It was while standing near our HOTEL AT Capanne di Cosola that my sympathy for mules reached its zenith. From our vantage point at an altitude of 1,500 metres, we gazed out over at least a dozen chains of craggy silver-blue peaks melting into the late afternoon haze before the distant Mediterranean brought some horizontal sanity to the scene. For hundreds of years from the Middle Ages onwards, mule trains loaded with sea salt would labour up to these heights from the coast, crossing range after range of the Ligurian Apennines, which separate the Gulf of Genoa from the Po valley in north-west Italy.
One of the salt merchants’ major markets was the prosperous city of Pavia where, at one time, a kilo of salt reportedly commanded a cool £19,000 in today’s money. The network of paths this outrageously precious cargo travelled on became known as the Via del Sale, the Salt Road, and over six days a friend and I tramped 80 miles (without mules) along one of the major branches of this once-great trade route.
Happily, we were following the mules’ return journey, from the heights down to the coast, so there was usually more down than up each day. Our sole burdens were the packed lunches supplied by innkeepers along the way, and a map with route instructions provided by On Foot Holidays, which started offering this itinerary two years ago. The company suggests doing it in May, June or September – we set off in May – but it runs departures from April to October.
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