Page 15 - Living Italy Issue 5a

pencil-straight cypress trees lead to inviting villas with views to picture-perfect hill towns of medieval and Renaissance splendour... Visiting Tuscany on foot is akin to making a voyage through time”
BOOK 3
Brian Mooney
Thorogood Publishing Ltd £14.99
Brian Mooney did not need much prompting to take up the journey again in the opposite direction two years later in 2012, this time from Rome to his hometown in Coggeshall, as he himself admitted in the Foreword: “I savoured the moment: all those long, parched days; the hill climbs; the country roads; way- marked tracks and canal towpaths; all the diverse human habitations from hamlets to metropolis; the churches and cathedrals; all the people I had encountered – I had en- joyed it all so much that I would have done it again”
However, he was also prompted by a friend: “In the Middles Ages...pilgrims walked home They didn’t have the luxury of Ryanair” So Mooney ew to Rome On landing in Rome
to start his journey on foot in the peak of the summer He admitted it was “Un pò pazzo”, to which an Italian cab driver replied “Al con- trario, è molto avventuroso” Those readers who followed the author along his rst walk in A Long Way for a Pizza will enjoy travel- ling with him again. As in his rst book, it is absorbing and light hearted
Georgina Jinks
Living Italy Past & Present 15