Hitt walked the Camino de Santiago in the early nineties, five hundred miles across northern Spain, back when the trail was still mostly empty and the pilgrim infrastructure was a few nuns with a stamp. He is not a believer and says so, and the book is funny and a little cranky — bad feet, worse hostels, and a rotating cast of eccentric fellow walkers. Woven through is the medieval history of the pilgrimage: The relic trade, the invented bones of St. James, the guidebooks written in the twelfth century that read exactly like the ones today. It’s the book most credited with reviving the Camino among Americans.
Off the Road