The importance of spending time alone...

A pilgrimage in western Sicily, or was it a walk?

It’s bold to announce you’re going on a pilgrimage when secretly you’d rather sit on a beach. Staring into the blue between sea and sky might be restful, yet it’s behind the shoreline, in the mountain slopes and hillsides, that men having stubbed their toes searching for greater understanding. With my own heart stubbed, I booked a short trip to Palermo in Sicily on a whim as I’d never been. I haven’t been to the new local Lidl, or is it Aldi, either, but Sicily was more appealing.

Some may disagree, but a pilgrimage is more of an undertaking than fighting off sun-lounger vultures. It suggests composure, spiritual alignment and perseverance, which declaring that you’re going for a walk never quite achieves, regardless as to how hard it is raining outside, or the days it’s been since the dog last saw his lead. Pilgrims are the sort who sneer at tourists beached by the pool; their hiking gear and folded maps lending importance and purpose to a trip that loaded-up hotel omelettes and room service swan-towels from room service simply fail to meet.

It also requires travelling alone. This is daunting. It means getting in your own way, all day. There’s no escape from your own head, so perhaps a pilgrimage answers the need to keep moving (as Hunter S Thompson once recommended). After all, it’s easier to survive your thoughts when they’re accompanied by the ancient footfall of saints, knights, crusaders, and retired home economics teachers, keen to find the meaning to their lives in unfamiliar landscapes.

There’s a great deal of transition in my life right now, upheaval of the sort that is preferable to watch from the middle-age sidelines, grateful that it is not you. This time it’s my turn to steer headlong into the turbulence of a concluding relationship and wonder where it all went wrong. When structures of your life collapse, regardless as to how dysfunctional they might on refection appear, it’s important to find space to understand what has happened, so that despite the pain there might be growth; perhaps because of the pain there will be growth. We swam in the same water and now I’m alone. Solo travelling is a chance to allow the old pond to drain, or at least wander aimlessly.

A pilgrimage suggests personal growth, sometimes, as in Christianity, outlining a particular spiritual focus or pathway which it is believed might lead to encounter with God. So, when does a walk become a pilgrimage, particularly when you only have time to complete the first day if you’re relying upon Sicilian public transport to get back to your AirBB? And how do you know if you have found God? Perhaps you don’t, maybe you allow him to find you, and standing alone in the hillsides makes you an easier target.

The pilgrimage is a declaration to myself that it’ll make sense once I’ve completed it. I’d also announced my intention to anyone still listening, so was left with no choice but to carry it through. After all, what sounds better: I’m going to Sicily to eat ice cream, or I’m going to walk into the foothills behind Palermo to encounter God, or at the very least myself? If anything suggests waving as you pass-by your broken promises, it’s the proclamation of a pilgrimage and not starting it. 

Ill-advisably I begin my walk from the centre of Palermo. When I travel alone I invariably end up in the suburbs. This isn’t the picket fence, garden sprinklers and shiny front doors of the idyl, but rather dry scrubland and solitary cars parked in inexplicably spacious lots as though at some point voluminous parking might be required. There’s parched public spaces between artery roads to the centre of town, where old men laugh at yesterdays’ stories today. The traffic passes small vans selling melons for 3euro while the proprietor sits in the shade of a tree with his daydreams of selling up and sitting beneath a tree he might call his own.

Perhaps I’ve been in this hinterland for a long time, and I’m seeking something familiar in the dust and corner weeds. I’ve never quite fitted in, amongst it, and yet apart. A shape having given up on ever finding its outline, a parcel yet to be delivered, a flower teetering upon the bloom. What is it with these never-quite to be places; all becoming and never quite arriving? They blur past the windows without making a mark. Yet without them how do we get anywhere?

It is the Magna Via Francigena, from Palermo to Agrigento in the south, that brings me to Sicily. The proliferation of Godfather T-shirts in street markets of Palermo suggests a more popular motivation. Marlon Brando smouldering everywhere is like John Nettles peering from every shop window in Jersey. The pilgrimage even passes through a village called Corleone, although with only a day to my disposal it’s unlikely that I’ll reach it for what is probably a popular selfie with the road sign.

The Magna Via Francigena became a pilgrimage in 2017 and in that sickening phrase ‘according to the Guardian’, locals are embracing the new pilgrims. Perhaps they’re already tired of pale, sensibly-shoed Islington types apologising for being white and offering to litter-pick the rubbish-strewn roadsides, because it's hard to see how the prolific glares and scowls I encounter might be hospitable. How were they previously responding to outsiders? Mind you, it’s easy to sympathise; having tourists gawping at your laundry and requesting only one packet of tissues rather than the pack of twenty (true story!) must get tiring.

