Gagner une semaine en Toscane!
Fermé
To Be a Pilgrim
'But I am a pilgrim,' Giuseppe said as he stopped to give directions to a group of backpackers following the route of the pilgrim.
As our trip toTuscany was now nearing its end, we were returning from seeing the sights of Volterra with Giuseppe as our guide. We had met him on the second day of our holiday when Sue, our representative, had booked us on a tour of a vineyard.
'Giuseppe, our guide, is an amateur archaeologist,' Sue explained. 'He will tell us all about the wine and olive oil production in the area. And we will see a truffle hound in action, too.'
We told us Sue that as an archaeology student our younger daughter would be interested in learning more about the archaeological past of the area.
'I will talk to Giuseppe, I am sure he'll take you to the archaeological dig that he visits,' said Sue.
Yeah right, we thought rather cynically, she's just saying this to impress us.
But here were were, five days later, returning from an action packed trip with Giuseppe who had taken us on a tour of the local churches during which he had given us as much of the histrory of each one as his English and our rather limited Italian enabled us to take in. More importantly, however, he took us on to the site of the excavation. There the archaeologist in charge, assisted by a colleague who spoke excellent English, explained about the dig and answered our daughter's questions.
'We have just discovered some human bones in this burial site,' the archaeologist explained and on hearing that our daughter was particularly interested in human ostoeology, she took her to the skeleton and asked her views about how old the person would have been. After a lively conversation that involved several of the archaeologists, a consensus was reached. Our visit to the site ended with an invitation for our daughter to join the team the following summer.
'That was the best day of the holiday,' she said. 'Thank you Giuseppe for arranging it.'
'My pleasure,' Giuseppe said as we headed back to our village. 'I am here to give directions to my fellow pilgrims like you or the young people by the roadside. '
