St. Davids

St. Davids (he renounced apostrophes as worldly) is Britain's smallest city. It meets the old criterion by having a cathedral, but not the modern one, in that it lacks an M&S Foodhall. The cathedral, a fairly splendid one, is sited below the town, making it easy to photograph from interesting angles, and beyond it lies a 14th-century Bishop's Palace in the perfect state of ruination; like a melancholy cutaway model. There are also bats wheeling about aimlessly in its undercroft, an important mark in its favour. The city as a whole is the cappuccino and art gallery sort of tourist town, with only the minimally necessary number of ice cream parlours.

My apartment here is from a strange era in British history when people took baths and access to electricity was guarded by rituals and tests of merit. Major appliances require you to hunt for and activate a wall switch with no obvious connection to them, and so does the shower. This is an aftermarket device bolted to the wall over the tub, and to activate it you must first pull a dangling ceiling cord (one of three; what happens to those who pull the wrong cord, I cannot say) to make power available to it and then push its "on" switch. I had to get an AI to figure this out, and I think it had to shut down protein folding while it did so.

In fairness, there's also a wonderful washer/dryer. There's something really satisfying about watching the grime of the local trails washed away and returned to the city.

Three Glorious Welsh Walks, in Ascending Order of Gloriousness

1. Overland to Cairn Heinif, coastal trail to St. Non's.

The overland paths are underappreciated. Reaching them from the town requires road walks, but these are on quiet country lanes that are really quite pleasant, except for sunken stretches where you have to lean against the embankment and inhale when a truck appears. And then you're on little-travelled trails through vast fields of rippling grass and and stubble where pheasants peck, foxes jump into cover, and staring sheep struggle to fit you into their worldview.

The overland route also allows a detour to Clegyr Boia, one of the many neolithic and Iron Age sites marked on OpenMaps that turn out to have absolutely nothing to see. Instead, it's a question of visualizing what may have been there. Imaginative people may be able to do this at home, but it's much easier if you've just climbed through the bracken to a stony hilltop in western Wales.

On the coast, the sea smashes itself into foam against broken black cliffs, boats stand at anchor offshore, and Ramsey Island sprawls in the background. Tourist maps mark an inlet here as "Seal Cove". This marketing effort has not worked on the seals, which are cynical. A small copper mine once operated here, too, and there's a ruined foundation and a large rusted gadget at sea level that may have been involved.

Snipping off the end of the peninsula in hopes of beating the rain meant another inland trail. Here, the wind bore strange noises, like screaming children, and the source eventually proved to be a soccer game played by screaming children. This was at a farm with a program for screaming children from the city -- a beautiful cluster of whitewashed buildings with red doors and windows. Then a very narrow inlet lined with lime kilns -- be warned, lime-burners, they are in ruins -- a cliff where climbers have a top-rope fixed to a nasty-looking slab, and finally the trail north back to the city.

2. St. Non's to somewhere just west of Solva, with an overland return.

The weather was perfect: heavy rain in the morning that ruled out the ambitious hike it would have been stupid to do and then clear and sunny to open up sensible options. The Well and Chapel of St. Non, mother of St. David, are just south of the city. The well is believed (everything to do with St. David is prefaced with "according to legend," "believed to," or "by tradition") to heal eye problems, so there was an attractive overlap between its miracles and my ailments.

The well and chapel (in fact, there's both a modern one and a ruined one) were also strongly recommended by the Lady of the Train just before she vanished mysteriously. At least, she looked to be on the point of vanishing mysteriously when I got off; and there's at least a small holy mystery in the way her split-fare switched at Swansea instead of Newport like mine.

There have been no improvements in my vision yet, but I'm open to a gradual miracle. It's also possible that just standing around nearby wasn't enough, but using the water in any way would, from the look of it, have meant going back in a few days to be cured of an eye infection or intestinal parasites.

The route after this is routine coastal magnificence until you reach the Iron Age fort of Porth-y-Rhaw, which is one of a few promontories hereabouts that were walled off in the first millennium BCE. This is one of the few really remarkable ancient sites: a huge system of grassy ramparts with a long, sinuous entrance. The inland return passes an abandoned complex of red brick that we might as well guess had something to do with WWII, and then some questionable route-planning saw me walking a short stretch of the A487. Friend, do not walk on the A487. It is dangerous, and there is very little fun to be had.

The last stop before St Davids is an abandoned WWII airfield with colossal runways of concrete slabs where people now go to walk their dogs -- the final fate of obsolete megastructures everywhere. Here, an unleashed spaniel trotted over and watched in fascination as I had a snack. It was desperately torn between the life it knew and watching a stranger eat a bagel, and only at the third call did it go back to its owner.

3. Cairn Llidi and St. David's Head

Overland through sparkling pastures to White Sands Beach, a popular surfing spot where surfers stand beside vans and talk about surfing. On the way up the hill of Carn Llidi, a gravel road turns into a proper footpath and then horses -- probably the "ponies" which, signs warn, have been set loose to graze the park -- block the path and guard the neolithic chambered tomb as though in fulfilment of some ancient and solemn pony covenant. They don't graze, just stand around being ostentatiously watchful.

After wading into the gorse to avoid the ponies, the path turns into a concrete ramp up to the foundations of a WWII radar base. Beyond is a grassy saddle and then a fun and slightly dicey scramble to the rocky peak, where ravens circle your head like you're some Celtic deity and not a middle-aged tourist who probably shouldn't be up there. Carn Llidi is, after all, the K2 of Pembrokeshire, with the highest scraped knee:summit ratio of any hill in the county. 

