Pilgrimage naar Rome, maar meer biografieën van de pilgrims

It was my assumption that I would be presented with an interesting tale of a pilgrimage to Rome in 1289, but details of the journey and the adventures of the participants on the road were regretfully almost absent. Instead we got offered a never ending sequence of life stories of quite a lot of the pilgrims in the group, which consisted of some fourteen people. These life stories were mostly not that interesting and took sometimes over 45 pages each to tell. Meantime, you hardly got any descriptions of the routes they were taking and what they saw and that was my main reason to read the book! So the novel was a sequence of life stories of people of high and low birth and the crimes they thought they committed, some of those crimes being quite hilarious or others very sad. I only was fond of the tales of the simple minded pilgrim Tom son of Tom who went to Rome to make sure his cat would be elevated from the purgatory to heaven. A worthy cause and he succeeded! Nevertheless, as far as I am concerned, I would have loved to hear about the roads taken, the people met and villages travelled through. It is not until they arrive in Rome that you get some details of how it felt to be there and details of what our pilgrims saw of the city.

It is not that I thought the novel was not worth reading, but it was strange that I never got the feeling that I was reading about medieval life and I mean that in the way the pilgrims talked, observed or argued.