Saints & Sinners: a pilgrimage in Lippiano

Our recent graduate in creative writing WS Pendray marked completing his licence by attending the prestigious ‘Haven for Stories’ writers’ retreat in Umbria thanks to one of our travelling scholarships. It was a liberation in more than one sense.

I didn’t expect to be shaken by airport security, but as soon as I stood waiting for my luggage to reappear on the x-ray belt, it hit me. Just three days earlier, I’d completed my licence. After years of restrictions, knock-backs, and losses; I was finally a free man.

As the plane lifted from the grey and dropped us into the patchwork of green and terracotta, Italy greeted me with softness. A farmer ploughed his field on a battered tractor in the evening light. Italy felt calm and timeless.

They say Saint Francis of Assisi was captured in battle, spent a year in a Perugian dungeon, and came out changed. A soldier turned poet; a prisoner turned pilgrim. I wonder if captivity itself made him a saint of nature, if being severed from the world made him love it more fiercely.

‘The system made me a number; poetry gave me a name’

I recognised that feeling. Stripped from nature, I found my way back through language, through memory, through metaphor, through the small light that words let in. We both learned to listen again: to the wind through the trees, and the birds calling across the hills. The system made me a number; poetry gave me a name.

We arrived in Lippiano, a medieval village in the Umbrian hills, crowned by a twelfth-century castle and watched over by the church of San Michele Arcangelo, where the stones are as old as prayer.

Before the Romans arrived, the Etruscans believed the gods spoke through signs in the sky. I suppose I do too. When I checked my phone, it read 18:18, on the 18th. 18 has followed me all my life; a quiet reassurance I am where I’m meant to be.

In my pocket, I found a piece of lavender, placed there by my daughter during one of our seaside walks. Its scent rose when I reached for change. A small mercy from home. Proof that love travels further than guilt ever could.

‘He couldn’t bail me out with money, so he did it with stories’

Saint Francis’s father ransomed him with gold. Mine ransomed me with imagination. In my bag, I carried something sacred of my own: my father’s letters. Twenty-two pages he sent me while I was in prison, a year before he died. They documented his journey overland from Romford to India in the early 70s. He couldn’t bail me out with money, so he did it with stories, and each page was a door.

There is a kind of faith in the air of this region, and you can almost feel the presence of the Via di Francesco, the pilgrimage route that winds near Lippiano, threading through the same green heart of Italy where Saint Francis once walked barefoot. I didn’t walk the official path, but somehow, I ended up on a pilgrimage of my own: wandering past olive trees and vineyards, stone walls, and the rolling hills of Umbria. Something felt holy in the rhythm of it all.

Through the tutorials, I found my own way forward; each tutor a kind of compass, their guidance part of this quiet movement toward understanding, art, and belonging.

Saint Francis gave up a life of wealth to embrace poverty. I, on the other hand, am trying my best to give up a life of poverty, and I can confirm it’s proving much harder than expected.

‘They asked what I do, not what I’d done’

Still, standing in that small Umbrian village, surrounded by people whose kindness asked for nothing in return, I understood something I’d been circling for years: compassion is the currency of the soul, and at Villa Pia I felt unexpectedly rich.

I feared stigma might’ve followed me here, that people would see the worst of my story before they’d heard the rest. But they didn’t. The other writers were warm, and curious, unbothered by my past. They asked what I do, not what I’d done.

The turning point came on the Friday, the day of the gala. I went to my tutorial with Tobias Jones, thinking I had a piece ready to read that evening: one of the many incidents from my father’s wild journey into India. Instead, I ended up telling him about another journey, one that I’d been too scared to touch.

My father’s funeral.

How I was taken there handcuffed to an officer. How I stood in that Sussex meadow carrying the weight of two kinds of loss on my wrist.

Toby listened, then said gently but firmly, ‘that’s your opening chapter. Why don’t you read that tonight.’

Those few words, I’ll always be grateful for.

‘I was no longer running from the past. I was writing towards it.’

I thought I wasn’t ready, but I was. So, I went to the hillside where the roads unravel through the distance like pasta al burro, and I sat with the moment I’d kept locked away. I put on The Ecstasy of Gold, my father’s chosen funeral song, and something in me broke open.

The tears came.

Then the ink.

It felt like a quiet divinity, the holy trinity of memory, grief and the page. For the first time, I was no longer running from the past. I was writing towards it.

The Etruscans once read omens in the flight of birds. That afternoon, I watched a kite glide over the hills and thought about freedom, how it isn’t the absence of bars, but the presence of possibility. Like Francis, I had been imprisoned after a battle (a rap battle, in my case) and we had both come out hungry for light.

Maybe we’re all saints and sinners in equal measure, forever falling, forever forgiven by the earth beneath us.

In Lippiano, I learned that holiness isn’t always reserved for churches or marble saints. Sometimes it arrives in its simplest forms: in the sound of birds overhead, in lavender between your fingers, in the warmth of strangers, and in the moment you finally write what once broke you.

Will received a Longford Trust travelling scholarship. If you would like to find out about supporting this initiative, contact Chris Walters. Our thanks to Villa Pia, where the writers retreat takes place, and its owner, Morag Cleland.  And to Tobias Jones, Elise Valmorbida and Alice Vincent, the three tutors on the course.  WS Pendray’s first poetry collection, Overgrown, is now available.