Down towards St. David's Head (where the apostrophe dramatically reappears) brings you into a rugged, rocky land featuring a dolmen and, on the point itself, rocks to sit on and a group of elderly Britons talking about real estate. It's wild-feeling here, despite millennia of history; after putting up the dolmen, no one was able to think of much to do with the area.

Fishguard

For reasons I probably could have explained a month ago, I rented a three-bedroom house in Fishguard. It was a great pleasure to scatter my junk across so many rooms. There was even a yard with a clothesline and a wicker laundry basket in case I wanted to look quaint.

Key achievements: walked along the coast in both directions, befriended a cat, visited stone circles, got a haircut in a combination barbershop/cell phone store, viewed a tapestry.

It has been pointed out to me that I could have gotten a haircut in Toronto, but there are some haircuts one can only get from a Welsh teenager who also repairs cell phones. The place was mostly a barbershop, but had a partitioned-off corner containing a desk, a lot of cell phone parts, and a teenager who handles both businesses. I don't know what happens if someone wants a phone repair during a haircut, or what the synergies are, or why it isn't also a crab shack.

The stone circles are both modern, the one I visited dating from 1935. You shudder to think of the dark rites of minute-taking and budget debating that once took place there. In fact, they were built by Gorsedd Cymru, which is (apparently) a Welsh cultural society that really does stage druidic-bardic rituals, and I have no evidence that they don't do so in black robes. The rituals were made up by an eccentric stonemason in the late 18th century, but are now traditional enough to, like Scottish tartans, claim a confusing type of authenticity.

The tapestry, made by local women in the 1990s, is modeled on the Bayeux tapestry and commemorates a 1797 French invasion (intended to distract the British from an invasion of Ireland that didn't happen) that stands out as one of history's most glorious shambles. A task force of deserters, criminals, and some actual soldiers came ashore, looted a couple of villages, got very drunk, and surrendered. Errors noted by military historians include bringing deserters, putting deserters in easily-desertable situations, getting drunk, not having enough guys, looting, and broadly failing to endear themselves to the people they hoped would rise up in their support. The tapestry is wonderful, and can be viewed under low, tapestry-preserving lighting in the local library.

The walk east was a pleasant out-and-back that took in the Fishguard fort, the lower town, where a dozen boats stood with their keels buried in tidal muck, and many coves. The walk to the west was more ambitious. A little coastal shuttle with no other passengers dropped me at the Strumble Head Lighthouse, which stands on a dramatic island connected to the mainland by a gated bridge that was, disappointingly, padlocked. Probably for the very good reason that people like me would otherwise try to mess with the lighthouse and then fall into the sea.

There's an Iron Age hill fort further along the coast to the south, and I tested the possibility of reaching it and doubling back but worked out that the time and effort would be too much. Just the walk back from the lighthouse turned out to be strenuous, a jagged sine wave that constantly climbed and descended headlands. In one cove, a seal and her pup were calling to each other like very loud sheep. I took a picture of the mother, with a mid-tier phone camera and at long range. If there were no such thing as seals, this is the photograph that would claim to prove otherwise. I can't absolutely guarantee that it's not an oblong rock or a prankster in a home-made costume.

Two-thirds of the way back, I turned inland in hopes (dashed by access problems) of visiting a couple of neolithic sites and entered a  cursed region of trails, horse tracks, single-lane roads, narrow paths overgrown with thorns and wet ferns, enchanted glens blessed with eternal muddiness, open fields, and grey-stone farming hamlets. This is Deepest Wales, and before GPS, anyone who found their way here had to stay and, apparently, open a horseback-riding business. It was a great happiness to find Goodwick and know that a shower was only one cove away.

Bristol

Accommodation: small apartment in a neighbourhood of pubs and vape stores. The pub next door has a Wikipedia page. Apartment is accessed by tapping 7-digit numbers into well-hidden keypads.

Arrival experience: search building exterior like a prowler while customers at the pub next door look on thinking, must be vapes in there. The keypad reacts to failed attempts by sounding an embarrassed little siren for a few seconds. No response team screeches up, so keep looking and finally locate correct keypad.

Quite a nice place, except the lights are on motion detectors. If you lie still and read for fifteen minutes, the lights go out. They also turn out if you're in the shower for more than six minutes. There's no window in the bathroom; you shower in total darkness until you find a spot covered by the motion detector. This is very interesting.

The building is separated from the rest of the city by a complicated traffic circle where locals go to dice with death. Pedestrians cross in four stages, and every wait comes with tempting pauses. A cyclist shoots across like a panicked deer, and then a light changes somewhere and another pulse of traffic comes screaming around the curve.

Castle Park: A beautiful park that once held a Norman castle and was a thriving neighbourhood until the Blitz, after which it was turned into a park. A bombed-out 18th century church remains. It's a bit sketchy in the evening; but if I were going to play loud music and get drunk in public, I'd choose Castle Park, too. It's just so evocative. In the morning, it belongs to gulls, one of which screams in triumph from the apex of an arch in the ruined church, and sightseers, one of whom approaches and starts a long and strange conversation. "When was your father born? Mine was 1917. It's not a contest." He was with someone else, who ran off like a freed hostage when I took over.

