All was quiet when we ascended upon San Gemini, una citta’ slow.  The town had also been infiorata the day before, but only bits of tape stuck to the street and a few stray petals were left.  The broad welcoming central plaza, smoothly paved, was ringed by a cheerful white municipal building, a gelateria, an archway into the medieval city, the 13th-century church of San Francesco with some relatively recently uncovered frescoes, several businesses and a wide walkway going higher up into the town.  Naturally the tourist office was closed, but my hiking pal Christina and I were directed to a nearby travel agency, a cubbyhole of a shop where the helpful young woman did her best to assist us, in her limited English and our very limited Italian, in accessing a hiking trail (and a WC in the equally pleasant Albergo Duomo).  Back in the piazza as we tried to figure out exactly how to leave town, Jerry offered to take us to find the start of the trail, which was a very good thing, because it turned out to be miles away on shoulderless Italian back roads.  Just at the entrance to Cesi I spotted the sign to Sant’Erasmo, hidden behind ragged brush in typical Italian fashion.

We set off uphill about noon and soon reached Cesi Vecchia, a long line of silent stone houses and patched-up walls, along with a rather new fountain presumably offering spring water.  Then it was up stone steps between a house with a barking dog and its intriguing walled garden across the way, up through a gate onto a road, and up the road to a roofless church, a map of the area and real CAI signs giving us a choice between two paths to Sant’Erasmo.  We selected the shorter one-hour route.  Then it was up through the woods on a rough trail, up over boulders, jutting rocks and tumbles of smooth stones, straight up unless the path took short hairpin turns.  Christina, though some years my senior, seemed to have no trouble but I was sorry I had forgotten my hiking poles and wondered how my knees, feet and I were going to make it back down.  The CAI was generous with brightly painted trail markings when there was no place to go but up, yet a bit lax with signage at intersections.  Up we climbed.  After about an hour, as we entered a flowered meadow, I thought I heard cowbells.  Soon we were in a parking lot (a parking lot!).

Stone steps, suddenly familiar, led up through a tunnel of trees to green grass, blue sky and a perfect gray stone Romanesque church perched near the edge of the mountain. Sant’Erasmo.  Maurice and I had stopped here some years ago; practically falling asleep on our drive from the airport, we had turned aside at a Sant’Erasmo sign and headed up this mountain from another direction.  But now the sky was bluer and the facade of the church was surrounded by…donkeys?

Donkeys with bells, and one with a baby. But they were too big for donkeys; they must be mules.  Yes.  Belled free range mules.  And they were blocking our way.  Not being farm girls and able to evaluate the temperament of these beasts (especially the one with the baby), we decided to give them a wide berth and cut through the tall grass and wildflowers to the left, making a wide circle around the back of the church, avoiding mule pies and thistles, pushing through the hay.  The grass of the field on the other side was thick with daisies and munched short.  Beyond a couple big shade trees a rocky outcrop opened on two sides to valley views and straight ahead across a deep gulch to a ruined tower.  It was a perfect spot for lunch.  After we ate I tried to set up the camera for a timer shot of the two of us but a big mule started our way.  “Go home!” I shouted but he kept coming.  We grabbed our things and moved.  “We don’t need a picture,” said Christina.  The mules were near the shade trees now so we hightailed it across the daisies to the front of the church, where we tried with all our might to open the latch to go in before I realized it was padlocked.

“Let’s take the other path down,” Christina suggested.  We hoped that slightly longer meant easier, and it turned out to be a wider and smoother path.  The CAI sign at the top announced Aqua Vive in fifteen minutes and Galleria in thirty.  OK.  The ginestra smelled heavenly.  At an unclearly-marked fork in the trail I noticed a decrepit trough–probably aqua vive, I thought.  We scouted out both trails and made our best guess, confirmed after a while with the CAI markings. After about thirty minutes the forest dropped away for a stupendous overlook of the mountain we had walked across and the valley below. “This must be the galleria,” I said.  We climbed down from the overlook rock, started down the trail again and soon rounded a bend. The trail stopped at an arched opening in the mountainside with the CAI marking painted boldly over it.  “I guess we go in here,” said Christina.  We stepped inside.  It was really dark, so dark we soon couldn’t tell where it was going.  “This can’t be right,” I said.  I went back outside and looked around.  There was no other path, just forest and a vertical mountain where the trail ended.

We started again, around the curve where the light disappeared, hands on the wall to the left, bent low, stepping cautiously.  It reminded me of the unlit staircase Sheila and I climbed in the square tower in Portugal which, after a couple turns in the dark, let in enough light from the top to see by.  But as we kept going in this tunnel there was no light.  It was blacker than black.  “I could take a flash picture,” I suggested.  If the camera would even flash because there was nothing to focus on. “My phone!” I said.  It’s not too smart but it does have a bright picture on the screen.  I fished it out and pressed its little button.  A feeble light shone in the blackness, feebler than a starless night; it lit the walls or ceiling if held within inches of them but did not penetrate the darkness ahead.  “What’s the matter with this?” I asked.  I pressed the button again.  No more light appeared, but it would have to do.  Christina was first, holding out her straw hat for first contact with whatever was ahead; I waved the phone slowly back and forth; we pretended we could see.  A narrow pipe ran along the floor and sometimes we had to step over it.  How long could this tunnel be?  My phone is so old it doesn’t hold much of a charge any more.  “I don’t know how long this light will last,” I said.  “Turn it off,” said Christina.  “We’ll just hold on and move slowly.”  So we did, even though I thought this must be some kind of practical joke, or there would be a cave-in and we would die unknown in the darkness.  Could the CAI really have meant for hikers to do this?  Suddenly I realized this was the promised galleria–a tunnel, an Italian word I must have known once upon a time.  We pressed on.  The floor had potholes; the ceiling protruded unevenly into the low space (and my head); the walls veered across our path or twisted away.  We felt like we had been in this aphotic channel for hours.  I prayed, “O Lord, your Word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.  Please send some of that light now.”  We continued shuffling ahead in the opacity.  Time passed.  “I think it turns here,” said Christina.  “Let me get out my phone again,” I said.  I pressed the button.  The whole tunnel lit up!  We were astonished.  Same phone, same darkness, new light.  “You are my lamp, O Lord; the Lord turns my darkness into light” (2 Samuel 22:29).  We looked around.  Yep, definitely a rugged tunnel.  “Let’s walk fast while we have the light,” I said, and we did.  Soon around a curve came a glimmer of daylight ahead.  A few more moments and we exited into the world of green and sunshine.  Hallelujah!  Soon we were back to the roofless church, then we were all the way at the bottom of the hill to our starting point, where we texted Maurice to pick us up.  After a while Jerry appeared instead; I forgot that I had gotten my lunch out of our car in the morning and kept the car key.

Back in San Gemini we looked up at a nearby mountain and squinted.  Was that Sant’Erasmo shining in the sun waaaay up there?  Indeed.  The town down on the right is Cesi Vecchia.

The next day Janice said, “In the middle of the night I remembered I had forgotten to tell you something.  There are a lot of vipers in this area so you have to be careful.  They like tall grass and dark places.” Oh joy and delight.  Yet in our cluelessness God had mercifully “surrounded us with his favor as with a shield” (Psalm 5:12).  The story is that local farmers had eradicated all the vipers, which led to an increase in rodents.  Greenpeace (or some other liberal do-gooders) decided to fix the problem by dropping in vipers from helicopters. Now the poisonous snakes are back and flourishing.