Travellers and lights of wandering centuries
Monks and pilgrims, merchants and wise men travelled by land or by ship, between inns and taverns, in a continuous coming and going: outside the stereotypes of dark decades, the Middle Ages is also this, as the Festival tells it well
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Key points
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Poor christians, those of the Middle Ages! Not only did they have to live in the 'dark ages', but they were also destined to be born and die in the same place, not knowing what lay beyond the fields around the village or beyond the city walls. There, if you still have these two stupidities in your head (the 'dark ages', which were not dark at all, and people rooted to their place of origin like a shrub) you are completely off the mark.
The Middle Ages (especially the Middle and Late Middle Ages) saw a swarm of people moving by land and sea, learning about the world and, when they knew how, telling what they had seen. Sometimes, even what they have not seen, but which 'must', of necessity, be there: enchanted countries, people with strange bodies, monstrous animals, in a free-for-all of the imaginary, which is not the negation of reality, but its counterpart, and which, therefore, is also part of 'geography'.
A surprising journey, that of the Middle Ages, the main theme of the eleventh edition of the Gubbio Festival of the Middle Ages (24-28 September 2025), dedicated precisely to the theme "The Journey. Pilgrims, wayfarers, explorers".
This ant farm on the move has many protagonists, each with their own specificities, but all responding to the same imperative: hit the road, hit the road. They include those who work in the mercantile trade and who move behind every load of wool or grain or whatever. They travel the length and breadth of armies and soldiers in search of engagement (there is always a war somewhere). They roam in search of fortune, money, a fame to build, a woman (preferably a rich one) to marry and a fiefdom to acquire the 'wandering' knights. They move from one university to another the clerics vagantes seeking knowledge and contaminating every place they visit with ideas.
They know the journey well, the Celtic monks who travel between Ireland, English lands and continental lands to bring the Gospel and, along with it, to spread the most ancient Celtic tradition, knowledge of which we owe in large part to them. Franciscan and Dominican friars walked the world ceaselessly to erect churches and bring the people closer to the word of Christ. That Christ to the places of whose earthly life rows of western pilgrims wander ceaselessly; the same ones who walk the roads of the iter compostellanum and the michelici paths. For the first Jubilee, in the year 1300, the flood of pilgrims to Rome is such that it forces the creation of a one-way street in and out of the city.
