In the year 990, Sigeric, Archbishop of Canterbury, walked home from Rome and had a clerk note the seventy-nine places where the party slept. That laundry list of stopovers is the oldest full record of the Via Francigena — the road through England, France, Switzerland and Italy that medieval Europe used when it needed to see the Pope.
Unlike its Spanish cousin, the Francigena was never a single engineered road: it was a corridor of preferred routes, shifting with wars, floods and bridge tolls. Today it is a signed long-distance path and a Council of Europe Cultural Route, and its northern stages remain strikingly under-walked. Our itinerary follows Sigeric’s line through eight anchor stops from Canterbury to the Great St Bernard Pass — the road’s dramatic hinge into Italy — with the Italian descent to Rome as the story’s final act.
Canterbury: mile zero
The route starts at Canterbury Cathedral, mother church of England and, after 1170, one of Europe’s great pilgrimage magnets in its own right — the Becket shrine made Canterbury a destination even as its archbishops set out from it. The official kilometre zero stone stands outside the cathedral’s Christ Church Gate; the Dover crossing has always been part of the route.
The French crossing
France gives the Francigena its longest and quietest chapters — cathedral cities strung across Picardy, Champagne and the Franche-Comté. Laon, on its table-mountain above the plain, is early Gothic with oxen carved into its towers, a nod to the beasts that hauled its stone uphill. Reims needs no pilgrim pretext: the coronation church of the French kings sits squarely on the route, and Sigeric slept in its shadow. Châlons-en-Champagne keeps the collegiate church of Notre-Dame-en-Vaux, a listed stop on the parallel Santiago routes; fortified Langres, birthplace of Diderot, watches the route climb onto the Langres plateau; and Besançon, wrapped in a loop of the Doubs beneath its Vauban citadel, closes the French chapter at the Jura’s edge.
Over the Alps
Switzerland compresses the drama. Lausanne Cathedral, the finest Gothic interior in the country, was itself a major medieval pilgrimage church; from its terraces the route drops to Lake Geneva and turns up the Rhône. Then comes the climb the whole northern route exists to reach: the Great St Bernard Pass, nearly 2,500 metres up, where the hospice founded in the eleventh century still takes in travellers — monks, dogs and all. Sigeric’s clerk recorded the summit stage matter-of-factly; ten centuries of travellers have been less calm about it.
The Italian descent
From the pass the route falls to Aosta and runs the length of Italy — Vercelli’s rice plains, the Cisa Pass over the Apennines, Lucca, Siena and the Val d’Orcia — before entering Rome, as pilgrims still do, for St Peter’s. We treat the Italian stages summarily here because CHO already covers their cities in depth; the point of this route is the neglected northern half, where you can walk a French cathedral town’s stage in complete solitude the same week the Camino Francés hosts a crowd.
Planning the journey
Walking the full line from Canterbury to Rome takes around three months; almost nobody does it in one season. The natural samples: the Kent and Pas-de-Calais opening, a Champagne cathedral week from Laon to Langres, the Lausanne–Great St Bernard alpine stage (July to September only for the pass on foot), or the classic Tuscan finale. Waymarking improves every year, and the northern stages are cyclable almost throughout. Accommodation needs more planning than in Spain — pilgrim infrastructure exists but is thinner, which is precisely the appeal.
Sigeric’s diary, and why it matters
The document behind this route deserves its own stop. Sigeric travelled to Rome in 990 to receive the pallium — the woollen band of office — from the Pope, and someone in his party listed the return journey’s staging posts: seventy-nine entries, Rome to the Channel, each a night’s lodging. The list survives in a single manuscript in the British Library, and it is the skeleton every modern Francigena guide still hangs its stages on. Nothing in it is picturesque; that is its value. It records where a serious traveller with good connections actually slept, which towns had beds and bread, and how far a mounted party moved in a day — the tenth-century road network measured in fatigue.
Modern reconstruction has been honest about the gaps. The Francigena was always a braid of alternatives rather than one paved line, shifting with floods, tolls and politics, and today’s signed route is a scholarly best-fit through Sigeric’s fixed points. Walking it is therefore a different pleasure from the Camino’s certainties: part pilgrimage, part detective work, following an archbishop’s expense report across four countries. The certificate for completing it — the testimonium in Rome — is issued a few hundred metres from where Sigeric collected his pallium, which is the kind of continuity this site exists to celebrate.
