By Nat Yorski
What I learned about blisters, boxed wine, and the kindness of strangers on the Via Francigena.
The nun arrived in sandals with a fistful of keys and no questions. She opened the convent door; I stopped pretending I wasn’t crying. The room was bare, the mattress thin, and it felt like luxury. I slept because a stranger with keys decided I could.
I didn’t go to Tuscany looking for revelations about hospitality. Honestly, I went because my mom asked me to. I wanted to see who she is when she’s not “Mom.” Not the woman checking twelve kids’ calendars, not the psychotherapist holding a hospital together. Just a person in a different country, moving through a world she’s made for herself. We haven’t had uninterrupted time like that since I was a kid. Maybe saying yes was my way of stepping into her light to see what it looks like when she’s walking in it.
I’m not a hiker. Left to my own devices, I’m happiest propped at a bar, glass sweating in my hand, something salty and fried within reach. My mother is an avid walker. Every year she laces up and disappears onto a pilgrimage trail, gathering with friends she first met on the Camino de Santiago. They’re scattered across Norway, the UK, and South Korea, yet somehow orbit back to each other. This time it was the Via Francigena.
And who says no to Tuscany? Even if you’re out of shape. Even if your career is basically eating and drinking. You say yes. The wine. The food. The hills are painted to sell the idea of romance to people who already want it.
People keep asking the difference between a pilgrimage and a hike. It’s not spiritual vs. secular. In short: infrastructure. Hiking is tents, stoves, and dehydrated meals eaten cross-legged in the dirt. Pilgrimages are built for continuity. Inns, convents, hostels, the odd volunteer-run way station all designed around the belief that at the end of a blistered day, someone will open a door and take you in. That’s where hospitality lives.
We began in Lucca, drunk on romance before the first step. Dinner in the piazza: long tables spilling onto cobblestones, spritzes glowing orange in twilight, pasta heaped indecently high, pizzas thrown down hot from the oven, prosciutto sliced so thin it dissolved like a secret. Local pecorino with honey; wild boar tortellini lacquered in ragù. Children zigzagged between chairs. Teenagers negotiated first dates. Everyone talked at once. No one hurried. I thought: yes. That’s the Italy I came for.
Morning stripped it away. Thirty-degree heat pressed down like a fist. My pack carved canyons into my shoulders. Dust climbed my calves and stayed there. By noon my feet were raw. When we reached our stop for the night: no room. Seven more kilometers tacked onto twenty already behind us. My mother – steady, patient, unflappable – strode ahead like the road owed her interest. I trailed behind, bargaining with a god I only remember when I’m desperate. In the next village, a woman with no English opened Google Translate and called a nun. Sandals, plain dress, a ring of keys in a practical hand; click, the door opened. I folded onto a thin mattress in a bare room and slept without dreams. That first night set the tone: the road would be brutal. People would make it possible.
Halfway up a hay-bright climb we met two of my mom’s Camino companions: Indon and Trevor. Pride almost kept me invisible. I hadn’t trained; I was ashamed of how out of shape I was and wanted to slip past her friends unnoticed. Instead, Indon rummaged in his pack and pressed a walking stick into my hand, then a cooling towel, then bandages. No judgment, just inventory, laid into my palms like personal items that I’d dropped or forgotten. “Pharmacy Indon” became the running joke, but nothing about his help felt like a bit. He’s sentimental, curious, the kind of man who will suddenly start singing “Take Me Home, Country Roads” with a smile that tells you he knows exactly what he’s doing. He’d made handkerchiefs for his original Camino family, printed with last year’s photos. A talisman, proof, a small square of belonging. He adores my brother, Steven, who wasn’t walking with us this time, but his name hovered over so many meals it felt like he was only ever five minutes behind.
Trevor arrived with nurse eyes and vineyard hands is a retired Brit who can’t not take care of people. He has a bottomless arsenal of small medical mercies and slang that needs subtitles. That first night he hauled groceries up a punishing hill with zucchini, peppers, and a whole chicken on his back. He managed to turn a bleach-smelling hostel kitchen into a Sunday roast: chicken skin snapping, vegetables blistered. We drank boxed Chianti from plastic cups and it tasted like victory. Afterward he FaceTimed his wife, and the way his voice softened told me exactly who he is when he isn’t with us. Completely, obviously in love.
Trailing us like a shadow was Indon’s lifelong friend, English limited, gaze steady. He didn’t laugh much at first. He kept twenty feet between us most days, camera up, witness and guard. When I lagged, which was often, he lagged with me, just behind, taking pictures of cypress and sky. Near the end I realized it was his way of protecting me. It’s funny what we can’t see when we’re inside it.
Day three almost broke me clean in half. Cypress stood at attention along hot ridgelines, vineyards shimmered like a dare, and the sun had no interest in mercy. My water dwindled. My skin hissed. Panic set up shop in my chest. I leaned against a tree and tried to bargain with the shame: don’t be the person who dies on day three. My mom came back down the path, eyes kind, voice steady, and said something well-meaning about pushing through to see who I am in the struggle. It made me furious. “I know who I am in a struggle,” I snapped. “This isn’t a vacation; it’s a reminder of how out of shape I am. This is your fun, not mine.” Not my best moment. She took it. She called me a cab. Love, the practical edition.
That night we found ourselves at a table in a square that could’ve been Lucca’s cousin with pizza, pasta, antipasti, and laughter humming off stone. A heartbroken Frenchman sat down and poured out his story. I ordered amaro for the table, the bitter, herbal medicine that tastes like bark and orange peel and decisions you’re not sure about yet. Trevor grimaced, then leaned in. By the end of the trip, amaro became our period at the end of every sentence. I ate cacio e pepe–stuffed tortellini with pistachio, and we ate off each other’s plates the way families do when they forget they haven’t always been one.