Cheese Lane Shot Tower: the last shot tower built to date (yes, so, you pour molten lead through a screen at the top and collect spherical shot in a pool of water at the bottom). It's so ugly that it won a design award in 1969, but it's been the only industrial tower to look at ever since they tore down the Shot Lane Cheese tower following improvements in bocconcini technology.

The harbour: gives the sense that an overexcited 1997 civic planning committee got everything it wanted. There's an open-air theatre where a woman is learning to roller skate, sheds redeveloped into long rows of restaurants, an aquarium, an audacious modern lift-bridge that broke last month, and We The Curious, a quirky science-arts centre that broadcasts audio out over a big, empty square. It's like a Soviet city where scientific curiosity is supposed to be compulsory, but no one cares.

We The Curious (which might be marvellous, I didn't go in) seems to have been given a list of late 20th century buzzwords and no further instructions and has been groping for purpose ever since. A museum of, say, ceramics has an easy life by comparison.

Then: I took a train to Fishguard via Newport. Bristol has a lovely Victorian train station with fascinating acoustics. They make announcements completely indecipherable, and a stopping train of steel ingots is avant garde music. A lovely older Welsh woman gives me tips for that coastal trail that I really should have written down.

Rome

My place in Rome looked to be one of those operations without a street-level lobby, and I was pleased with myself for finding the building, buzzing in, and locating the rooms up on the fourth floor. But a uniformed attendant found me there and escorted me back downstairs and a few doors along to check in at the lobby of the hotel of which these rooms are apparently some weird annex. Then a different attendant led me back into the grubby ground floor of the first building, summoned the tiny stairwell elevator with a flourish, and guided me back to the place I'd already found.

It's a debatably-interesting fact that, no matter how grand the exterior, the ground floor of every building in southern Europe looks like a parking garage. There are always soot or dirt stains on the plaster that can't have gotten there through any human agency you can think of, a floor of tiny tiles, and a ramshackle wooden booth with a purpose lost to history. But the room is just off Piazza Repubblica, and if I blew up just one apartment building, I'd have a view of Santa Maria della Vittorio.

Of the two full days I had, I set one aside to walk the Via Appia. If you want to have the worst possible Via Appia experience, I'm in a position to advise. Go to the Porta San Sebastiano and head south. That stretch is busy, has ambiguous sidewalks, and is walled-in, so you can't escape. Cars and the route 118 bus you should have taken rumble continuously by on asphalted cobblestones, their exhaust hangs over the sunken road like a gross atmospheric river, and you have a long time to enjoy all that, because the first interesting sight is a fair ways away. I've walked this route before, many years ago, and had forgotten all that. I forgot, too, about the tour buses at the catacombs, the cyclists, and the classic car rallies. The classic car rally may have just been that one day, I don't know. At any rate, it was all a neat demonstration of the unreliability of memory that scientists are always going on about.

It was a relief to reach the grassy ruins of the complex of Maxentius (a mausoleum, a circus -- towers, the spine of the track, and the discreet doorway for removing wrecks -- and an inaccessible palace), just like something from an 18th century Grand Tour. You want to get an oil painting done, with some sheep added for atmosphere -- maybe stand over the artist and keep barking "more sheep!" -- to hang in your parlour. The baths of Trajan, back in the centre of the city, are the same. Too hopelessly ruined to do much with, they're a litter-strewn hangout for the indigent.

I took a bus back into the city and was happy to see the screwball comedy of tourists trying to use bus tickets playing out just like it used to. The transit system now takes cards directly, but everyone has tickets or passes. The various machines on board let you tap, scan, or insert, and it's not obvious which to try. Some people also have exotic all-in-one tourist passes that can do none of these things, and they can only stand around helplessly. Only later will they appreciate what a quintessentially Roman experience they've had.

That grudging coexistence of the old and new -- ticket machines, in this case -- is part of the city's weird charm. It's a beautiful, frantic, frustrated place where you can't change anything without destroying something priceless. Developers yearn for the happy medieval days when people knocked down anything that was in the way and used the wreckage to build whatever they wanted, locals halted by crowds think wistfully of the Goths, drivers -- actually, no one can get inside the mind of a Roman driver, and it's better not to try. And yet the city is somehow extending a subway line, and, strangely, the ancient centre is teasing new attractions: hoardings near the forum hide new excavations soon to be unveiled.

The plan for the last day of the trip was to just walk around and maybe hang out in the piazzas trying to look like Fellini. Many people don't know Fellini frequently wore hiking pants. It was great. Places I used to freely wander in and out of require tickets and have snaking lines, but I've seen them before, and it's amazing how much of Rome you can see in a few hours if you refuse to stand in lines. 

Along the Tiber, I rested and admired a derelict passenger ship with graffiti on its sides and bed sheets in the windows. It looked like a cruise ship for anarchist squatters; the fare would be a bag of flour and an anti-establishment artwork. The only buildings I went into were churches, a pizza a taglio place, and Tazza d'Oro, a cafe I went to many times on visits long ago and was happy to find totally unchanged. It's still madly busy, the cashier still responds in English no matter how perfectly you think you've ordered, and you still leave your receipt on the counter under a coin, drink your coffee, and are on your way in seconds.

