with the image of a cathedral. After all, Sigeric, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the one who left us traces of the Via Francigena in 990 when he walked from England to Rome, would’ve had such a building on his mind. When we say cathedral, we may think of a particular kind of place. It’s usually grand, it may have coloured glass and it may smell of myrrh and frankincense. Let’s expand the definition a bit.

In Encounters at the End of the World, Werner Herzog filmed a scene that’s embedded deep into my neocortex, like a childhood memory. It haunts me in a good way. He shows divers going under the Antarctic ice. When you see the footage, you understands why they call it their cathedral. I recommend watching the scene.

[Commercial break while you watch or re-watch it - the full 7 minutes are great]

I suppose we all need our own cathedrals. Metaphorical, as well as physical. My cathedral is the space where I can feel wonder, humbled, at peace and light with a sense of duty. It’s a place where I’d invite my friends and I’d be proud of it. I’m careful with the preaching.

I love finding quirky objects in alleyways and seeing faces in inanimate objects – pareidolia if you want to be technical, I’ve learnt. There’s something about these friends that I find peppered throughout cities all over the world. There’s the faces themselves that make me dream up characters and then there’s their shadows and how they interact with their surroundings. I like to think of these objects as friends on the walk. They’re there to tell me: “Hey, idiot! Stop rushing! Look here. Stay for one more moment.” And, somehow, I always do.

That is what I want the spirit of my cathedral to be. For the next 20 days, the walk will be my cathedral. And like anyone trying to start a sect, I’ve got a belief, maybe controversial, definitely up for debate, as beliefs should be: *Preservation is more about keeping the essence alive than freezing the details in amber. History used to be looking at great people, what they did and how they fought each other (oh yeah, and it was mostly men). Then the trend shifted to impersonal forces - epidemics, weather, economics, political movements. Today, a lot of history is accounting for the average person and those overlooked in that process of storytelling that history is. Here, we’ll try to go a step further and bring the essence to life. Welcome to my cathedral.

That’s it for the day. Time for bed. Tomorrow I have to cover 18km to Altopascio, starting from San Martino Cathedral in Lucca (more on that later).

Saluti,

Florin