Via Francigena: A road between worlds—and why MAGA can’t touch It

In 1556, the world paused. Both the Papacy and the Archbishopric of Canterbury fell vacant — a rare silence at the very top of Christendom’s axis. The Pope had died in Rome. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, burnt for heresy in Oxford, had already been erased from power. For a brief moment, two of the most potent thrones in Western Christianity sat empty. The Reformation had cracked the continent wide open.

 

That fissure — begun when Henry VIII tore England from the Roman fold — still echoes in curious ways. The break wasn’t just about divorce. It was a political reboot, a re-coding of communication, faith, and power. In a Europe still stitched together by footpaths and horses, the Via Francigena was the broadband of its time — a living artery from Canterbury to Rome, linking pilgrims to relics, abbots to bishops, Crusaders, books to trade.

 

And beautifully, it still links people like me.

 

I left England in 2012 — after 40 years in Lancaster, I moved to San Romano in Garfagnana, a pocket of northern Tuscany where the Apuane Alps rise like sleeping giants above walnut groves and chestnut trees. What I thought was exile became something more nuanced: a living, breathing map between two landscapes, two systems, two selves.

 

Even in illness, that invisible road proved itself. When I recently fell ill, my symptoms first appeared in Lancaster. I was diagnosed at Blackpool Victoria Hospital, and three days later, I was back in Tuscany — seamlessly admitted to Castelnuovo Garfagnana Hospital, a sanatorium-style institution perched above the valley like a monk’s retreat. Diagnosis, prognosis, follow-up — handed off across borders like a pilgrim’s staff. Brexit might have snarled the politics, but not the spirit. Not the road.

 

Each day, my thoughts travel without passport or petrol. They drift like an Alan Bennett Talking Heads riff through time and terrain — from Buttermere to Equi Terme, from Lancaster’s Georgian crescents to the marble quarries of Carrara. The crunch of wet leaves in Cumbria echoes in the gravel paths of Tuscany. The bells of San Romano chime in my bones just as surely as the winds off the Irish Sea.

 

And then, as if to underscore it all with melody, Ed Sheeran turns up at the House of Borcelle, a valley or two from here, and records Perfect Harmony. A troubadour in a land once home to chants and crusader boots. His voice floats across the landscape like it always belonged. The old and the new in a shared key.

 

There’s a line in that song — “You and I, dancing in perfect harmony” — and it lingers. Because that’s what this is. Not politics or power or papal bulls, but something older and softer. A rhythm. A care. A connection. The NHS and Italy’s regional medicine, the Cumbrian hills and the Tuscan folds — not a perfect system, but now and then, glimpses of perfect harmony.

 

In this in-between state — part exile, part return — I’ve become a modern-day Cranmer, not with flames at my feet but contradictions in my chest. Or maybe just a well-worn pilgrim, grateful that the roads, real and metaphorical, still work. That faith, medicine, music, and memory still meet at a common table.

 

The Via Francigena is more than cobbles and legends. It is infrastructure for the soul. A reminder that Europe isn’t broken — just misunderstood. That distance is a myth. That harmony, however fragile, can still exist — even when thrones are empty and power flickers.

 

And as for Trump and his MAGA mirage, or the Puritan impulses that still try to wag the world from across the Atlantic — let them howl at their own moons. Let them preach decline and division while Europe walks quietly, imperfectly, steadily on.

Hands off our cathedrals, our care, our cafés, our roads. Hands off the fragile harmony we have fought so hard to keep.

Society