You can no longer drop into the Pantheon on a whim, but Rome is the American Olympic basketball team of ecclesiastical architecture: the second string is still incredibly impressive. There's Sant'Andrea della Valle, an only-slightly-less-rich man's St. Peter's; Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, a stupendous renovation of the baths of Diocletian planned by Michelangelo; San Vitale's, a surviving 4th century basilica, now far below street level, which no one goes to because it doesn't look impressive and you have to go down some stairs. Skipping the baroque masterpieces also opens up real variety; if you want to get weird, Rome's churches can get weird. I didn't go this time, but consider Santo Stefano Rotondo, a round church economically dedicated to two different Stephens that has an interior covered in gruesome frescoes of martyrdoms.

Rome may be frantic, but it's also amazingly casual: people have to live among all this stuff. Some are walking their dogs in the Circus Maximus, and a woman leaning over a railing ashes her cigarette on Caesar's forum. The souvenir scene is another important part of the street life. This year, the shops are being undercut by street tables selling even worse crap for €1 per item -- "if you find cheaper crap anywhere... buy it" -- and eager buyers are rooting around in the bins of identical key chains looking for the perfect one.

On the last night, I woke up sick to my stomach (pizza a taglio? Questionable breakfast buffet items? That grocery store salmon carpaccio I knew was a mistake at the time?) and came close to skipping my flight. Instead, I took more Gravol than I've ever taken before and had a day that was not very much fun. 

Lecce

All of Puglia's train stations seem to be under construction. Otranto's is closed altogether, so the trip on to Maglie is by bus, which, confusingly, proves to be a tour-company coach with a small sign in the dash identifying it as a train replacement. There's plenty of time to explore Maglie station. Its amenities comprise some porta potties, a shrine with a half-life-sized statue of Jesus, and two benches occupied by people playing audio on their phones (I can't guarantee they'll always be there, but it seems likely). I don't know whether to include a third bench, because it's behind construction fencing, but someone is still somehow sitting on it and enjoying a video. You can leave the station, of course, but the most entertaining thing in the immediate neighbourhood is a stationery store.

I concentrated intently to try to understand an announcement and, based on what I'd gathered, got on the train to which it referred (if there had been platform displays, I would have listed them as amenities). It set off in the wrong direction. A better shrine idea would have been one to the patron saint of getting on the right train; and if there isn't one, there's probably some obscure saint who could use the work. What's St. Arwald been up to lately? Exactly. Anyway, I studied routes on my phone, watched anxiously for ticket inspectors, and got off in Poggiardo, which is remarkable for having no "attractions" whatsoever on Google Maps. I bought another ticket to Lecce and talked to a South African woman on the platform who had moved to Puglia. She assured me that the next train, though late, was indeed going to Lecce, and had some interesting things to say about the ex-pat experience here, mostly about how hard the written driving test is.

My place in Lecce was in a tiny B&B. It was up two flights of dingy stairs that smelled of cinnamon, but the room itself had 14' ceilings of girder-supported stone, a pretty, though cold, tile floor, and a little balcony, and was quiet, except for an overzealous guard dog nearby. "That passerby," it would say, "that bird, that cloud, none of them did us any harm, but can we be sure that would be true if I hadn't barked at them?" Happily, the dog was only on duty in the middle of the day, so was not much of a problem. Still, my main suggestion to the operator of the otherwise excellent B&B is to drug that dog. Wouldn't it be happier on barbiturates, anyway?

Charles V enclosed Lecce in city walls, and their route still forms a sharp border between the old and new towns. When you pass through one of their great gates you blip into a world of white limestone and curving baroque architecture, and most of the disagreeable things about modern cities can't follow; they can only fume outside waiting for you to re-emerge.

The main churches are splendid and require a ticket -- a single ticket, as they are a package deal. I think I'd rather see them competing individually on price, which would drive efficiency gains in the baroque-architecture market. One result of the charge, though, is that the churches were pleasantly empty; just a few tourists sitting in the pews, quietly determined to get their money's worth. I also paid to walk around the surviving wedge of the Roman amphitheatre, even though you can see it at least equally well from the street above. I wanted to do things properly. Also, I knew I wouldn't be going anywhere near the Colosseum when I got to Rome, so this would be my main chance to hang out in an amphitheatre and to read plaques about gladiators. 

These notes have been light on dining experiences, so I'll record that in Lecce I bought some of the oddest fake lunch meat I've ever tried. It looks like a stack of Fruit Roll-Ups and has a powerful but undefinable smell with great staying power. All the stores sell it, which is hard to understand, unless it's to people who want to frisbee slices at their enemies. In fairness, I should say that fake lunch meat is in no way a regional specialty. I'm pretty sure chocolate granola is, and that was excellent. Equally irrelevantly, it was nice to see that the miniature dachshund is still a popular dog in Lecce, and they've done a tremendous job at their breed specialty, as there were no miniature badgers to be seen anywhere.

I caught the correct train on to Rome, but lost the ticket barcode while trying to connect to the broken train WiFi (in hindsight, there were better options than keeping it open in a browser). Overall, I didn't put in a very strong performance on the trains here, though it would be untruthful to say it was any worse than average. The ticket-checker had to come back later, when I produced my ticket with a triumphant flourish. He seemed pleased and, I like to think, a little impressed.

It was a long but pleasant ride to Rome. Outside every little city was a clump of mid-rises hung with washing, and between the cities were olive groves. Many of them were being tended by farmers, which was somehow disappointing. I'd imagined that being an olive farmer was just a question of wearing a flat cap, pottering around with a stick, and hoping Carthage doesn't invade again. A number of the groves I walked past in Puglia were for sale, possibly because their current owners had thought as I did.

