Grand tours: The bride and the gloom

Adventures in literature: Mary Taylor Simeti skirts the menacing Black Forest as she retraces the route of a Sicilian princess

The American-born writer and academic Mary Taylor Simeti is an exemplary Italophile, who allowed herself to be rusticated on a farm outside Palermo with her Sicilian husband and children. Simeti's books have included 'On Persephone's Island' (about Sicily and its myths) and several books about Sicilian cuisine. Here she retraces the route taken by Constance of Hauteville, a 12th-century Sicilian princess reputed to possess the most magnificent dowry Europe had ever seen, for her marriage to a German king in Pfalzerwald.

My own arrival in 1996 was easier, quicker, and considerably less dazzling than Constance's had been: I brought no mules, carried no treasure, made no perilous mountain crossings. My major challenges were to succeed in driving the car on and off the overnight ferry from Palermo to Naples.

Except for the usual traffic jam crossing the pass over the Apennines between Florence and Bologna, and heavy traffic around Milan, there were no problems, and we arrived at Como in time for dinner. By 11 the next morning, we had zipped under the Alps and were in Zurich. It felt as if we had robbed ourselves of time and space.

We crossed the German border near Schaffhausen and, going slowly now, drove west along the northern bank of the Rhine. The river itself is fairly wide in this part, but the fluvial plain is narrower: to the north a strip of rich fields, tightly farmed with what appeared to be forage crops, and then a dark line of fir trees – the southernmost hem of the Black Forest. Across the river and to the south, the Swiss side of the plain rose rapidly into foothills, beyond which the snow-covered peaks of the Alps closed the horizon like a freshly painted picket fence.

The vision of the distant mountaintops glowing in the sunset was tamed by the well-fed placidity of the Rhine in the foreground, the prosperous fields, and the highway running straight. Had it been the 12th century, however, we would have found ourselves surrounded by bogs and marshes, rotting bushes and fallen trees obstructing our progress, our path blocked each spring by the floodwaters of the great river obese with roaring masses of melted snows, the rafts at the fords drawn ashore for the season, the wooden bridges torn from their moorings.

We would have felt menaced by that ribbon of black trees to the north. The Black Forest hid bandits, both real and mythical, and wild men, long-haired and naked, who lived on roots and berries and ran amok. We would be thanking God that at least the mountains were behind us and that we had been brought this far in safety.

My idea of the Black Forest had always been strictly out of Grimm – virgin, dark and impenetrable, populated by Gauls who moved silently through the underbush, as at ease as deer. Caesar claimed to have marched through it for months without seeing sunlight. So be it, but that wasn't the forest of today. It wasn't black, and it wasn't composed of Norway spruce. I hadn't realised that a forest of conifers cannot reproduce itself, since the saplings die for the lack of the sunlight that the parent trees deny them. Without human maintenance, careful foresting, and clearance, the beech tree, the only tree that can reproduce itself in its own shade, will take over.

What we found as we drove northwest through gentle hills were stands of Norway spruce, dark indeed but with little or no underbrush, alternating with bright green meadows and threaded with carefully tended paths, quite crowded with young families, babies and backpacks bobbing on their shoulders, and older couples striding along with the help of walking sticks.

The meadow grass grew paler as the mist crept over it, laying big banks of fog over the lower valleys. We had decided to take the Schwarzwald-Hochstrasse, the upper road that would carry us up through the highest and densest part, which supposedly offered the most spectacular views. Here, however, the forest became white, ceding its black to the rain-clouds.

It was a relief to come down out of the fog and to cross the valley of the Rhine. The late afternoon sky was overcast and prematurely dark when we arrived at Annweiler, the small village that lies in the valley below Trifels.

That night my sleep was agitated by dreams involving Constance and the castle that we would be seeing the next day. I woke early, and lay in bed musing about Constance in the irregular thought patterns that belong to dawn, and gazing at the walls around me. The owner of the bed-and-breakfast was a big, sunny bear of a man who spoke only Greek, and the décor of his establishment had immigrated to Germany with him; souvenir amphoras and wall hangings embroidered with pictures of the Parthenon, Mediterranean kitsch rather than German Gemutclihkeit. I felt at home here, as Constance would have: she had grown up in a polyglot society in which the Greek language and culture played a prominent role ... the sound of someone speaking Greek would surely have aroused her nostalgia.

This is an extract from 'Travels with a Medieval Queen', by Mary Taylor Simeti (Phoenix, rrp £8.99). Readers of 'The Independent on Sunday' can order a copy for the special price of £7.99, including postage & packing (within UK) by calling 01903 828503 and quoting ref: jamq.

Follow in the footsteps

Take a hike

The area of the Black Forest, or Schwarzwald, is renowned for cuckoo clocks, hiking terrain, and its cuisine – famously its kirsch-fuelled gateaux. The Schwarzwald-Hochstrasse runs for 60km through the forest from Baden-Baden to Freudenstadt.

Getting there:

British Airways (0845 77 333 77; www.ba.com) flies to Stuttgart for £109 return. From there Deutsche Bahn (08702 435363, www.bahn.co.uk) runs trains to Baden-Baden for around £31 return. A double room at Hotel am Friedrichbad mit Prager Studen (00 49 7221 396340; www.hotel-am-friedrichsbad.de) costs from €99 (£66) per person per night based on two sharing, including breakfast. The Baden-Baden tourist board is on 00 49 7221 27 52 00, or visit www.baden-baden.de.

Alice Rooney