⚜ Avvisi

Day 5 - Slowness

Colle di Val Elsa → Monteriggioni (15 km)

Hi, I’m Florin and I write daily dispatches as I walk the Via Francigena from Lucca to Rome. If you missed the other days, you can access them here.

“With the barista hat?” Marcello asked in Italian.

“Yes, perfect,” I said.

“Only if you take a picture of my friend. Behind you,” Marcello said while searching for his cap.

His friend was not into it. He smiled, but kept his arms crossed. It was my first stop of the morning, walking out of Colle di Val d’Elsa. Marcello’s cafe was another one of these hubs for the local community, where people gather to gossip, discuss politics, football or any other matter. Only closed on Saturdays. Marcello stamped my pilgrim passport and wrote the date, saying out loud each syllable: “Fifth of September 2025. And onwards!”

“I am a celebrity in London now,” Marcello said to an incoming customer as I was taking his photos. He had to attend to them. I paid for my espresso and panino. “Discount for you,” he said, “because you’ve worked hard!”

“See you next time!” He waved me off as I started the day’s 15 km. Marcello was both full of energy and slow. There was no lethargy, sluggishness or reticence. He was slow in a confident way, taking each next task as it came to him. That was some food for thought.

Today, I followed the river Elsa, as I walked out of the Colle di Val d’Elsa. It’s quite amazing that with a population of just about 20k, the medieval town accounts for most of Italy’s crystal glass production.

The river’s hues of blue and green shifted throughout the day. From teal, to turquoise and cyan. The water flows fast and every 50 meters or so there’s a small waterfall. In between, there’s enough time to ask myself: What makes a “good” pilgrimage or walk? “Slow down,” Marcello comes back with the answer. I think back to Pilgrim Mode and his words fill in another piece of the puzzle with the name on the back spelling: slowness.

I need a good dose of slowness and walking around Italy helps me notice when I do the opposite. Whether it’s checking in at donativos, ordering food or making small talk with locals, I notice slowness everywhere. The good kind, the opposite of urgency and progress trackers in Jira. I think about my interactions and whenever I catch myself rushing again, I remind myself to slow down. A lot of the locals seem to know something I don’t.

There’s a great line on the www, popularised by Tim Ferriss: “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast”. I guess we end up rushing when we don’t know where we’re going. We then try to make up for it. We hurry and try to pack a lot of things in a short amount of time. As much as possible, as quickly as possible. But when you know where you’re going, you can go slow, because you want to notice what’s around you.

With the risk of beating the dead horse of comparing a walk with life, I think there’s another parallel on the topic of time. I am no expert on time, its management and this is not some self-help piece. Time to get nerdy. It does feel to me that time is a vector, not a single value. A vector has both direction and speed. Similarly, I think time can have intention and speed. Maybe the former is more important than the latter. I’m not the first one to point out the importance of intentionality. Why am I repeating it then? Because it helps to walk to really understand what it’s like to go slow and feel smooth. Otherwise it becomes a cool phrase to repeat to your friends.

Now, a trick for slowing down: some sort of activity, creative or not. Pick your own: photography, drawing, mushroom picking, whatever. These create the space for you to slow the fuck down and notice what’s around. On the plus side, such activities give you some output that turn into excuses to replay the days in the evening. That process helps reflect, think about your creative practice and laugh about the day.

That’s it for today’s musings. Tomorrow we’ve got 20 km to reach Siena.

See you next time,

Florin