Otranto

I left Tricase in the rain, reached Maglie in a storm, and then caught a ride to Otranto generously offered by the man who manages the apartment I rented here. We could communicate only by auto-translation, which worked pretty well, except that Maglie apparently means "shirts" in Italian and dropped pronouns were replaced by the app at random, so I'd have to field questions like, "when does it get to jerseys?" 

Otranto's a beautiful place, and has kept a lot of its dignity despite having a Christmas store and a selfie museum. To avoid disappointment, be aware that the selfie museum doesn't display selfies, it has dumb props for the taking of selfies; it's a museum in the sense of being a temple to the muse of selfies. She doesn't appear much in classical sources, because everyone found her a bit embarrassing.

It is unmistakably a tourist town in the off-season: fairground rides, food stalls, and a target-shooting booth are shuttered or covered in canvas. The Castle of Otranto, namesake of Horace Walpole's weird gothic fairytale, is deserted, and so is the cathedral, with its medieval mosaic floor and its chapel holding the bones of people massacred by the Ottomans. Equally quiet is the tiny market on a gravel patch by the canal. A Piaggio Ape ("bee") tricycle is parked there and three old men sit on lawn chairs selling the small amount of produce you can fit in a Piaggio Ape. I like that the old men of Puglia don't do anything alone. If you have a head of lettuce to sell, you call up a couple of buddies.

Otranto has hikes for both kinds of people: those who love caves and those who love quarries.

The quarry hike

The most popular hike outside the city goes to an old bauxite quarry. It's fair to be skeptical of a hike whose chief glory is a disused quarry, but it is, in fact, an amazing route.

It runs along the coast to a medieval watchtower and climbs to a stone wall marking what a hand-painted sign announces is an agriturismo operation; a good place to advertise, except that the wall encloses an uninviting field of rocks and thorns. "Welcome! Your project will be to clear this field and use the rocks to build a pajara. And put something interesting in it for hikers. Drug lab, leopard den, kiosk, be creative."

Back down on the coast is a cluster of barrel-vaulted WWII bunkers you can wriggle awkwardly down into and a man fishing in a hidden cove. The coast here is bare eroded limestone, all pits and sharp ridges, like a coral reef or a hostile alien world with good fishing. I have always felt that two dumb similes are just as good as one good one.

Along the beach that comes next, some industrious beachcomber has built a lean-to of pallets and driftwood. Could beachcombing be the retirement hobby I'll need? No, modernity has ruined it. The internet says that serious beachcombers now track storms and study tide schedules; they'd always be combing out the good stuff ahead of you and then squealing off in black SUVs like the bad guy in Twister.

The trail was almost empty early on, and absolutely empty farther up the coast. The last person I passed was a shirtless man with an enormous pot belly, with whom I exchanged grave buongiornos. It was heartening to learn I was not, after all, the worst-dressed man in Italy. Later, I even took a page from his book -- Bare-Bellied In Puglia: A Failed Social Experiment, obtainable at any struggling bookstore at a steep discount -- and took off my shirt. A few minutes later, reflecting that one page was enough, I put it back on.

At the end of the beach, a row of skeletal limestone fingers tickle the sea, and then the trail runs along a steep slope for the long and tricky walk to the lighthouse. It becomes narrow and rugged and picks up the habit of disappearing among the rocks and then turning up later on, which is just starting to get tiresome when you approach the promontory. Just before the lighthouse is a low stone wall enclosing a shallow cliff in the hillside. If you eagerly explore it for archaeological wonders, you discover a grill and a bag of charcoal. "No doubt part of the Grillin' Horizon so well-attested in this region," you muse pompously.

The lighthouse seemed a likely tourist spot. I had a vision of a crowd of sightseers and maybe someone selling coffee from an espresso machine mounted on a Piaggio Ape -- it was a detailed vision -- but there was no one there at all. A sign in front of the lighthouse promises an ecological museum inside, but the lighthouse is locked and shuttered. From here, long gravel ramps switchback up to a road and a military base. Along the way, signs tell you about the history and wildlife of the area. One suggests that you might see sperm whales, or, at the right time of year, swordfish pursuing tuna. I saw a cargo ship and a seagull.

The way back up to Otranto along the inland path is a dawdle, and the quarry itself, notionally the star turn, is really just sort of interesting. It's surrounded by striking mounds of red earth, presumably bauxite, and the water is a milky green. 

The legality of access to the quarry is a bit ambiguous. Parts of the surrounding high ground are wired off, and to get out (having, admittedly, probably taken the wrong route), I have to duck under a locked gate hung with forbidding signs -- whether to avoid liability problems from the kinds of idiots who fall into quarries or to discourage bauxite claim-jumpers, I'm not sure. All I know is that I'll be flying home with what I assume is a fortune in bauxite.

The cave hike

Otranto and its hinterland are riddled with artificial caves (known here as hypogea) dug for storage, as graves, or to make olive oil in (advantages: temperature control, security, owning a sweet cave). My apartment complex has a glassed-in set of 17th century storage pits in the parking garage, and it celebrates them in its name and in framed pictures in the apartment. And yet, I didn't book it because of my love of storage pits; that's pure coincidence. If you're not satisfied with the ones in the parking garage of your building or those dug, somewhat unsettlingly, into the sides of the ridge on which it stands, you can hike inland to see hundreds more.

