Sun, Storm, and Solitude: Discovering Hidden Italy on the Cammino di San Benedetto

The open road. To many it means escape, but I wasn't escaping from anything.I traveled more than six thousand miles by plane, train, and bus to walk in unfamiliar country, but I left behind no process server, no posse, no bounty hunter. No one was looking for me, and no one, other than my wife, knew I had left home.

I want to see an Italy I hadn't seen before. I wanted to get away from the cares of quotidian life. I wanted sustained, healthy exercise. And I looked for the novelty of the unknown and the unexpected. I found some of each and too much of some.

The Cammino di San Benedetto (Way of St. Benedict) lies in the Apennine mountains to the east of Rome. Sometimes dirt, sometimes asphalt, it passes through villages that date to the Middle Ages. It is one of Italy's newest pilgrimage routes, as yet uncrowded and unspoiled. Along the Cammino I found characters as colorful as the fields and serenety as deep as the valleys. I even found out something about myself.