All's well that ends well.

My brother is thankfully returned home on Friday. A gruesome ordeal but no surgery was needed. Thank you for your many kind words.

Today, for really the first time since moving here, we went down into Florence for a walk and a meal. It was a stupendous day with the most dazzling and clear light from a sun already much lower in the sky than in those insufferable days in the summer.

We ate al fresco at the Four Lions - featured earlier. My spaghetti alle vongole were fabulous if a bit on the short-measures side. The Boss' fresh porcini with taglierini were nice and the crostini were pretty good. We finished up with a delicate amount of ice-cream from the tiny gelateria in the  diminutive little triangle of a square.

Then a long walk through the narrow streets of the Oltrarno - on the other side of the Arno from the main tourist draws. Still lots and lots of people about.

I had an experience yesterday with the fast-falling dark and a large chestnut and oak forest. I'd written it all out and pressed 'save changes' and it all disappeared. Ughhh.

So. So as to not disappoint I'll do it again.

I went for a walk yesterday in the late afternoon into the chestnut woods up above the Santuario of The Madonna of the Rock. It's there because, like it says on the tin, back in the mists of time two girls watching after the sheep had a vision of the Madonna on a rock. The actual rock is nestled under the church alter and one can touch it for good luck.

I've walked the steep, solitary paths before and felt fairly confident about my route.

It was a beautiful early evening. I was up at 800m with not a soul around. Golden sunlight slanting through the high beeches.

I'd been going for an hour and a half and stopped to have some bread, cheese and olives from my backpack. The vista stretching to the distant horizon with its stretching waves of hills and the bulk of Montebonello standing sentinel above Florence was/seemed as benign as it was beguiling.

As I was descending down the long track that then cuts off through the woods to circle back to the Sanctuary I noticed a big dark mass of clouds coming in fast from the main Apennine ridge. The sun already low set with surprising speed. The wind blew, at first just warning zephyrs pushing through the high branches.

I came to the point where the concrete track continues to descend and my path struck off along the contour into the woods. I was taken aback by the deep gloom under the chestnuts and oaks. The gathering wind was rocking through the trees now. Chestnuts and acorns rained down, cracking and knocking off the dead wood of lower branches in an eerie way. I thought to myself, 'I'd better get a shift on here'.

It got darker and darker along the sunken track, mostly obscured by fallen leaves, as I moved further into the woodland. A few rays of the last sun crept round Montebonello and lit up the matt grey of the young chestnut trunks with surprising menace, as if something was just slightly out of kilter.

I'd always enjoyed these woods so much. In the spring with their flowers, the rare cistus that grows nowhere else in Italy, the heights with their bosky escape from the stultifying heat of the valleys. But now this felt different. Not alarming. But very different.

The path ahead lightened and I came to a clearing where they'd coppiced out the chestnut timber. I've been this way before but with my rushing I got seduced down a very steep timber track.

The nice reassuring red and white waymarkers suddenly disappeared and iI found myself descending too fast, too steeply. I thought maybe the track would turn to the left and rejoin the contour but it plunged on down.

I realised with a shock that I didn't know this path or its destination. Keep going or struggle back up? No mobile signal. The wind picking up. Ominous growls of thunder.

I decided to press on - I knew more or less where I was but the woods are so thick. Just a big bloody indistinct mass of tightly packed trees. 'As long as I'm going downhill,' I thought,' I'll eventually cross the road to the Sanctuary, won't I?'. As long as the track doesn't just stop.

Gloom and the hail of projectiles. Breaking into a run now. Getting a little scared. And not wanting to run into some big old boar fattening himself up on oak mast for the winter. Or a wolf (although luckily I forgotten about them at the time).

The track seemed to be going downhill too far - winding this way and that, thick with leaves, loose stone, soft mud in the damp deep parts of it.  Then I came to a bigger cleared track, not just mud through the wood, but a forest glade, a by-way.  Which way to go? Intuition said left but I checked the right-hand branch. It ran out quickly in a little logging camp long abandoned.

I turned and went left. The track opened out into another small clearing. And some waymarks on the trees - at least I was on a recognised path even if I didn't know where it was going.

An abandoned house stood silent offering no hope or solace.  The track pulled round the back of the house and plunged back into increasingly dark woods that now turned into a thick,  ominous pine stand. Then it joined another track and in the gloom a varnished sign appeared pointing to the sanctuary. But it indicated that it was still half an hour distant.

I reckoned in half an hour it would be  pretty near total dark. I pressed on, running, gasping for breath, stumbling and tripping. I knew I could not be far from a road because the timber workers wouldn't drag there wood to a dead end in the middle of the forest. And so it turned out to be. It got lighter ahead and stepping over a chain I came to a metalled road.

At first I thought I should go further downhill. But then I recognised, or thought I did, that this was the incredibly steep road I had driven up two hours earlier to the Sanctuary.

It was  a long slog up it and at first I was not entirely convinced this was the  road.  Two cars came down it, their headlights blinding me. I picked a fallen branch out of the road but stupidly didn't stop them and check where I was. I probably looked quite a sight in the dark, tumbling along, soaked in sweat in a light green t shirt.

It turned out I was much further east than I'd realised (although without a compass or map or torch in a t-shirt with a cagoule in a backpack and no food). Darker and darker, all sorts of debris on the road, almost white in places from the crushed chestnuts. Up and uphill, past the now familiar car park, by the stations of the cross cast in bronze, a solitary street light going on and off, big bursts of lightning in the distance. Finally I got back to the reassuring safety of the car, the lightning cracking around in the distant Arno valley.

I'd earlier imagined what it might have been like to be a wayfaring Franciscan monk striding through the woods to seek a pilgrim's bed and a hot meal at the Sanctuary (they still cater for pilgrims). And I've been re-reading Umberto Eco's novel, The Name of the Rose, which is set in 15th century Tuscany as conflicts between the Pope, the Emperor, Rome and Avignon and the sated parts of the church and the more radical upstart movements who preached poverty raged. There is much murder in the book, talk of burnings, martyrs, and the inquisitors and hunters of heretics.
The action takes place in a monastery in a position and place not unlike that of the Sanctuary, although a much bigger religious settlement. But I guess the monks rarely travelled through the lonely and often dangerous country by themselves.

It's a twenty minute drive back to our place in Fiesole along a tight, wooded, winding, hilly road. It was wild driving back, the Tuscan cypresses 'snowing' their dead scurf across the road, olive branches scudding along,  leaves swirling and acorns and chestnuts pinging and spinning off the roof. I had Bach's St Mathew's Passion on the CD. It sounded about right.

It was a salutary lesson about how fast a cold front can sweep in and up over the Apennines from 'continental' Italy to the north. And how fast the night falls, particularly when the last of the light is smudged about by fast moving thunderheads. And how much light the thick foliage of the woods keeps out.

Looking back at my photos the sun set at 18.40 and by 19.00 it was getting near dark in the woods.

All's well that ends well, they say. And so it turned out to be. But I offered up a little 'Thank you' to Saint Francis, who was very big round here and who, I hope, was keeping an eye on me.

Much, much later The Boss got home on a delayed flight from Amsterdam that had made the quickest flight to Florence the pilot had known, so strong were the tailwinds. But it was a scary flight as the plane tunnelled through tempest to bang down onto Florence's notoriously fickle runway.

Today was another day of benign and beautiful weather but yesterday put a shot across my bows, a warning of what may be to come, and how those heights and delightful shady woods of the summer can become a creature of an altogether different stripe when the cold wind blows and the skies darken.

There. I did it again. Rewrote the whole bloody lot. It 1pm now and past my bedtime. But Blippers are made of strong stuff, no?
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