While things are still somewhat fresh in my mind, but not as current as when I wrote the daily blogs, let me summarise my thoughts on the Via Francigena:
It really is a fantastic walk, at least where I started from in Vercelli. I am very, very happy we did this one. I needed at least the first week to be somewhat easy and the flat lands from Vercelli to Fidenza provided that.
A local phone is VERY useful in those first two weeks. You need to call a day in advance to make sure you have a bed and someone to give you access to it.
Wi-fi is not always findable in many towns north of Lucca.
Tuscany is extremely gorgeous to walk through but do not count on places to stop along the way. Most days, you leave in the morning and you probably won't see a place to eat / drink / sit on a toilet until your final destination.
We stayed in a mix of ostellos, affittacamere, hotels and albergos but we stopped staying in ostellos on day 24 when it started to look like the
Camino Frances' bed race.
We walked with only a few pilgrims and some of the days and some of the kms. It was pretty rare to see other pilgrims on the trail until south of Siena. We did meet up with some at night time though, after the first week.
There were lovely people we met all along the way, both pilgrims and local Italians. As I sit here, all I can remember are the many fantastic people but also one single pair of women who ran the Covento di San Francesco ostello who I did not enjoy meeting at all (really, you should avoid that dump aloughth, to be fair, two friends stayed their and survived) and the daughter of the woman running the ostello in some little town whose name escapes me now.
Learn some Italian before you go. It will make life much easier and more rewarding. At minimum, make sure you can make reservations for rooms over the telephone. That's a bare minimum. I used Duolingo for a couple of months and enjoyed having small conversations with people.
Italian breakfast is always a pastry and a coffee. If you want more than that, you'll need to make it yourself. I think I had more than that at a handful of B&Bs, but not much more. I haven't seen an egg, strip of bacon or sausage since leaving Singapore.
Some stages are long but there are often work arounds. Get GPS / offline maps on a smartphone. Maps.me worked perfect. The GPS tracks I downloaded from the Via Francigena website were not always the most recent but that's okay. Every tiny track is in maps.me and its easy to find your own way.
The route is signposted very, very well. It's not 100% perfect but second only to the
Camino Frances that I know of. That said, because some paths are long with no marking other than the first one saying to enter it, it can be reassuring to confirm your route on the GPS.
Plan your walk so that you go from Fiorenzuola d'Arda to Fidenza on a weekend or school holiday. Stop in to say hello to Massimo and Claudia. Don't shortcut and miss their house. Also, take the ferry across the river after Orio Litta with Danilo. You won't regret it. Sigeric spoke so highly of Danilo that we had to do it. He is a legend but he needs at least 24 hours notice and he won't speak on the phone in anything but Italian.
Expect B&Bs to only serve breakfast before 8:00am by bribing them. Except dinner in a rest arrant no earlier than 7:30pm. Carry some food with you all the time. We had too many days where a single croissant needed to last us until 3:00pm. BTW, one day like that is too much for me. After three hours without food, I'm the kind of guy whose body will think I'm on a hunger strike.
Pilgrims meals don't really exist except in a very few towns. Normal for us was a ham sandwich and lemon soda for lunch and a dinner of pasta then a shared main course and salad. With a second breakfast when we were lucky to nave a town nearby the 1-2 hour mark, meals cost the two of us a total 50-70€ per day.
Either bring euros with you or have a bank card where you can withdraw money from local banks. We happened to have US$ sitting around so we brought them to change to euros. The very few money changers we have seen (and we looked) were in Pisa and Rome. With commissions, they were stealing about 6-9%. ATMs worked flawlessly 10 times so far and they are taking 4% from the interbank rates.
Rome is a big tourist town. Mass with 10,000 people today at St. Peter's Square was awesome. Seeing the Trevi Foutain on Sunday afternoon with 10,000 tourist sucked.
Other than the other pilgrims that you may run into on the hill overlooking Rome, no one else in the Eternal City cares that you walked 2,000km, 850km, 100km or twenty meters. This isn't Santiago. Revel in your own accomplishment silently otherwise people with think you really are crazy.
We were blessed with great weather and I say this despite the very cold rain when crossing the mountains and the hailstorm in Radicofani. The last three days were burning hot with an energy sapping sun and that is what most of our walk was supposed to be. I can't imagine 36 days of that.
Join the Confraternity of Pilgrims to Rome and download their accommodation list. It's rarely up to date on prices but I found it extremely useful, more so than the LightFoot guide. That guide was borderline worth the carrying weight.
Once again, the most useful thing we brought was a parachord clothesline, 20 small paper binder clips and a drybag for washing clothes without getting water and suds everywhere. The least useful things I brought were a small torch, an Italian phrase book and set of hair curlers. I'm kidding about one of those. The curlers were actually quite handy.
I can't think of anything else now but holler if you have questions.