St. Ulrich to Trieste, Day 11 - Cesclans to Venzone to Gemona

Wednesday July 1, Cesclans to Venzone to Gemona

Beware of falling hexagons.

With Friuli still under the heat dome, I shortened and flattened our route to Venzone. We agreed to reassess the temperature once we arrived, and we'd decide whether to walk or take mass transit to Gemona. 

Cesclans sits stop a ridge. We had a nice view looking back at Pieve di Santo Stefano on our way down.

After the initial descent, we followed the Tagliamento Ciclovia adjacent to the riverbed the rest of the way to Venzone.

The trail passed underneath the earthquake-reinforced freeway that was heading toward Taravisio and then Austria. We were only about 50km from Austria and 20km from Slovenia as the crow flies.

S paused to put a bandage on a developing blister. I had to pause to do the same a little further down the trail. We had hiked a week in boots with nary a blister, but both succumbed in sneakers. Maybe it was heat-related. (If you're wondering why I didn't put on a bandage during the fifteen minutes it took S to do so, you might also wonder how it could take him fifteen minutes and take me only three.) 

Almost there...

For the entire walk to Venzone, the Tagliamento had ever widening swaths of water.

Venzone began as a Celtic settlement ca. 500 BCE. After Charlemagne captured the kingdom of Lombardy in 774 CE, it became a fortified settlement of the Holy Roman Empire. The cathedral dates from the 1250s.

Venzone has millennia of documented history, but the main historical focus for us was on the earthquakes on May 6 and September 11-15, 1976, that destroyed most of the town. Almost everything we saw had been painstakingly rebuilt stone by stone. See  http://www.venzoneturismo.it/en/visit-venzone/earthquake-1976/ for before and after images of the devastation. The earthquakes impacted much of Friuli. Some places, like Venzone, rebuilt the old structures; others, like Villa Santina and Gemona, are largely newly built.

The museum is in the building on the left...

We also spent some time visiting the cathedral.

The rebuilt Duomo di Sant'Andrea

Eve, fig-leafing

Herein lie Roman mummies.

We didn't pay to see the mummies up close, but S read the poster. The mummies were discovered in tombs beneath the cathedral in the 1600s, during renovations following another earthquake.  

Some post-earthquake cracks remain in the exterior walls of the cathedral.

One of the many town gates

We had a very pretty lunch near the cathedral. Lots of farm-to-table dining in Friuli.

Venzone restored most of its buildings after the 1976 earthquakes, but left the Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista in its post-earthquake state as a reminder of the devastation.

Temps were in the mid-90s. We decided not to repeat our mistake of the previous day, so we walked to the train station and sat in the shade for an hour and a half to wait for a train to Gemona--a 6-mile, five-minute, air-conditioned ride to a town even hotter than Venzone.

Our hotel was a short walk from the train station, and we actually squealed with delight when we entered our room and learned it was AIR CONDITIONED.

Like Villa Santina and Tolmezzo, Gemona has gnomes.

Our evening plan was to walk to Gemona's rebuilt castle and cathedral, but clouds had rolled in, and the wind was strong. When we stopped at a grocery store and saw dust blowing up from the riverbed, we decided to skip the walk. Weather forecasts indicated the heat dome was finally ending.

Ta da! 8.3 of the day's 11 miles, 200' up, 600' down. Bike trails are pretty flat...

St. Ulrich to Trieste, Day 10 - doing something dumb - Villa Santina to Cesclans

Tuesday June 30, Villa Santina to Cesclans

Today we did one very smart thing and one very dumb thing. 

The smart thing: boxing up our hiking boots, jackets, mittens (seriously, we've hiked in the Alps four summers in a row and have yet to not encounter sleet or snow), extra first-aid kit, map, etc., and shipping them back to Germany. 15 lbs less weight between the two of us made hiking in the heat more bearable. 

But first, breakfast. It was spectacular--all homemade by our host, with artistic flourishes, pastries, fresh fruit and veggies, and the best breakfast of our entire trip. What a delight, too, to be clearly past the realm of sweet empty-carb breakfasts. 

When our host learned of our plan to shed weight in Tolmezzo, she found a box for us, and some packing tape, and cheered us on as we packed. We were thus able to ship the box from the post office a block away in Villa Santina. 

Our goal for the day was Cesclans. Knowing the town lacked both a grocery store and an open restaurant, I had replanned our route to go through Tolmezzo, so we could pick up food for dinner and spend the hottest part of the day in a museum and at the community swimming pool. 

This meant paralleling the Tagliamente River, which still looked pretty dry outside of Villa Santina. 

We followed the Carnia Ciclovia (Carnia bike path) most of the way to Tolmezzo, appreciating the shady spots. 

High up on the hill, an Italian flag, in case anyone wondered where they were

Stone wall with built-in stairs... 

When we arrived in Tolmezzo, we learned that although we were now past all six Alta Via routes, there were still more north-south routes to see. We were now on the Romea Strata, a pilgrimage route that runs all the way from Latvia to Rome.

In Tolmezzo, we visited the Museum of Carnic Folk Art. The collection included pottery, masks with and without goiters, St. Agatha holding her breasts on a plate, a machine for tuning accordions, Carly the Travel Chicken's cousins (some of whom were ocarinas!), and much more. 

Elsewhere in town, gnomes lurked.

During lunch, we began our big dumb thing for the day. S doesn't care for nice, cooling swimming pools, so he suggested, while sitting in the shade enjoying pizza and a cool seltzer, that we go ahead and walk to our endpoint of the day, Cesclans. 

After he made this dumb suggestion, I did the even dumber thing and agreed.

But first, we headed back to the Altstadt for groceries. I took a dozen photos of this staircase near the store, because that's how I operate.

Here's a photo taken while we crossed another bridge over the Tagliamente--with water in it!--in the blazing heat. We thought the temp was ~93°F, but the recorded high for today was near 97°. We did not keel over that afternoon, but the walk was often without shade and supremely uncomfortable, and I was pretty pissed at both of us once I realized how risky this was. Don't be as dumb as us. 

The penultimate stretch was uphill through woods... 

6.5 stinking hot miles and one electrolyte-filled Pink Lady apple past Tolmezzo, we arrived at the outskirts of Cesclans, where it was a smidge cooler.

The first thing we did when we reached our un-air-conditioned inn (where our host gave us a look and said, more or less, "you hiked here? What were you thinking?") was to take cooling showers and declare ourselves idiots. Then we ate snacks and drank a ton of water for dinner.

Afterward, we walked up the hill to the church of San Stefano. The oldest parts of the church date from the 8th c., with its modern form dating from the 18th c. 

From the wall behind the church, we looked out at the end of the Alps.

It was only after looking up the history of the church that we learned about the devastating earthquake of May 6, 1976. The quake destroyed large swaths of buildings in Villa Santina (which probably accounts for why that town had looked more bleakly utilitarian than quaint), Tolmezzo, Cesclans, Gemona, and many other Friulian towns. That first wave--another series of earthquakes would follow in September--killed 990 people, injured over 3,000, and displaced over 157,000. The church of San Stefano was left with only tower standing; its rebuild and related archeological research weren't completed until 1996.

Ta da? 13.75 miles, 900' up, 1,030' down. Pretty dumb, but we didn't die.

Villa Santina to Tolmezzo

Tolmezzo to Cesclans