St. Ulrich to Trieste, Day 13 - Nimis to Montina

Friday July 3, Nimis to Montina

We headed past vineyards toward the woods, optimistically assuming that yesterday's struggles with brambles and fallen trees on trails were local to some past weather event in Gemona--like the storms that rearranged trails along the Eno River in Durham last year.

We assumed wrong. Turns out the lush environment in this part of Friuli, in combination with extreme weather events common in the Friulian Alps and Prealps, often leads to washouts and rapid trail overgrowth. Limited volunteer resources mean many trails go unmaintained. 

Butcher's broom. Very poky. Avoid.

The cost of our attempt this morning: a mishap ending with a bent hiking pole.

S engineered a repair that kept the broken pole functional enough for the rest of the trip, and ordered a replacement part that was waiting for us when we returned to Germany. 

Because hope springs eternal, we continued up the trail, navigating one fallen tree...

...after another,...

...before giving up, retracing our steps, and aiming for the same rural highway we had taken a bus to avoid walking on the day before.

Fortunately, there was a big difference between rush hour traffic in a small city and mid-morning traffic between rural towns. 

We soon left Nimis behind...

...and passed from one rural village...

...to another...

Every village we passed through had a church with a tower. The 10th-12th c. medieval bell tower in Racchiuso was originally a lookout tower. 

It was transformed into a bell tower starting June 1, 1448, as inscribed by the masons who did the work. The inscription is famous for being one of the oldest known  written examples of the medieval Friulian language. MCCCCXLLVIII ∙ fo ∙ chomen / chat lo tor ∙ de ∙ Reclus / lo primo dì de cugno / Pieri ∙ e Toni so fradi de Vergnà. (1448. Was begun the tower of Racchiuso on the first day of June. Pieri and Toni, brothers of Vergnà.)

The biggest church in Faedis, Maria Assunta, dates from the 1900s, but retains artworks from the 14th-c. church that preceded it. The bell tower is 14th c. 

This painting dates itself in the banner across the top:
ANO DNI MDXVI DIE XXX OCTOBRIS
(30 October, 1516) 

We hiked uphill out of Faedis and could easily see as far as Udine, the city on a hill on the horizon.

On the outskirts of Faedis, I took photographs while S checked maps. He was confident that the next scheduled trail in the woods would be a navigable forest road, because hope springs eternal.

To get to the trail in the woods, we passed a lot of fruit. Below, artichokes graced the end of every row of grapes in this vineyard.

As we reached Campeglio,...

...we passed the tallest bell tower we'd seen that day. The interwebs say both the church and tower were destroyed in the 1976 earthquakes, so these are new structures (although the bell tower looks, at least from afar, like it was restored). 

Three miles outside of Montina, we made one last attempt to hike over a hill and and through the woods, where we got scratched by brambles and bitten by blood-sucking insects that laughed--haha!--at the picaridin that I had by now carried 165 miles across mountains and foothills and plains for just such an occasion. So we bailed yet again--here's the clear path on which we ultimately escaped--and stuck to paved roads the rest of the way to Montina.

We passed the wee Chiesa di San Rocco, which looked impressively at ease without a big bell tower. It was closed, so we couldn't peek inside.

We stayed at another Agriturismo, B&B Emma. We were the only guests, it was ridiculously inexpensive, our room was spacious and air conditioned, and breakfast was very good. 

I had only brought two pairs of hiking socks with me this year, having decided in previous years that a third pair was unnecessary. By the end of Day 13, I was down to just two socks, one from each pair.

For dinner, we walked back up the road a bit to Togliano...

...and ate at a mom & pop's spot, Trattoria al Passeggio. Mom was pretty confident that we were hiking the "Camino" (presumably the Camino Celeste, which passes near Togliano and runs from Aquileia to Mount Lussari near Tarvisio). S managed to convey through pastiched Spanish-French-Italianish (Romance languages are all kinda the same, right?) that we were hiking from St. Ulrich to Trieste, and Mom gave us a "no way! Well, to each his/her own, I guess" look...  

Ta da! 13.6 of the day's 15.4 miles, 800' up, 1,000' down.

St. Ulrich to Trieste, Day 12 - Gemona to Nimis

Thursday July 2, Gemona to Nimis, a day of unplanned backtracking and rerouting

Ah, coolth! Or at least, ah, not mid-90s anymore!

