Beyond Genoa
Running on an Etruscan track
This is a story about three days I spent running in a village to the west of Genoa, in Italy. I don’t remember the name of it; I was told to go there by a New York roommate I had, who was from Milan. She told me it was one of the most beautiful places in Italy, but that only Italians went to it. So I went, alone, to get away from Milan, where I was staying.
Hope you enjoy the story, but whatever you do today, go run.
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Beyond Genoa
The track cut into a mountainside above a chain of pearl-pink villages beside a Mediterranean as clear and blue as in the dreams of every Odysseus who ever dreamt of home became the world to me as it had been to thousands of others for thousands of years. For three days and for the twenty years since it has been as real to me as the freckles on my now-aging hand. As undimmed and brilliant as my own dreams remain.
The track is 2000 years old, at least. Romans had trod it; Etruscans too, probably, given its location. I shouldn’t have been on it but I had taken the privilege of the runner and followed an old concrete staircase that led to a path that led to a trail that was barely there up a mountainside between goat pens and past cottages. I emerged into the light of an open track 2 meters wide whose neat, time-worn surface stretched to the left and right of me. The mountainside continued up, a sheer cliff, in front of me while crevasses and tree tops fell away behind me. I turned left.
In three days of running that track I only ever went a few kilometers for fear of losing my way, forgetting what the entrance to the trail that was barely there looked like, passing it by, and not being able to find my way back down without bush-wacking and trespassing.
On the first day of running that track I met no one at all.
On the second day, I met a little old woman on my way out. Scarf around her head, she looked surprised and then cracked a huge smile as my out-of-place, far-too-young face approached her in running silks and bright shoes. On the way back, I met a little old man. He walked slowly, with his hands behind his back. He, too, looked surprised, but, grumpy, he looked away.
On the third day, it misted rain down on the mountainside. I had come up early to run before catching my train. The rain obscured the sea and the track seemed to be its own world, levitating above its rock resting place. I had already turned around at my halfway mark when I overtook an ancient corgi, his face and flanks white with age. My running sparked an ancestral impulse and he, too began to run, stiff on short legs that had long forgotten how. His tongue lolled out as we paced each other and he looked up at me with joy in bright, dark eyes, his ears perked for approval. I watched as his round little haunches rolled stiffly over and over.
Vai! Vai! [Go! Go!] I said to him encouragingly as we rounded a bend.
There in front of us, a little old man with a cap and cane turned to see who approached him. His face split into a wide grin as he saw us trotting. His old friend, returned to former glory, and a strange young figure in blazing colors against the rain-muted cloud bank.
“Vai! Vai!” he called to me as I passed, waving me on in encouragement as his corgi hop-skipped to a walk beside him.
The cloud bank swallowed them from my sight as I disappeared from theirs. I found the trail entrance, familiar by now. I slipped and slid down the muddy hillside to the slippery concrete stairs between the goats in their pens and the silent cottages. I returned dripping to my clean, plain, scrubbed hotel room. I changed my clothes and so changed myself from an out-of-time figure in too-bright clothes back into just another traveler in jeans, with a backpack. I gathered my things, mopped up the wet from my dripping, and caught my train.
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Loved your essay.
Yesterday I woke late, heavy with fatigue, but still rose. Later I ran two hours: jungle, woods, quiet streets. The silence was strange, almost comic, yet it carried me. Thoughts wandered, pointless but alive, like small reminders that existence itself is enough.
I felt how your Stoic running shaped you: discipline without grand reward, peace in the act itself. Keep writing your journals, they remind us that even lateness, even exhaustion, even the endless road, can be a kind of kindness we give ourselves.
I love how a daily discipline can take to unusual and history rich places. thank you for sharing!