For a long time, walking was the condemnation of the poor, that is, of the majority of the population. Then, with mass motorization, almost everyone has lost the habit of measuring distances with steps. However, walking has become more and more synonymous with freedom and contact with nature.
Ancient paths have thus been rediscovered, the sheep tracks created by our ancestors for work in the fields or in the woods or to follow the transhumance of the flocks have been retraced. Young and old have been tempted by the ancient roads that cross our country far and wide. A country that is very rich in paths suitable for our feet as demonstrated by the volume "111 places of the Italian paths that you really must discover" (Emons, 2023, Euro 16, 95, pp. 240), a guide entirely dedicated to those who they like to move at no more than 4 kilometers per hour.
Traveling at this cruising speed, Fabrizio Ardito, Sara Cavina and Sara Zanni take us on a discovery of most of the 2,000 kilometers of historic or recently built roads, Roman and religious itineraries, paths and dirt roads that cross our peninsula. We then go from the trazzere of Sicily to the chalk of the Apennines, from the Tuscan vineyards to the rocks burnt by the sun in the silence of the Aspromonte to reach the rice fields of the great plains and of course the mining paths of the Iglesiente, to that Cammino di Santa Barbara which attracts now walkers and walkers from every corner of the globe.
Place after place we are thus confronted with an ancient and probably more authentic way of travelling. A slow mode, which allows us to take a deeper look, helps us gain awareness of the country in which we live. Thus we discover the so-called minor Italy, which is actually the preponderant one. The Santa Barbara Mining Trail is instructive from this point of view because it offers the possibility of coming into direct contact with an epic that lasted hundreds of years: that of the miners and their hard struggle for survival. An epic that today can be found between ghost towns and forgotten mines, with the blue of the sea in the background. During the path that winds following a ring that has the city of Iglesias at its center, you trample paths traveled for centuries by miners, huge construction sites that have changed the shape of the landscape, immersed in the silence of the scrub or in the dense shadow of grandiose forests . A long walking itinerary punctuated by encounters with the memories of civilization born in the mines, with the big and small stories of men, women and children who worked and fought, day after day, in the stone heart of the mountains. Memories that it would be impossible, here as elsewhere in our country, to rediscover without treading the earth, slowly, at the rhythm of step by step.