We began our day by heading up the hill to see Gemona's old city center. 

The main draw there for us was the Duomo di Santa Maria Assunta. A 7-meter tall statue of St. Christopher, patron saint of travelers, looms by the front doors. It was built from six blocks of sandstone by Giovanni Griglio in 1331-32. Pilgrims on the Romea Strata must have appreciated the colossal spiritual nod.

As with most cathedrals in these here parts, there's evidence of pre-Christian, early Christian, and medieval structures that preceded the current building, a renovation that was begun in 1291 and consecrated in 1337. The Romanesque scene above the main entrance dates from the late 12th-early 13th century and depicts judgment day. Gemona's tourism website says all of the cathedral's exterior sculptures were once similarly colorful.

A mermaid flexes her provocative tail at St. Christopher's feet, representing the whores who were sent to him in prison, and whose wiles he of course resisted. Tsk, women. 

Inside, an angel rides a dolphin across a baptismal font. The basin is from a Roman monument dating from the 1st or 2nd c. CE; it was repurposed as a font around 1000 CE, with baptismal carvings added to both ends in the 11th to 12th centuries.

The epicenter of the May 1976 earthquake was near Gemona, and the cathedral suffered significant damage. Rebuilt stone by stone, it has been structurally reinforced to protect it from future damage. An earthquake-damaged crucifix is now the focus of a memorial to the event, symbolizing both damage and recovery.

On to hiking! Here, a view of Gemona's ancient public laundry along the city wall below the church and castle.

The plan for the day was to seize one of the last opportunities for elevation gain and to hike over two foothills between Gemona and Nimis. Up, up, up through the woods we went--until overgrown trails forced us back down on the only passable trail we could find.

This is not the overgrown part

We emerged from the woods after 3 miles of hiking...

...and were disappointed to see Gemona just a stone's throw away. Indeed, we hadn't even left town yet.

We decided to stick to roads until our next opportunity to tackle a ridge, where we hoped the trail would be better maintained. Up, up, up the windy road we went to San Giorgio, where we paused for lunch in the shady portico of the new church (the old one having been destroyed in 1976). We then headed to the trailhead below Mt. Campeone.

The trail followed a lovely creek for a mile, then rapidly became overgrown and then repeatedly blocked by fallen trees. A small metal sign enthusiastically said the trail was being repaired for all users!--but the fallen trees and brambles made it so slow and difficult for us to navigate, we decided we should backtrack to San Giorgio and stick to the roads if we wanted to reach Nimis before nightfall.

On our way back through San Giorgio, we thought perhaps a pretty side road that aimed steeply downhill would get us back to the main road...

...but it dead-ended in brambles behind an orchard, so back up we climbed.

We were now back in St. Giorgio for the third time. A three-wheel mini pickup truck zipped past us. By this point we were 8.5 miles into our day's hike and barely 3 miles from Gemona.

Down, down, down he main road we went, past bees...

...and accompanied by cicadas. Turn your audio on to hear them.

We passed several names painted on the road. S guessed that the women's Giro d'Italia had gone up this hill. We later learned that both the women's and men's races had come through Friuli to honor the 50th anniversary of the 1976 earthquakes, but none of the cyclists was named Ilenia, and "mandi" simply means "hello." Perhaps this was a greeting for Ilenia Lazzaro, a former professional cyclist who is now a prominent sports journalist.  

We descended to Artegna--and would you look at that! We were now a good 3.4 miles from Gemona. I found this far more amusing than S did...

We did not bother climbing this hill in Artegna to see the inside of this 19th-c. Valhalla-ish church.

Evidence!

We continued on through towns and fields toward Tarcento, where we figured out that our new stick-to-the-roads route had us heading to a freeway. With 14 miles already behind us and rush hour in high gear, we decided it would be safer to ride a bus the rest of the way to Nimis than to get hit by one on the freeway.

From the bus stop in Nimis, we made our way to beautiful Agriturismo Bressani, our accommodation for the night.

Ruh roh

On our way to a neighboring Agritourismo for dinner, we passed this very tiny car. Dinner included grilled radicchio, "frico" (potato-onion-cheese patties), and the lesson that we needed to learn how not to order both a first and second course just because a server expected us to.

Ta da! Almost 14 of the day's 15 miles, 2,025' up, 1,900' down.