In the middle of Otranto is a stone-walled canal full of reeds and slime. Branching off the canal are hiking routes that quickly multiply into a confusing web of paved roads, farm tracks, and dirt trails running above and along the low cliffs that house the grotti. Maps also mark a number of pioggi (wells), but searching for hidden wells seems both unhealthy and unnecessary, as I was likely to fall into one, anyway.

The GPS track I downloaded turned out to be by a grotto completionist, so I picked and chose, but there were no bad choices. Olive groves covered in white wildflowers, sunken ruins overgrown with bougainvillea, farmers on tractors stoutly resisting the urge to run me down, pine forests, stone walls, a dovecote tower, a mountain biker who gives an encouraging fist pump as he passes ("yeah, bro, get after it! Find those grotti!"), a Piaggio Ape that goes by with a cheery honk and a wave, bowers of drooping cane, and tattered clothing spread on trees. In one place there's a drying rack on the trail, as well. If you live in Otranto and left your washing out during a storm, I found it.

I did laundry myself on my last afternoon here, and, braving the displeasure of people who want to read about other people doing laundry, will say only that there are shades of frustration unknown to anyone who has never tried to use a washing machine in a foreign country.

Tricase

There's a transfer in Lecce to a slow rural train that halts at listless, sunstroked little towns where no one boards and no one gets off. The platform at Tricase had no sign, but the conductor was leaning out of the car, watching for people like me, and he agreed when I suggested this might be Tricase. I stopped at the grocery store by the station and was a smash hit with the proprietor, who wrung my hand and insisted on knowing how tall I was and whether I was from Germany. I get these questions a lot. I won't reveal the answers here, because I'd seem less mysterious.

Getting me into the cottage I rented here took a whole family. The father, tearing up on a scooter, found me squinting at house numbers in the wrong alley, and joined the mother and two children in giving the tour. It's a "lamia", with a sunken floor, a star-vaulted bedroom, and windows 10' off the ground hung with cords with which to swing the shutters futilely back and forth. 

Part of the appeal of Tricase is that the Via Francigena pilgrimage route runs through here. It's a modern reconstruction of an itinerary from Canterbury to Rome, with this southern extension catering to pilgrims who wanted (while this was possible) to go on to Jerusalem. It's not popular. I walked the part to Marittima, and the only other walker was a man in a black tracksuit who turned off to Tricase Porto, and I'm not sure he was a pilgrim. If he was, he was treading water, spiritually speaking, because he was frittering away whatever eschatological advantages he was gaining from the pilgrimage. The tracksuit alone has to be worth a couple of years in purgatory, and playing audio from his phone was worse.

The Via runs along haphazard smallholdings of every shape but rectangular; the historical poverty of Puglia is easier to understand when you think of people trying to wrest a living from these little trapezoids of stony ground. The best option was to grow olives, and it apparently still is. Patches planted at different times show the various life stages of the trees, which start out proudly upright and develop into leafless, tortured-looking things (but don't be fooled, they love it here). Most fields also hold a curious dry-stone building like a truncated cone or pyramid; these are pajare, once used for storage or as temporary homes for farmers.

The prime stretch runs on red dirt through a national park and takes in a clifftop tower covered in scaffolding and a grotto. You can clamber down to the grotto, but I advise against it. The way down is thick with spiny weeds, the footing is bad, and the grotto is a dent filled with thorns. There's also a very nice pajara on the path, though, and it's important to go into one, because otherwise you'll never be able to shake the nagging suspicion that there's something interesting inside them.

Marittima was a attractive little town, but everything was closed. Nothing happens in the afternoon in Puglia. The day has seasons, and spring is at 4:30PM. Then, clothing stores and hair stylists raise their shutters; people come out, bundled up warmly against the room-temperature weather, to shop for clothes and get their hair done; lights come on; argumentative old men crowd onto benches in the piazzas and begin passionate discussions; butterflies emerge from their chrysalises, flowers bloom, flocks of colourful migratory birds return and sing songs of hope and promise, and so on. Then, at 1 PM the next day, everything slams shut again.

A section to delight lovers of long stories about public transit

Things in Puglia tend to turn into minor adventures, whether you want them to or not. Public transit is a good example. There's a lot to be said about the bus system here, but it's the sort of thing you really want to bang out on a typewriter and make bad photocopies of or turn into a 17th century-style pamphlet with nasty woodcuts. Essentially, knowledge of bus routes and stops and payments is a secret wisdom inaccessible to outsiders.

To get back from Marittima, I had a Trenitalia bus ticket, but Trenitalia wasn't telling where the stop was, and Google Maps thought it knew, but was, I gradually realized, wrong. It's a bit of a jar to find Google Maps fallible here; it also believed a weed-choked ditch in Tricase to be a public footpath. Missing the Trenitalia bus meant catching a local one, but how to buy a ticket? You can usually get them at tobacconists -- and note the opportunity to stamp out at once the two great evils of smoking and the Puglian bus ticketing system -- but Marittima's was, naturally, closed. The collective that runs the buses, COTRAP, has a web site, but it is pure evil. COTRAP also has an app, which orders methamphetamine precursors to your home address and then sets your battery on fire. 

