A short stage luckily, as the temperature rose to 27° and I confidently left my kagoul behind, with a lot of tarmac walking today, although there were some grassy dikes, and the sounds were of frogs in the channels.
It turns out that the ibises I've been seeing are Sacred Ibises, an invasive species now well established in the northern Mediterranean. It's quite an interesting story if you want to follow up.
The landscape is unchanged; just fields, ditches, cascine, and the Via stretching out ahead.
Perhaps the highlights were a delicious homemade shortbread and apricot biscuit in Nivorco, and a chat with the proprietor and an eighty-year-old cyclist in full Lycra, about women walking the Via alone. The verdict appeared to be that only foreign women would do it, Italian women being still trapped in an androcentric paradigm. This led to a rant about Italian judges not enforcing the law (on men who attack women). After that, I picked up a pilgrim stamp in the tiny chapel down the street, and stumbled on to Mortara, which appears unappealing. And so back to Pavia on an ancient train.
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