Time for Spring Cleaning

A few weekends ago I went back to Civitacastellana to visit my friends there. Saturday afternoon we went for a short hike to see part of the via Amerina, a Roman road. This particular stretch contains one of the original Roman bridges that is still in use today. That’s the kind of thing that keeps me fascinated with this country.

Here is a photo of the bridge. Just look at that. It just sits there in the middle of a farm, pretending to still go wherever it used to go. I actually looked it up so I could tell you where it goes. Of course, nowadays some stretches have been covered over or torn up, but it continues discontinuously along that path and with an eye for small brown tourism signs, you can walk along the same road that Romans used 2000 years ago.

“Via Amerina
The Via Amerina was a road that broke off from the Via Cassia near Baccanae, and held north through Falerii, Tuder, and Perusia, rejoining the Via Cassia at Clusium. When the incursions of Faroald, the Lombard Duke of Spoleto, cut the Via Flaminia, the lifeline between Rome and Ravenna, the Via Amerina was improved and fortified at intervals, works that represented some of the last road-building carried out in Italy in Late Antiquity. As the new military and strategic route, the Via Amerina “became the communications core of Imperial Italy and the chief support to the claim that imperial Italy was still extant.”

That’s from a small but good Wiki page about via Cassia, with more pictures.

And lots of people do walk the via Amerina. Italians tend to live in apartments in the cities with little if any outdoor space, so they pile into the car as a family or make biking and hiking dates with their friends, because these sites are just outside the towns and are easy to visit. We saw two fishermen who drove their four wheel drive vehicle right over that bridge as well as a young family with children who walked in. There were lambing sheep in the pastures alongside and the banks of the road were covered in wildflowers of the earliest kinds.

So you could say that Italians do appreciate their historical and wild heritage. I have lots of friends who know secret little places in the middle of nowhere that have Roman milestones or not very important Roman ruins. But you could also say that some Italians and some others who live in Italy need a bit of training in environmental studies and manners. This is what is just upstream from that bridge.

A trash dam. It can break your heart.

I’ve decided to carry garden trash bags in my car. Of course I won’t have my car with me everywhere I go, but I do often enough. That and a spare pair of garden gloves will empower me to undo some of the desecration I see. If we all did this and we all reared our children to not litter, most of us would feel more tranquil I think.