2026-08-17 20:25:00
The day is August 16th, the time is 6:42 am, and the temperature is a very enjoyable 16°C. The sun is about to rise over the mountains, and I can see it appearing behind the car I just parked at the same parking spot where we ended our walk back in June.
It’s been a long summer so far, and not a great one when it comes to hiking. It’s been hot. Probably too much. We hit a few records here and there, hitting 40°C more than once and hiking when it’s more than 35°C and with more than 50% humidity is a miserable experience. But I wanted to go hike, I felt the need to be out there moving through nature, putting some steps in. And that’s what I did.
This is going to be a strange hike since it’s part of the 44 churches loop I’m walking, but it’s not going to be a point A to point B hike, and I’m also hitting all the churches of the sixth segment of the loop plus an extra one for reasons I’m gonna explain later. But we have a long way to go, so we better get going.
The first church we’re going to visit is very close to the start, just 1km away, and it’s one I never visited before, even though I drove through this place a million times. Walking along the river this early in the morning is very enjoyable, and it’s nice to start a hike on flat ground, rather than immediately going up.
Barely 10 minutes into this hike and we’re visiting the church of Sant’Antonio Abate (22/44).
The church itself is not all that remarkable, but there’s an interesting plaque on a wall under the porch as a reminder of the history of this place, and also a window was open so I managed to take a picture of the inside.
With the first of the six churches we’ll see on this hike behind us, it is time to work our way up. We walk through a few lovely houses (never been on this part of the town), and we find the trail that is gonna take us up to the second church. Noticed a couple of what used to be houses completely reclaimed by nature and was reminded of a recent podcast episode I listened to during a long drive where they were talking about abandoned places amongst many other things. It’s fun to imagine how these towns and villages would look if we all left for a few decades.
The narrow trail widens up, we intersect one of those service roads, and then we work our way up to a lovely stretch through a series of open fields. I’m glad I’m walking this part of the trail early in the morning. As always, we’ll encounter random Jesuses and Maries throughout the hike. This is just one of them, placed there for who knows what reason.
This part of the loop is very close to home, I walked these fields many, many times before, and I also walked past this cabin so many times and always thought it would be so nice to live in such a place. At some point I should probably ask the owner if he’s willing to sell it. It’s such a lovely place.
Just a bit more than an hour into this walk and we have reached the church of Sant’Andrea Apostolo (23/44).
This is a lovely church, but the whole area surrounding it is quite neglected, unfortunately. There would also be a lovely view of the whole valley just outside its porch, but sadly everything is overgrown. And that’s the reality of this whole area: it has so much potential, but everything is so neglected, and it feels such a waste.
With this church we have also concluded the first uphill part of the hike, it’s going to be mostly flat and downhill for a while before we start climbing back up again. Plus the third church of the hike is just 10 minutes away from here.
And in fact, just like that, we’re outside the church of Santa Lucia (24/44).
The outside is not unlike many of the other churches, but this one has a gorgeous altar. I couldn’t take a decent picture, but there are a few on the site linked above, so make sure to go click it.
We connect back with the trail, and now we have quite a long way to go before we reach the next church since it’s almost 8 km away and we need to go back down this side of the mountain, into the next valley and back up again.
Thankfully this walk is gonna be almost entirely inside the woods because the day is warming up fast. But for the next hour and a half we can enjoy this slow descent into the nearby valley.
A bit more than 10 km into this walk, and it’s about time to start going uphill again, in the direction of the village of Costne and the fourth church of this hike.
I have never been up here before, and it always amazes me how many old and abandoned houses there are in these valleys. I think I should start doing a more comprehensive work of photographing these places just to document how an area slowly dies down. Maybe that’s a project for future me.
We just passed the three-hour mark, and we have reached the church of San Mattia Apostolo (25/44), which I think is the only one so far with 3 bells.
I thought this was a nice spot to take a quick break, eat something, drink a bit of Gatorade and also, since I had phone signal, FaceTime my friend Mattia who was about to hop on a plane for South Korea. I’m walking around the valleys while he’s travelling around Asia at the moment, and if you’re interested in that, you can follow his adventure either on his site or via his newsletter. This 20-minute break was nice, but we’re now moving again, going down for a little bit before starting the biggest climb of the day.
