The Castelli Walk
When I was a student at the English College in Rome, we spent a couple of weeks in between the end of the exams and going back to England, at our old summer house, the Villa Palazzola. During my first stay there, a group of students were planning to revive an old College tradition and do the Castelli Walk. This involves walking through thirteen of the towns of the Castelli Romani — a distance of about 35 miles. It’s just possible to do this in one day, if you start early, leaving by six o’clock at the latest, and if you keep going steadily and don’t stop anywhere for too long, you can aim to be back by about nine in the evening. I’ve always enjoyed walking and so I decided to go along with the group. Naturally, I felt extremely stiff and footsore by the time we returned, but it was worth it — both for the sense of achievement and for the walk itself. I repeated this every year I was in Rome, except that in the fifth year we didn’t make it all the way round and had to cut the walk short, cutting off the final long loop of the route.
For many years after my return to England, I supposed that I would be unlikely to have another chance to do the Castelli Walk, though I occasionally did walks nearly as long, on my day off. In 2008 I was looking for ways to raise money for our diocesan pilgrimage to World Youth Day in Sydney, to reduce the amount that the young people would have to raise themselves. That’s when I had the idea of going back to Palazzola for a few days, to repeat the route as a sponsored walk. I did this again in 2012, 2014 and 2017. I documented the 2008 walk at the time, and I’ve added a few updates — most notably to take account of the landslide that now prevents you returning to Palazzola by the traditional ‘Lake Path’. Over recent years, a good number of English College students (and others) have done the walk. So this is for them and for anyone else who, like us, is mad enough to do it!