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Friends Dress As The Fellowship Of The Ring, Travel Italy, Cast Ring Into Volcano

Mark Foster

Published 

Friends Dress As The Fellowship Of The Ring, Travel Italy, Cast Ring Into Volcano

Featured Image Credit: Nicolas Gentile via Instagram

What did you do to celebrate the last big milestone in your life? Big night out with the squad? Go karting? Maybe paintball? Perhaps you and your closest buds dressed up as the members of The Fellowship Of The Ring and hiked across Italy to cast a ring into Mount Vesuvius? If you did that last one, there's a good chance your name is Nicolas Gentile.

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Nicolas is a 37-year-old pastry chef from Bucchianico, near Chieti, a city located on the eastern coast of Italy some 200 kilometers from Rome. Being from this quaint part of the Italian countryside, it began to dawn on Nicolas that the region of Abruzzo was very much like one of his favourite fantasy locales - J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth.

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Speaking in an interview with Wired Italy, Gentile said, "over the years I have realized that the hobbits could only be from Abruzzo. I live in a place where everything changes very slowly, my relatives are almost all farmers, like hobbits. And I too, who work in a pastry shop, do a very hobbit job. And so I said to myself: I too am a hobbit."

It's perhaps this reason that on August 27th, he and his Fellowship set out from Chieti to the Apennine Mountains to throw his ring into the famous volcano. Incidentally, that journey is just shy of 300 kilometres, compared to the 2100 travelled by Frodo and Sam. Still, I'm sure we can agree to cut Niclolas and his friends some slack. A similar distance on Earth would be like walking from London to Belarus' capital city of Minsk.

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Gentile documented his experience on his Instagram page, _myhobbitlife_ which has around 80 thousand followers at time of writing. In the posts, he shows off some of the stunning Italian countryside his group passed through on the week long route to their destination, and how much of it can be likened to some of the places described in Tolkien's Middle-earth.

Outside of his journey there and back again, Nicolas also operates the Gentile Project, which aims to convert parts of his native Chieti countryside into a sort of pseudo-Shire. He purchased land and has been crowdfunding to convert its use from agricultural to tourism, to be able to build the attraction.

There's no doubt that the interest generated by the walk to Vesuvius will help the project gain traction, and hopefully Nicolas' hard work will be rewarded in donations. As for the journey itself, it's made me really want to do something similar with my friends. Though I probably wouldn't kill Boromir for the sake of accuracy. Probably.

Topics: The Lord Of The Rings

Mark Foster
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