Terms of Use

What this guide is, and the safety realities of walking the Via di Francesco. Trail conditions change, GPX tracks are guidance rather than a guarantee, and you walk at your own risk.

Please read the safety section before relying on anything here for a walk in the mountains.

What this site is

Walk With Saint Francis is a free, independent, non-commercial guide to the Via di Francesco. It is published for information, and for the benefit of pilgrims.

We are not affiliated with any official trail organization, diocese, religious order, tourism board, or public authority. Nothing here is an official route designation, or an official statement by anyone else.

We sell nothing. There are no advertisements, no affiliate links, and no paid placements. Links to booking platforms are provided for your convenience only, and we earn nothing from them.

Walking is your responsibility

The Via di Francesco crosses remote, mountainous, and sometimes exposed terrain. You walk at your own risk.

This is not a monitoring or alert service

This site is not a real-time trail-monitoring, weather-warning, wildfire, flood, landslide, or emergency-alert service. Nobody is watching conditions on your behalf. Warnings may reach this site late, or never.

Before each stage, check current notices from local authorities, trail managers, accommodation hosts, weather services, and civil-protection agencies.

Obey closures, barriers, warning signs, and instructions on the ground, even when they conflict with this guide or its GPX files.

Information ages

  • Conditions change constantly. Trails get rerouted, waymarks fade or are removed, bridges wash out, paths close for logging or landslides, and rivers rise. Information here describes conditions as we understood them when we wrote it, which may be long before you read it.
  • GPX tracks are guidance, not a guarantee. They are an aid to planning and orientation. They are not survey data, they may not match current waymarking on the ground, and they may cross land where access has changed. A GPX line confers no right of access, and never justifies crossing a closure or entering private land.
  • Never rely on this site as your only navigation. Carry a paper map and compass, or an offline map, and know how to use them. GPS devices fail, lose signal in valleys and forests, and run out of battery.
  • Distances, ascent figures, and walking times are estimates.

Weather and seasonal hazards

A route that is reasonable in dry summer conditions may be dangerous or impassable in snow, ice, thunderstorms, extreme heat, wildfire conditions, or after heavy rain.

Consider heat and dehydration, lightning, cold exposure, snow and ice, wildfire and smoke, high water and flash flooding, and short winter daylight. Check a current forecast and local warnings, and change or abandon a stage when conditions warrant it.

Terrain and access hazards

Along the way you may meet road walking and road crossings, farm and forestry activity, livestock and guard dogs, hunting seasons, ticks and insects, slippery rock and mud, unbridged stream crossings, private land, and damaged or missing waymarks.

Treat all of these as your own risk to assess.

The route is not assessed for you

Difficulty labels, estimated times, and elevation figures are general descriptions. They are not an assessment that a route is safe or suitable for you.

Consider your health, mobility, medical conditions, experience, your party, your pack, the weather, and the daylight remaining. Seek qualified medical or outdoor advice where appropriate.

Water and supplies

Water sources may be dry, closed, or unsafe. Treat every water point as unconfirmed until you see it.

Carry suitable footwear and clothing, enough water and food, sun and heat protection, a first-aid kit, a torch, offline navigation, and backup power. That is a minimum, not a complete packing list.

Emergencies

In an emergency in Italy, call 112.

Mobile coverage may be unavailable and a call may not connect immediately. Carry a charged phone and backup power, know how to describe your location, keep essential route and emergency information available offline, and tell someone your route and expected arrival time.

Do not contact this site for emergency assistance. We do not monitor users, we do not receive emergency requests, and we cannot help you on the trail.

Our responsibility

This guide is provided for general information, and without any guarantee that route, safety, access, accommodation, or transport information is complete, accurate, or current.

You remain responsible for your route choice, your preparation, your navigation, and your decisions on the ground.

To the extent permitted by law, ThornroseGrp and the volunteers who contribute to this guide are not responsible for loss or damage arising from your use of this information, or from walking any route described. Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability where doing so would be unlawful.