The only option was to try to buy one from the driver. The internet can't agree on whether this is possible or not, but, in fact, that saintly gentleman not only waited for me to run over from where the signed stop was to where it actually was, he waved my cash and card away and gave me a ride for free. He's my best friend in Puglia.

On gorges and cod

On my last day, I went down to Gagliano to hike a gorge. There was absolutely no one else on the train. "Gagliano?" snapped the conductor, checking my ticket efficiently like he saw passengers all the time. Is it demoralizing running this ghost train back and forth? Is it a backwater assignment where you serve time waiting for a break on the main lines, or where you're sent for bungling something important, like a detective getting traffic duty?

The Ciolo gorge is a quality gorge. It's spanned by a locally-famous bridge, it has striking limestone cliffs on both sides, and its slopes hold enough pajare and dry-stone walls to satisfy anyone. The southern cliff is in the sun and is streaked with rusty orange, while the northern one is stained with black and dotted with shade-casting overhangs like the eyes and mouths of a row of ghoulish faces. It's market day in the town itself. Outside the supermarket are rows of canvas canopies shading stalls selling produce, meat, clothes, and fish. Huge salt cod lie in baskets and flies circle them, intrigued. I would have liked to buy a salt cod. I've always sort of wanted to hit someone with one. At one time, you could have built a whole Vaudeville career on an idea like that. Or leave one in the kitchen at work with a "help yourself" note.

Bari

There was a carnival atmosphere downtown, with thousands turning out to see me off, for game 7 of the World Series, or both. The flight was full, mostly of sick babies, except for two empty seats beside me in the exit row. Other passengers eyed these seats covetously, asked attendants about them, and trembled their hands at their seatbelt buckles like gunfighters, and then we took off and a woman just ambled up and dropped into one of them without asking the crew or completing any of the application forms I'd prepared.

I don't know why so many sick babies were going to Rome. It's probably our fault for following sick baby influencers, though I'm the first to admit that some of their content is pretty great. Sick baby at the Spanish steps, sick baby crawling the Via Appia, sick baby under the dome of St. Peter's -- those acoustics!

I took the train straight on to Bari, with the idea that napping on a train would be better than hanging around Rome until check-in time. That worked well, though I accidentally booked a seat in a facing pair across from a man with a soul patch who constantly ate clementines. This isn't really something to worry about. Soul patch clementine guy is quiet, stays on his side, and has a personal style that demands respect. Unrelatedly, I think I might grow sideburns and start eating a lot of pears.

The drawback is that you get to Bari tired and stumble through strange, dark streets like a gutshot character in a film noir. In the square outside my large, purple apartment, local kids were riding push scooters tricked out with LEDs and throwing "snaps", which make a tiny explosion and a sound like a gunshot and are traditionally used to celebrate city festivals and random Sunday evenings in November. The snap-throwing felt like it might happen daily, but the next night there was instead a group of men smoking and yelling outside a store. There might be a rota. I don't know what the kids do on Mondays, probably start fires.

The key landmark was an inactive Ferris wheel on the promenade by the sea. If you turn right from here, you strike an eerily lifeless row of public buildings from the 1920s and 1930s, while to the left lies the old harbour and the old city. Tiny fishing boats are tied up in rows and there's a wooden shade structure, marked on maps as a fishermen's market, where three or four men stand proudly over tiny plastic tubs in a "behold the bounty of the sea" sort of way.

The old city is a twisty town of alleys where compass needles spin randomly, homes stand open behind doorway curtains, laundry dries on balconies, voices float up from restaurants in bare cellars, and hands holding cigarettes poke from dark rooms through iron gratings into the street. A cruise ship docks and disgorges tour groups that straggle after the raised umbrellas of guides like soldiers after their banners, seeking loot in the form of fridge magnets and bags of orecchiete.

The church and the basilica are both 12th century or so, whiter and more austere than the cathedrals of northern Europe. Under the cathedral is a crypt with a glass-fronted casket piled high with gruesome relics from a variety of saints. Under the crypt lie the remains of an earlier church, some mosaics, and a bit of a Roman road, and that's as deep as they've cared to dig so far. You can't sink a fencepost here without striking a lot of fascinating history and having to install a bunch of glass floors and metal staircases.

In the early morning there's booming and hammering, as though preparing Bari for another day means firing up some infernal machine from the age of steam. You could draw the curtains and spend a day just listening to the sounds, then be surprised to find no revolutionary barricades or exploded boilers. But the liveliness of this piazza gives the wrong impression; Bari is peaceful, except for the traffic, and the people relaxed and friendly, when not driving.

The third night decided which of the previous two was the anomaly. It was the quieter one. The kids don't just stand in circles and throw snaps, they also have either a band or a very loud stereo and then someone sets off fireworks that seem to explode just outside the window. Not haphazardly, it's a beautiful show (was it a city event?). You can't even stay annoyed, because a mist of nostalgia descends and you remember what it was to be young and Italian and in love with fire.

Reading and the Thames Path

The historic centre of Reading, which I'm pretty sure is where I was, has a lot of graceful gothic revival buildings and a shopping arcade that's a refuge for oddball stores -- toy railroads, comic books, antiques and old junk -- that wouldn't survive the retail-chain jungle outside. The cute but confusing practice of naming businesses after those that first occupied the buildings is popular here. The "Corn Store" is a steakhouse, and there are many others. "Can I get a quick haircut?" / "Sorry, this is an asbestos remediation business."

