16km Flat.
We get away from our lady of the house by 8.40 she is happy to talk about their walking on pilgrimage routes and has done various Camino’s and an Italian route involving St. Francisco to Assisi.
Soon we get to Cavaglia and get coffee in the main square opposite a church with an impressive dome but little else to commend it, just outside is the graveyard and war memorials in a beautiful setting in fields with distant mountains. The memorial records military, resistance and transported civilian deaths!
The postman stops while we are eating our oranges and gives us water in plastic bottles. Part of the function of pilgrims is to allow locals to feel good about helping, we are happy to oblige.
Shortly after we see a pair of lapwings obviously trying to lure something away from their nest, wherever it is. But then we spot the Harrier that goes down into a field. We don’t know whether it had a good early lunch of baby lapwings! The distant Alps appear over the field and especially on the spiral staircase that is the route over rail and autoroute so that we go round 360deg. Tony metaphorically slides town the banister and gains half a km on the rest of us. We then traverse fields bounded by irrigation ditches sometimes on two levels.
We arrive in Santhia and find Piazza Roma where there is a bar which has keys to our lodgings. In there we find a program for the 1993 Juventus v Moscow match which not only out host attended but the home team of zebras won! Possibly because they played Julius Caesar, well if you had a player called J Caesar you would play him. Ray says he wasn’t really there as he misheard and was therefore in Gaul at the time.
We are taken by Mario across the square to the donativo ostello. This is very serviceable and gives us reductions on meals at two restaurants in town. We feel well braced after our showers. There is s malfunction in the boiler, the water feels like, and probably is, snow melt. But a very pleasant short day across the fields of Piedmont.