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| The valley beside Montalto |
Woohoo! Internet is working using my stick. It isn’t supposed to here up the valley, but our apartment is so high up it has reasonable reception. Collected emails, updated the blog (only 10 days of it!) then headed off while it was still coolish on a good walk up and across from Montalto past a church we had spotted a couple of days ago. This one was built beside a grotto where an apparition was seen in 1453 – it’s a huge church, amazing for being in the middle of nowhere.
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| The track to the church |
The walk was much like the Ceriana walks of 2 years ago. Initially a nice wide path with ages-old cobbles zig-zagging up through forest to the church of Madonna dell’Aquasanta. It wasn’t very far so we kept going up the path as it narrowed, past many tumbledown buildings, and a few that were looked after as they had road access. It is sad to see the old ones slowly collapsing, but the effort to get them into some sort of shape is immense. Few have roofs, many are missing a wall or two, none have power or water. Even if you could restore them, they mostly have only a single door and possibly a window, so they wouldn’t be much good to live in. We imagine some were only used in summer when the olives or grapes needed tending. The terracing is stupendous. Miles and miles of it, almost all in olives, and much still in use.
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| View from 400m up |
A bit of hassle getting some work done today. I’m not sure how fast our connection is up here – it seems a bit variable – and I had a load of data to get onto a client’s site, and it was not working well enough.