Reading is light on major attractions; its one big draw is the ruined Reading Abbey, a massive 12th century affair of which the cores of most walls and a few other bits and pieces survive. It is famous for the gruesome execution of its last abbot by Henry VIII -- for heroically refusing to surrender the abbey during the dissolution of the monasteries (according to the abbey placards) or for unrelated charges of high treason (according to everyone else). Its monks also preserved an early English song, Sumer Is Icumin In, containing one of the earliest, albeit disputed, English references to goat flatulence. A 13th-century round about summer being good, it is every bit the equal of other Middle English party anthems like Mirie It Is While Sumer Ilast, God, Ich Hate Wintere, and What Fedest Thou This Goat?  

My room was above a pub and was as close to ideally located as it's possible to be while still being in Reading. The pub was noisy but hospitable. To extend the traditional Reading welcome of lukewarm Mexican beer, there was a single bottle of Corona standing on a table, and each day they left a 'breakfast bag' containing food I didn't want. These kept piling up. I could have taken a bath in the instant oatmeal, but there was only a shower. And the apples. I ate two -- I'm not a monster -- but what of the other four? Do I hand them out on the street? Teach myself to juggle? Wait for two more and carve apple portraits of the wives of Henry VIII? 

Up the street is the Reading Museum, which holds a 19th-century reproduction of the Bayeux tapestry, exact in every detail except for the pants primly provided to a naked gentleman, 2000 years of odds and ends, a collection of biscuit tins, and a taxidermied badger wearing a shirt asking people not to pet it. I don't often get political, but people need to stop petting stuffed badgers. They're delicate, and they're being ruined by your selfish insistence on touching them. It's nothing to do with me, I don't pet badgers.

Apart from being close to Heathrow and cheaper than London, Reading's other attraction is that it's on the Thames Path. Close to the city, there are multitudes of geese, swans, and ducks, whose down and feathers litter the adjoining green fields. Swans paddle up eagerly when a child pauses by the water but go away hungry, twitching their rumps in frustration. Swans' noble appearance really handicaps their begging. They want you to know that their beauty and grace don't mean they have any dignity. They are happy to do degrading tricks for french fries.

Interesting boats are moored along the river. There's a stubby green one with solar panels and a military-surplus look, like someone's post-apocalypse plan is to run canal tours of the Cotswolds -- everything will be valueless except ammo, canned food, and scenic boat tours -- and one that has sunk. It clearly sank some time ago, but disposing of it is probably an expensive job, and the owner, judging by their boat, may not be prospering. My suggestion, which I offer freely to the local authorities, is to put up a sign saying that it's an important habitat for riparian wildlife. And why shouldn't it be of historical interest? "Went down with no hands in the moderate breeze of February 11, 2018, which caused £18 of damage and annoyed several people in the greater Reading area."

Moving west, there are several rowing clubs, and scullers are going through their paces with coaches barking at them from little motorized coaching-boats running alongside. In a green space to the south, an inflatable theme park is taking shape behind trucks painted with "Inflatable Theme Park" and "In Town Now" -- self-evident, maybe, but the excitement is understandable. Would it be weird for an adult to go to an inflatable theme park by themselves? What if they really wanted to?

In the next open space, a toddler has begun to feed the birds, which converge in amazing numbers, swimming up to the bank and marching in columns across the pavement. The real reason for the 'no feeding' signs is surely that it allows anyone to muster a waterfowl army capable of terrorizing a city. This particular little girl has no supervillainous ambitions, but that's just luck.

The path, which is paved near the city, becomes a dirt track, and is pleasant enough, except for the caches of empty beer cans and some of the moored boats. A couple of these are owned by a species of nautical hoarder I didn't know existed. In general, the canal boats are not the charming type tourists photograph in quaint settings. If they were land vehicles, they'd be up on blocks. If you have a boat you don't want, you apparently moor it here late at night and sneak off. The riverbed on this stretch is probably clasping dozens in its mucky embrace.

The trail now crosses the train tracks that run parallel to the river and, for unclear reasons, takes a long detour through a suburb. It picks up again at a village commons repurposed as a playground but still feeling like a farmer's field, and then enters a pasture of shaggy horses, some free-roaming and some in separate electric-fence paddocks. A notice on the gate I exit by explains that there's been an outbreak of the strangles, which is apparently a horse disease. Having looked into it, it's less fun than the name makes it sound.

 

When the river reappears, it's running through a lock and weir. Nearby is this stretch of trail's main sight: the Mapledurham house, an Elizabethan mansion with a watermill that was featured on a Black Sabbath album cover -- surely a source of fierce pride to the inhabitants. Whether you're into Ozzy, 16th century English architecture, or both, the Mapledurham house has something for everyone. My first plan was to await a social invitation to a country-house weekend, at which my manners and neatly-combed hair (I recently purchased a comb) would have made me a great success. When no invitation arrived, possibly due to a postal error, I thought of stopping by from the path. In fact, though, there is no way across the river for miles in either direction, so I got only a distant glimpse of the house. But I did get exposed to the strangles. We always seem to be compensated for life's disappointments.

 

The final stretch to Pangbourne runs through vast and peaceful English meadows, where raptors circle in a gloomy sky and it's easy to imagine Jerome K. Jerome boating alongside with a couple of friends and a dog. Pangbourne has the look of an attractive and wealthy village, but it's the train station and its promise of a quick return to Reading that interests me most.