Italy Day 5 - Bushwalking in Siena

Unfortunately for all of you, a family wedding feels too personal to invite the internet to, so I took the day off from journaling. However, I have one story from before that I can share: Killing some time as everyone else primped and prepared, I wandered out an unlocked gate behind the  far guest houses, which lead to the forest. There I found an wide, gently sloping, and overgrown staircase heading deeper into the woods, flanked by trees that had clearly defined an avenue once, but were now deciding their own destiny. The staircase became more overgrown as it descended, and after a hundred yards the stonework began to blur with the rocks, mushrooms, and fauna as nature reabsorbed the structure.  Continuing in the direction the avenue indicated, I did two miles of off-piste bushwalking, stumbling across game trails that vanished as suddenly as they appeared, twisting through prickerbushes, and scrambling over rocks and roots on all fours. I love this shit. After several scrambles I realized that the height of the cliffs was too regular, the edges too well formed.  Decades of work had gone into terracing the entire hill to extend the grove of olives through the whole area, only for the forest to reclaim them at least a century ago.  However, knowing that they were man-made I searched out (and sometimes found) stones cantilevered diagonally up the faces, crude steps I could use when crossing the lines on this terrain map come to life.  Despite all this being an ubiquitous fact of life for Italians, it felt magical to stumble across ruins older than any city in America, to climb steps climbed by the farmers across time.  The centerpiece, almost fully occluded, was the irrigation canal cut across the forest floor. Maybe 18inches wide, 6 feet deep, with a few inches of water flowing across the bottom. A bit of a challenge to climb into, but delightful to splash into or vault. I eventually reemerged into the contemporary grove and circled back to the villa on actual trails, returning to my apartment to shower off the mud and metamorph into a gentleman.