The Path to Rome
In 1901, Hilaire Belloc set out from his birthplace in northeastern France with a staff, a vow, and a radical proposition: to walk to Rome as pilgrims had walked for centuries, seeing Europe through the lens of the Christian Faith that built it. What unfolds is neither guidebook nor simple travelogue, but something far stranger and more alive. Belloc argues with an imagined reader, breaks into song (providing sheet music), sketches landmarks mid-thought, and pauses to meditate on everything from the stones of ancient churches to the politics of the French Third Republic. His voice is imperious, funny, deeply learned, and occasionally insufferable, and absolutely compelling. The book captures a Europe on the edge of oblivion, a Catholic landscape that would be shattered by the Great War just a decade later. Walking through the valley of the Moselle, across the Alps, toward the eternal city, Belloc reminds us that travel once meant something: a discipline of the body, a schooling of the soul, a way of knowing a place by the slow weight of footsteps upon it. For anyone tired of the speed of modern travel, here is a book that insists the journey is the destination.
Editions
X-Ray
“Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!””
— Hilaire Belloc
“For I know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of merriment in the soul of a sane man.””
— Hilaire Belloc
“For one's native place is the shell of one's soul, and one's church is the kernel of that nut.””
— Hilaire Belloc
“los bárbaros construyen sus casas separadas, y los hombres civilizados, juntas.””
— Hilaire Belloc
“… that exasperating quality for which we have no name, which certainly is not accuracy, and which is quite the opposite of judgement, yet which catches the mind as brambles do our clothes.””
— Hilaire Belloc
“economics are but an expression of the mind and do not (as the poor blind slaves of the great cities think) mould the mind.””
— Hilaire Belloc
“But there is some influence in vows or plans that escapes our power of rejudgement. All false calculations must be paid for, and I found, as you will see, that having said I would sleep in the open, I had to keep to it in spite of all my second thoughts.””
— Hilaire Belloc
“Let us suffer absurdities, for that is only to suffer one another.””
— Hilaire Belloc
“Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army! See them how they stand in rank ready for assault, the jolly, swaggering fellows!””
— Hilaire Belloc
