From Mortara to Pavia with a stop in Garlasco

Mortara

Mortara was a hard town for me to love for several reasons:

• You approach the town by walking alongside a major train yard for a kilometer or more. The route is not inspiring.
• Once I finally arrived at the city center, I realized my hotel (the only one that had been available) was in an industrial district a 30-minute walk away from the Via Francigena.
• The city has the basic look of most other Italian towns, but it looks tired and poorly maintained. My view was probably tainted, though, by walking twice through an ugly industrial district to get to and from my hotel when I was already exhausted from a long, hot day.

I did see a sticker applied on top of a Via Francigena marker that made me smile, even if it was a bit crude.

The Po Valley’s endless rice and corn fields have their own beauty, but they are harder to capture on a phone camera than other landscapes along the Via Francigena, especially when your focus is on getting the day’s walk behind you rather than lingering around too long shooting photos while the sun rises quickly in the sky.

From Mortara to Pavia, a distance of 54kms, the net descent is only 25 meters, although the distant Apennine Mountains begin to show themselves on the horizon 200kms to the south/southwest.

I was surprised to see that the farmers in this area not only flood the rice fields, they also flood-irrigate the corn fields.

Garlasco was smaller than Mortara, but it didn’t have the same run-down feel. In another lifetime, it would be interesting to see if my gut impressions of towns and villages actually correlate to income levels or other social and economic variables.

The 18th-century Church of Santa Maria Assunta in Garlasco was quite impressive inside. I don’t know what the particular architectural style is, but there was something about it that was particularly beautiful.

While I was inside the church, I met Jessie, another pilgrim from Quebec (no photos), who has walked from Canterbury. He was headed to the next village for the night, but we would both be in Pavia at the same time, so we agreed to get together there to compare notes.

Garlasco’s connection to Hannibal

Local legends say that Hannibal rested his elephants and his army in Garlasco in 218 B.C. on his way from Spain to Rome. His army was comprised of 50,000 infantry, 9,000 calvary, and dozens of war elephants. Can you imagine what that looked like headed in your direction?

Garlasco to Pavia

I first thought that this installation on an irrigation canal might be lifting water, but that wasn’t the case. Then I thought it might be a mini-hydroelectric generator, but a screw doesn’t seem like the most efficient way to drive one. Please help me out!

Between Garlasco and Pavia, I walked by two different cemeteries/mausoleums that were both so large, I thought they were villages at first. I then realized they were cities of the dead. I was surprised by how large they were relative to the nearest villages since the resources required to build and maintain them had to be immense. They were both locked up, so my photos are of the backs of the mausoleum buildings that are lined up like townhouses, with a couple of bad photos taken through the gate.

The last 10kms of the day’s walk were along a raised dike along the Ticino River. It’s a wide, clear river that meanders between expansive sand and gravel beaches.

The Via Francigena crosses the Ticino River on the Ponte Coperto (the Covered Bridge of Pavia), which was built between 1949 and 1951 to replace the previous medieval bridge that was destroyed by American bombing in World War II.

One of nature’s many wonders:

Next up: Pavia, a dynamic university city