The trail is 130 miles retracing the ancient road of the Frankish Knights, of which I completed six. The knights probably had knaves completing greater distance than this to fetch their breakfast. The Franks are guys who need better PR, as do the Normans, both of whom conquered the southern tip of the Roman Empire as it descended into bread and circuses, and built staggeringly impressive Christian churches seemingly anywhere they could. It’s a landscape seeped in drought, hardship and worship and with the grandeur of Palermo crumbling into its streets, it begs the question ‘when did it all go wrong?’.

As a reminder of the lacuna in my Normans knowledge, they built the Cattedrale di Monreale under William 2nd in 1182, and is impressive in the way that ancient architecture invariably is. It’s not simply breathtaking, but bewildering as to how all the greatest buildings are from the distant past, and yet we’re so deeply programmed to praise our current ‘progress’. Monreale is a few miles out of Palermo and the ideal place to start the pilgrimage. There is a queue of people keen to spend 13euros to make appreciative noises at the archiepiscopal cathedral, which swerve to instead locate the start of the Magna Via Francigena down some steps behind the main attraction that quickly leads into a countryside of dogs barking and cicadas chirping in the heat.

In fairness not every local frowned at me. While eating my lunch I did get a cheery wave from a car passing at the sort of breakneck speed generally associated with lateness for a hair appointment. They were probably wondering why a tourist, I mean pilgrim, having walked through cascading terraces of olive groves, snaking bends and staggering views had chosen to picnic beside a small lorry depot to stare at a wall. I wanted to explain my discovery that your stomach declares where to stop for lunch, not the views, but I doubted by Italian was up to it, even if I had caught up with the Fiat Punto. That said I must’ve blended in, as earlier a Sicilian had stopped his car to ask me directions. At least I assume that was what he was asking, and not saying ‘tourist go home’, as suggested by the graffiti down in Palermo. He laughed when discovering he’d met the only person in the entire region unable to speak his language.  

The most significant advice I had been given was wear a hat. Thankfully the relentless Sicilian heat compensates for me ignoring this and forgetting a hat by brewing storm clouds and rattling thunder like stones in a tobacco tin across the distant hilltops. I am alone. Am I one of those weirdos at the verge? I probably am. But sometimes in life you are too centre of stage in your own life, and too preoccupied to feature much in others, so perhaps it’s best to hike alone for a while.  

No one knows where I am. The valleys and hills stretch behind me like carved waves (you don’t get that at the beach) as the Cattedrale di Monreale recedes so far into the distance that its grandeur is swallowed by the landscape. I approach a hilltop town called Alfonto, its flagstones polished by hundreds of years of thoroughfare. The town square is deserted. It is a two-bus-a-day town back to Palermo. The storm clouds are closing in and I wonder if I’ll get back to the city. There is one bus left that day, not that you’d know it. Even the street cats have better things to do than look at a tourist.

I fear the worse, until a few cars pull up, and people begin loitering in a way that suggests enough intent that might justify arrest by the underworked police. The comparative bustle in the square of 5 people implies the bus is a supply train to pioneers at the end of the line. A Piaggio with its window last wound down in the 80s plays opera as it clatters to a standstill alongside the cafe that’s rolling up its shutters. And the bus arrives.

I’m aware my pilgrimage is little more than a surreptitious tightening of a neck scarf and would have most pilgrims sniggering behind their maps, but it feels important, at least to me. I’m unsure why. Out there beneath the troubled sky I encountered a sense that no one knows me, and wondered how familiar that is to people. Are we all in steady search to be understood, yet fear it; after all what could be worse? Yet how is intimacy with others possible if you hide yourself? I may have manufactured some purpose to my Sicily trip, but it was purpose nonetheless, and I saved 13euros entry fee to a cathedral.

Just as booze makes people more tolerable, perhaps solitary time alone allows a familiarity with yourself that is at risk of remaining otherwise out of reach. How is it possible for people to know us until we know ourselves; or are we unknowable? It might be that walks, hikes, pilgrimages are to walk alongside your self for while, to listen and feel who you are and where you’re at in life; to delve into who you have become without necessarily noticing. I might have spent an inordinate amount of time impressed at the cheapness of mozzarella in supermarkets, and drinking a lone beer in a restaurant, but between the gaps I sensed my sadness, disappointment and loneliness, yet in the fissures of those spaces lingered a vague taste of recovery and hope. It’s a big sky beneath which I am nothing but another shape, a lizard, a lemon in the road, little more than the shadow of an insect flying momentarily across this world, traveling in life without making a mark. And so it is.