What happens when you walk for days? You stop running. Not just with your legs, but—more importantly—with your mind. Walking for a long time is like slowly letting go of every thought you once believed to be essential, only to realize—step after step—that maybe they only lived in your head. You start to remember, then to forget, then to forgive. Something shifts, even if you can’t quite name it. Walking is an ancient way of moving forward. And you don’t have to go far: starting is enough.
These three stories—real, though slightly fictionalized to protect those who lived them—hold the quiet power of walking. The gentle strength of someone who doesn’t push, but lets themselves be carried.
1. Marta and the Via Francigena: “When I dropped everything, I found everything”
Marta was 37, working at an ad agency in Milan, and couldn’t keep a ficus plant alive. “Just like me,” she’d say every morning, looking at it. Then came the email: yet another job change, “more strategic and challenging.” That’s when she realized she’d been chasing something for years without even knowing what it was.
She packed a backpack, said ciao (not goodbye), and took a train to Aosta. The next day she started walking the Via Francigena. “I had never hiked in my life. I didn’t even own proper shoes,” she says. But after 30 days, 1,000 km, and countless nights in bare-bones hostels, Marta discovered something no MBA had ever taught her: the freedom of not knowing what comes next.
Today she lives in Tuscany, works remotely, grows vegetables, and yes—the ficus is still alive.
2. Antonio on the Sentiero Italia: “In the silence, my father was there”
Antonio lost his father suddenly. A heart attack, 63 years old, just another morning. With him went all the unsaid words—and, unfortunately, the ones said badly too. All that remained was a voice in old WhatsApp voice notes, which Antonio listened to over and over again.
Then he found out about the Sentiero Italia: a trail that stretches over 7,000 km through all of Italy’s mountain ranges. He didn’t walk the whole thing, of course. But he did spend a month hiking solo, sleeping wherever he could, talking to shepherds and old folks who somehow seemed to know everything—even about him.
“The first nights were awful,” he recalls. “But then, in a mountain hut above Norcia, I dreamt of my dad. And he wasn’t angry. He was laughing.”
When Antonio came back, he wasn’t healed. But he had learned that grief, if you walk far enough, shifts—from your shoulders to your feet. And it gets a little lighter.
3. Adele and Marco on the Brigands’ Trail: “If we got lost, it was only to find each other again”
Adele and Marco had been together for eight years. Living together, paying bills, planning holidays months in advance. But lately, something had cracked. They barely talked, and barely listened. She wanted to move to a new city; he wanted to stay. She dreamed of having a child; he wasn’t sure.
A friend suggested they try the Brigands’ Trail. “Just to disconnect, see what happens.” A 100-km trek through Lazio and Abruzzo, through dense woods and villages where time seems to have stopped.
They fought on day one. And day two. But then something shifted. “When you walk all day, you can’t fake it. You drop the masks. You see the other person as they are—not as you imagined them.”
They didn’t come back “stronger than ever.” They broke up. But gently. Without bitterness. “That walk helped us see we did love each other. Just not enough to stay together. And that, too, is love.”
What do these three stories have in common?
The start, not the finish. The decision to walk without knowing exactly where you’re going, but knowing full well what you’re walking away from—or towards. In all of them, the walk wasn’t an escape. It was a confrontation. With themselves, with who they had been, and with who they might become.
Walking isn’t just physical movement. It’s a practice in awareness. It teaches you how to listen, how to wait, how to master the art of the slow step. It pushes you to slow down while the world speeds up, to breathe when everything feels too fast.
Walking as active therapy
Some do therapy on a couch. Others on mountain trails. Neither is better, neither is final. But walking has a unique power: it demands presence. You feel every muscle, every breath, every thought finally free to come through.
It’s moving meditation. A kind of endless playlist of thoughts unrolling like a path through the woods. And in the end, even if you don’t find answers, you always find something: a landscape, a word, a silence telling you “you’re okay.”
That’s why in Italy—along the Francigena, the Sentiero, the Brigands’ Trail—those who walk aren’t just nature lovers. They’re people looking to come home with a different step. Even if home hasn’t changed at all.