The Walk of the Fools

On most days in Italy, we would have the breakfast/morning meeting, when members of our group would discuss their plans for the day.  Several planned to take “the walk of the gods,” an off road trail that was about 10 miles long and a short, 2 hour drive away.  I decided to walk from the villa to a nearby trail that I would call, "the walk of the fools".  This trail was listed in the local guidebooks, and featured, among several points of interest, “the old wrecked car” 

Off I went. 

After battling the fiats for about a mile or so, I reached the entrance to the trail.  Once again, the trail was quite steep (read nearly vertical).  As it wound its way up (there’s that word again) the cliff. Unlike the other trail which went past a number of dwellings and on to the nearby town, this was rather remote in that you were pretty much in the middle of nowhere without a ceramic store in sight.  But it was clearly marked as it meandered up the cliffside. 

And there were interesting things to see along the way. 

Ruins of look-out towers built to watch for Saracen pirates 800 years ago.  A herd of mountain goats, along with the herder and her three dogs barking at me in Italian. 

Periodically, I would see a spent shotgun shell on the trail.  Seeing these made me think of a new meaning for the term “tourist season” 

Finally, there it was.  The highlights of the trail, the “old wrecked car.”  It was old.  It was wrecked.  And it was there. 

How did it get there?  It was akin to finding the wreck of a German U-Boat in somebody’s swimming pool in Kansas.  It was also at this point that the trail suddenly ended.  There were no more trail markers.  Maybe the guy making the trail ran out of paint. 

Or interest. 

Maybe that was his car. 

There was, however, once again, that ever so reassuring sign picturing the human skull and the warning in Italian.  Maybe this time is said, “No Parking.”

I'm looking down the cliffside, and directly below me I can see the Mediterranean, a cemetery (which probably contained the remains of several less fortunate hikers), a 747 coming in for a landing in Naples, and our villa.  There was, however, no direct way to get there.  Perhaps you had to get in “the old wrecked car” tune the radio to a specific frequency and receive instructions how to proceed.  But they would have been in Italian and of no use to me.

I turned around, hoofed the three miles I had come past the mountain goats, and instead, battled the Fiats.  I couldn’t wait to get back to the villa and “rehydrate.”