It’s March and everything seems distant. Canterbury seems distant. Rome certainly seems distant.
The latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of St Peter’s Basilica are: 41.9022° N, 12.4539° E. That doesn’t help at all.
Perspective must be the answer.
I decided to buy a map. It’s a big fold out road map. I decided to draw the route on the map.
Only about a third of the stopping places were marked on this map: the rest of them were in towns too small to be acknowledged.
It took me a concerningly long time to ink this black line. The scale is 1: 2,500,000.
Maps are also flat so I drew some alps on it to remind me that I’d be crossing some alps.
My next map is quite a bit older. It’s a fairly typical early-ish medieval map of the world. It is found in British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius B V; the same manuscript that contain’s Sigeric’s itinerary. The British Isles are on their side in the lower left hand corner. It’s likely to have been based on an earlier Roman map and is the earliest known depiction of the British Isles.
Note the turquoise rivers in the Northern hemisphere and red rivers in the southern hemisphere. It was a widely held belief that the lower portion of the earth was uninhabitable due to extreme heat. The rivers obviously ran with lava. To understand that things start getting cooler after you go south from the equator you either need personal experience or an understanding of advanced astronomy.
In the image below I’ve zoomed in on the bottom corner of the map so you can see ‘Lundon’, ‘Brittania’, and ‘Roma’. Intriguingly, the towns directly below Rome on this map, ‘Luca’ (now spelt Lucca) and ‘Luna’ (now Luni), are both stops on the Francigena.
This map can never have been intended for navigational purposes. Nonetheless, it was clearly a work of considerable effort and knowledge. An effort made to understand one’s place in a geographical vastness.
My last map is the map I use most often. I can barely remember the world before Google.
This route is by no means a perfect mapping onto the traditional Francigena route. I tried to drag the blue line to make it more closely reflect where I’ll be walking but it wouldn’t let me go through the Great St Bernard Pass. I think this is because it’s currently frozen and the road is closed.
I like the yellow warning icons: ‘Use caution – walking directions may not always reflect real-world conditions.’