We’re passing close to the village of Tribil, which is where this segment of the loop ends, but we’re headed in the opposite direction, up Mount Hum, a place that’s filled with WWI history, and then down on the other side to reach the fifth church of the hike.
The sign at the base is telling me it’s gonna be a 1-hour hike to reach the summit, but I have different plans. I hiked this mountain before, but it was a lot more slippery back then. Now everything is super dry.
And we’re at the top. It took me 30 minutes. Easily the hardest part of the hike so far, and my HR can confirm that. But that’s behind us, and we now need to go back on the other side before going up again to reach the halfway point of this hike.
We’re down the mountain, back on the road, and I can see the church from here. Been up there quite a few times lately, it’s a lovely spot, especially late in the day.
Final push uphill, and we have reached the church of San Volfango (26/44).
We’re 5 and a half hours into this walk, and we have hikes 20kms so far. It’s time for another quick break to catch my breath and also finish this Gatorade I have with me. Most of the rest of the hike is gonna be downhill from now on, but we have quite a long way to go before we’re done.
So down the stairs we go, through the abandoned—I think—village of San Volfango, onto a very sunny road and back to where we exited the trail out of Mount Hum not long ago. I’ll have to walk back on the same trail for a tiny bit—something I usually try to avoid—because the alternative would mean walking quite a long stretch on paved road and that’s not an enjoyable experience.
On the trail, I stumbled on a big group of people that was taking a break, lying down in the shade, and they all had horses that were also chilling on the trail. Lovely animals. Horse riding is something I’ve never done in my life but would love to do one day. Feels such a great way to experience nature.
Almost 25 km into this hike and we’re about to enter Tribil, where this segment of the churches loop ends. I passed through here just the other day, during a silly walk with my dog, but that’s a story for another time.
And here we are, at the parking spot next to the cemetery where our hike should end, if I was a reasonable person. This is also where the next hike will start. But this time, we’ll keep going, and we’ll make it a full loop, going back to my car. And on our way there, we’ll hit a church that’s part of the 7th segment of this loop.
There are two reasons why I’m doing this. The first one is that I’m an idiot and I like to do silly things. The second is that the second half of these walks all have idiotic routes that make absolutely no sense. And as you’ll see in future newsletters, I had to tweak the proposed paths quite a lot to make them walkable in a decent way. And hitting this extra church today allows me to make the next walk much more enjoyable. But that means today we need to keep going, so down the trail we go.
The trail is mostly uninspiring now, just a long, relaxing, slightly downhill stroll through the woods, as we’re heading towards the village of Presserie, very close to the final church of the day.
We’re out of the woods now, back on paved road, and about to approach the final uphill stretch of the hike. My feet are starting to hurt a little bit. We are a bit more than 30 km into this hike.
Almost 8 hours into this hike and we’re finally outside the church of San Paolo Apostolo (27/44). Thankfully, there’s a fountain just outside of it. I definitely need to refresh myself a little bit.
The only thing left to do now is to walk back to the car. Which means leaving the church behind us, going through a short stretch into the woods, back onto the main road, then through a weird side trail again and then back onto paved road.
We’re down at the bottom of the valley, only a couple of kms left to walk on this sunny road and then we’d be done. With the walk. My feet are now hating me, but that’s a problem for later me.
And just like that, we’re back at the car. The time is 4 pm, the temperature is 35°C, and we have walked almost 38 km and ascended almost 1600 meters. I’m honestly less tired than I thought I’d be and kinda pissed that I didn’t hit 50k steps for the day. But the good thing is that I need to walk the dog later in the day, so we’ll get there. As always, photos of the walk are on the shared drive folder (these are all kinda shitty I have to say, not sure what happened, I definitely need to buy a camera) and the data from my watch is available at this link. See you next time!
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2026-08-11 19:20:00
Yesterday I was emailing with the always lovely Robin Harford, who has a wonderful website over at eatweeds.co.uk. We were discussing the sad state of the web, and wondering what can be done to prevent Google and the others from abusing our content. And within that discussion, he mentioned his hate for the word “content”. He’s not the only one who feel that way; I’ve seen quite a few people mentioning this issue of the use of the word “content” to describe the product of someone’s creativity.