Food set our rhythm. Mornings were coffee and cornetti eaten in motion, sugar dust stuck to our fingers. We tore into warm apricots along the road. Gelato became my salvation – stracciatella, Sicilian lemon, ricotta-blueberry, even vin santo. Sandwiches were interventions: porchetta sliced thin, Iberico Maldonado because sometimes you need a little luxury, roasted zucchini tucked into focaccia with mozzarella and prosciutto.
Siena fed me a first: a European kebab on a street corner, grease leaping onto my hands. Perfectly wrong and exactly right. We split pizzas loaded with wild mushrooms and sausage, gorgonzola melting into mozzarella, arugula collapsing over burrata. I ate rabbit-and-sausage terrine, a liver praline with hazelnuts, and a blueberry-porcini risotto that still haunts me. Beer-braised sheep with apricot chutney. Enough local red to sand down the day’s edges.
Somewhere between courses, Anna, my mom’s blunt, free-spirited Norwegian friend, burst in, laughter first, stories close behind. She announced that Astrid, another Camino alum she’d convinced to fly down last-minute, was on her way. Nobody knew where exactly, so the group fanned out through the streets of Siena in a half-drunken scavenger hunt, Anna clutching a balloon meant to welcome her. But convent rules don’t bend, and by ten o’clock the massive wooden doors swung shut. The balloon bobbed in the lamplight as we left Anna on the Duomo steps, waiting.
At a volunteer-run hostel, dinner came from what others left behind: stewed lentils, mixed pasta, bread, thin wine. Long tables draped in blue checks. Austria, Ireland, Italy at our elbows. It was humble, uneven, and perfect. Not linen or lists. A door propped open and room for one more plate. Here, volunteers stirred what they had and said, sit. It reminded me: hospitality isn’t polish; it’s making room. And it isn’t only things you can hold. It’s trust. People gave what they had, even when what they had was limited.
When the heat bullied us again, our group split. The Norwegians pushed a day ahead. Indon and his quiet friend kept walking, stubborn in their rhythm. My mom, Trevor, and I veered off the trail entirely and landed on the Adriatic coast. Trevor found us an apartment in Pescara, and my ego had to take several seats. I like to be the person who cooks, who curates, who decides where and what we eat. It’s my job and my love language. In Pescara I let Trevor take the wheel. Sea air as therapy. Guinness off the beach. Cans of local beer and bags of pizza-flavoured puffballs in the sand. We cooked prawn salad and mussels, then staged a Korean cook-off in the Airbnb kitchen.
I still wanted a night out. We walked to a restaurant; they claimed to be full. Old me would’ve taken it personally. New me, worn down and wide open, shrugged. We detoured to a proudly Polish dive bar, had a beer, walked back, and somehow the same place that was “full” wasn’t anymore. We ate one of the best meals of the trip. There was something in the persistence and something in the letting go. A lesson I’ll try not to unlearn. Also: “budgie smugglers.” Unforgettable.
Rome closed the loop. My brother Steven – eccentric as he is generous, famously the guy who taped his Camino shoes and slept on beaches for the story, rented a grand apartment big enough for all of us. At Mercato Centrale I went straight for trapizzini: one eggplant, one beef tongue. Little pockets of white pizza, crunchy outside and soft inside, stuffed with Roman recipes like someone folded Sunday dinner into a handheld. I chased them with Moretti Limone, bright and cold, and felt something like gratitude spread out behind my ribs.
That night Trevor made roast dinner, potatoes crisped in olive oil, a salad that understood lemon, and we poured boxed wine into plastic cups and laughed until the room felt smaller than our voices. It was one of the best meals of the trip, not because the food was the best (though it was excellent), but because we’d earned the table together.
By the time I flew home, I’d promised myself something embarrassingly simple: walk more. Move my body. I miss Montreal all the time, but this is where I live, and there’s a balance to be made between city hunger and country grace. If Tuscany taught me anything, it’s that home isn’t a place you earn by perfecting it. It’s a practice you keep by showing up.
I came to walk with my mother and to see her outside the life where she carries everything. I learned what draws her back to these roads: steadiness, small rituals, the way strangers become kin. I also learned something about home – about Niagara, where I work in a hospitality world with thin margins and post-pandemic scars. The best moments there are the same as on the trail: people giving what they have, even when what they have is limited.
The irony of a walking trip is that what I carry back isn’t the kilometers. It’s the tables. The convent bed after a day that wanted to break me. The kebab that baptized my hands in grease. Gelato that melted faster than my complaints. Blueberry–porcini risotto that still visits me at night. A boxed-wine toast in a room big enough to hold all our noise. A man twenty feet behind me, camera up, making sure I didn’t disappear.
Back in Niagara, it’s easy to believe hospitality is an industry powered by margins and trend pieces. Tuscany reminded me it’s a decision made in the moment. Sometimes it’s a walking stick pressed into a stranger’s hand. Sometimes it’s letting someone else cook when your identity is built on knowing where to eat. Sometimes it’s trust. Given first, not earned.
Home is slippery. It isn’t always where you were born or where you live. On the Via Francigena, I found it in a nun’s keys, in Trevor’s groceries, in Indon’s song, in Anna’s balloon stranded at the Duomo, in my mother’s steady stride beside my stubbornness on a hard day. Hospitality, I realized, isn’t starched linens or curated wine lists. It’s seeing someone struggle and making space for them. With food, with drink, with care. That’s home, and that’s hospitality. Or maybe it’s simpler: a habit of making room for one more plate, and the reflex to pour one more amaro.