Accommodation, opening hours, and other practical information

We list places to stay, eat, and rest along the route, and we try hard to keep it accurate. We cannot promise that any of it is current.

  • Prices, opening dates, phone numbers, and availability change without notice, and seasonal places close.
  • Some listings are compiled from public sources and may contain errors.
  • A listing is not a recommendation, an endorsement, a quality rating, or a safety inspection.
  • Always confirm directly with the place before you rely on it, especially outside the main walking season.
  • Any arrangement you make with an accommodation, a taxi, a luggage transfer service, or anyone else is strictly between you and them. We are not a party to it, we take no booking, we hold no money, and we cannot help if it goes wrong.

If you find something wrong, please tell us at hello@footstepswithstfrancis.com — corrections from pilgrims are how this guide stays useful.

Religious services, opening times, and access

Mass times, pilgrim credential stamps, and access to churches, convents, and sanctuaries are set by the communities that run them, and they change frequently. Treat everything we publish about them as a starting point, and check locally.

Please respect the fact that many of these are working religious houses, not tourist attractions.

Using our content

Original text, photographs, maps, and route files created for this project are protected by copyright unless a different credit or licence is shown. Depending on the item, those rights belong to ThornroseGrp or to the contributor or licensor named in the credit.

You are welcome to:

  • read, print, and save this material for your own pilgrimage;
  • share links to any page;
  • quote short passages with credit and a link back.

Please do not:

  • republish substantial parts of the guide on another site or in a publication without asking;
  • scrape, bulk-download, or systematically copy the site or its database;
  • use the content, the data, or the GPX files in a commercial product or service;
  • present our material as your own, or strip credits from photographs.

If you would like to use something, ask at hello@footstepswithstfrancis.com. For a genuine pilgrim, parish, or nonprofit purpose the answer is usually yes.

Third-party rights

Not everything on this site belongs to us.

  • Many photographs are used under Creative Commons licences, or with permission from their photographers and institutions. Their credit and licence terms are shown on the image credits page, and those terms travel with the photograph — our permission does not extend to them.
  • Map data is © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence.
  • Some imagery is © Google Earth, and is used under Google's attribution requirements.
  • Names, emblems, and marks of religious orders, sanctuaries, towns, and trail organizations belong to them, and are used descriptively.

If you believe something on this site infringes your rights, write to hello@footstepswithstfrancis.com with the page address and a description, and we will look at it promptly and take it down if we should.

Acceptable use

Please do not:

  • scrape, crawl aggressively, or place automated load on the site or its interfaces;
  • attempt to reach data, accounts, or systems that are not published to the public;
  • extract contact details for accommodation hosts or businesses for marketing, resale, or any bulk purpose;
  • interfere with the site's operation, or use it to distribute malware or unlawful material;
  • misrepresent the site or its content, or use its name in a way that implies endorsement.

Direct host-contact details are deliberately withheld from the public accommodation pages, precisely to protect small hosts from spam and abuse. A few older descriptions still contain one, and we are correcting them — please do not treat those as fair game.

We link to other sites — trail organizations, sanctuaries, transport operators, booking platforms, and mapping tools. We do not control them, we are not responsible for their content or their privacy practices, and a link is not an endorsement.

Availability

This is a volunteer-run guide. It may be offline, incomplete, or out of date without notice, and we may change or remove any part of it at any time.

Contributions

We are not accepting public submissions at present. If we open contributions later, we will publish separate terms covering what happens to what you send.

Please do not send us private information about hosts, other pilgrims, or anyone who has not agreed to be named.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of the State of North Carolina, United States. Nothing here removes any right you have as a consumer under the law of the country where you live.

Who publishes this guide

This site is published and operated by ThornroseGrp, based in North Carolina, United States. A nonprofit organization, Footsteps with Saint Francis, is being formed to take over the guide, and we will update these terms when that happens.

Contact

ThornroseGrp — hello@footstepswithstfrancis.com