As I said to him via email, I don’t have the same issue with the word, but that’s maybe because I’m not a native speaker and to me “content” doesn’t carry a connotation of any kind. If you say “content creator”, though, that’s a different story. He used the word “art” to describe the product of his work, and I have no issue with that. He’s a writer after all, and writing is an art form.
My 5 years of high school were spent at an art school, studying traditional goldsmithing, as well as art in general. And maybe this is how my brain is wired, but to me the word “art” usually isn’t attached to written content. I also don’t consider myself a writer. Which is funny because when I get asked to describe what I do the most succinct definition I often use is “writer of code and words” since that is what I spend my time doing in front of this screen. But reflecting on the use of these words made me wonder what even is this thing I’m doing here on this site.
This is clearly writing and, therefore, I am a writer. But in that case, we’re probably all writers. We all text and send emails and post online. Are we all writers? What makes a writer a writer? The medium? The length? The meaning? The time spent?
As I said to Robin via email, I think of what I do here as public emailing. I sometimes have thoughts appearing in this brain of mine, and I decide to share them in a way that’s public. These are attempts to communicate, to make connections, to encourage dialogue. But maybe that’s also what artists try to do with their art? As always, many questions, not as many answers.
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2026-08-10 16:45:00
I just went through the queue of submissions to blogroll.org and probably deleted 95% of what was in there. This is not unusual, and has become more and more common lately. A big reason for this is clearly AI. The amount of slop submissions I’m getting is trending upwards, unfortunately. The other big reason is people attempting to use the blogroll as a way to get traffic for their shitty marketing sites, which is obviously annoying and a waste of my time. There’s people who have submitted their stupid marketing sites multiple times, and I’m starting to contemplate the possibility of blacklisting domains because some people out there clearly don’t know how to behave.
But all this is making me question the value of big lists in an age where content is becoming more and more abundant. There are people out there—idiots, if you ask me—who think that coding has become a commodity, that everyone can make a site with just a few prompts, and that producing content worth consuming has become so incredibly cheap and easy. If you believe in all that, what even is the point of having a big list of sites worth consuming since content worth consuming should just flood every corner of the web and be easily accessible?
I do not believe that to be the case. I believe, in fact, the opposite to be true. Good content, content worth consuming, is becoming harder to find, and it’s getting buried under a sea of low-quality crap, which makes me wonder if it’s time to start rethinking how blogroll.org works. I have ideas for how to tweak both the site itself as well as the submission process (and no, that doesn’t involve the exchange of money), but it’s obvious to me that the only way out is to raise the barrier to entry, which is pretty much the opposite of what the web has been all about for the past 20 years.
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2026-08-04 13:15:00
About two months ago, I discussed my fitness challenge where the goal was to get below 85.3kg, the oldest measurement I have on record on the scale’s app, starting from 89.6kg. We’re halfway through this challenge, and things got a bit out of hand because, as it’s often the case, I tend to go a bit extreme when I set this type of goal. I hopped on the scale this morning and logged an 81.1kg, which is the lowest weight I have on record since I bought the scale 10 years ago.
I’m feeling incredibly well, at least physically, if we ignore the heatwave with its endless series of days at 39°C. The mental side of things, well, that’s a different story, but I can assure you it’s not related to the loss of weight. That’s helping a lot actually, but this is something I plan to write about once this challenge is over in a few months.
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2026-08-02 00:05:00
It’s a very chilling 38°C outside at the moment. Those are at least 35 more that the max temperature this dog considers acceptable. But he’s doing his best to ride the heatwave, like the rest of us.
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2026-07-29 18:40:00
There is nothing I hate more than doing self-promotion. The idea of talking about something I’m doing, I’ve done, or I'm going to do makes my skin crawl. But the opposite, promoting things other people are doing—especially friends—fills me with so much joy that I’ll never miss out on the opportunity of doing it.
And that’s why I’m excited to let you know that my longtime friend Mattia is about to embark on another of his trips, this time touching Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, and as usual he’s going to share thoughts and pictures on his newsletter “Missives From”. I’m sure he’ll figure out a way to get himself into some sketchy situation since he seems to have a knack for that.
So, “Missives From” Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, first newsletter dropping sometime this week (maybe). Go sign up and tell Mattia Hi and let him know I sent you.
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