Italy

Bergamo was the start of a ten day tour of cities and towns in north east Italy. Strange really as cities are never our first choice place to visit when travelling by bike – busy traffic, lots of people, large areas to cover – and we had not really planned on visiting any until Venice. But somehow we ended up going to several.

With panniers full of clean clothes and feeling slightly refreshed (fully refreshed is just a pipe dream) after a day off, Brescia was our first stop. We had our lunch picnic by Lake Iseo in Clusane, where well dressed retired pensioners stroll (we looked very out of place and got the usual mixture of staring and intense questioning in Italian). From the lake we followed a rare and lovely Italian bike path through vineyards and small villages, which was very well signed until it wasn’t and we lost it. Ah well. With the days so short we invariably arrive places in dusk/dark, combined with rush hour traffic this isn’t too pleasant but we were happy to pass the 2000km mark in the centre of Brescia next to an impressive 11th Century duomo.

Arriving in Verona at night (well 5.30pm…)

From Brescia the next city stop was Verona, ‘home’ of Romeo and Juliet and a Roman arena still used for summer opera. We rode via Lake Garda, usually a busy tourist hot spot but weirdly desolate in October – strange to us at it was still so warm but the holiday season is very much over now which makes touristy places very strange places to ride through. As above we arrived in Verona in the dark which at least meant we saw the centre lit up with the arena looking particularly spectacular. It also rained for the first time in a while which was a bit of a shock to the system and made the cobbled Italian streets even more frightening on a bike, especially when our host for the evening told us a story about falling off her bike and breaking both elbows after slipping on a wet cobble…

On the look out for a small town to relax for a day before reaching Venice, we turned south and rode along flat roads (this part of Italy is particularly level so we hadn’t ridden up a hill in a while) to Montagnana, a small town with well preserved medieval walls the whole way around. Now who doesn’t love a good walled town, and as the youth hostel there had a garden for camping we had found our ideal rest stop. The Italians who ran the place thought we were mental for wanting to camp and their tone implied that we were bound to die from hypothermia, despite it hovering around 7-8 degrees at night. After assuring them that as English people we were confident of our survival we cooked a gourmet meal (it included meat and no pasta), slept warmly in the tent and had a relaxing day wandering the city walls and drinking coffee in the sunshine. It would be easy to miss Montagnana while speeding through the more famous Italian cities in the area but we would highly recommend a visit.

And so on to Venice, the destination we have always had in mind as the end of leg one of the trip. Yet as you can’t take bikes into the city, leg one actually ended with a train journey into the centre to explore on foot. The weather was perfect, the crowds not too busy, and strolling around St Marks square it was a strange thought that we had pedalled (almost) all the way there from Leicestershire. We also saw the most selfie sticks per square metre of the trip so far, perhaps not surprising, but the average age of a selfie stick user in Venice seems to be around 57. Took them ages to get the shots lined up. The next couple of days we rode through miles of farmland with mountains always over our left shoulder to Aquileia, a town with a lot of Roman ruins (many still unexcavated) and once the second biggest Roman city. The ruins are very impressive, well worth a closer look when you are in the area visiting Montagnana…

Our final Italian stop was Trieste, the biggest city we had ridden in yet and a place where cyclists are massively outnumbered by mopeds. It has a very fancy square with buildings on three sides and the sea on the other, but it’s not a place recommended for cycling. Somehow we escaped the city after eventually finding the bike route that would take us through Slovenia and into Croatia.

So after two weeks it was time to leave Italy, a country that exceeded our high expectations, bathed us in the sunshine we were desperate for during those cold days in France/Germany and re-introduced us to partially complete cycle routes that take you off busy roads only to divert you back onto them a few hundred metres later. Made us feel much less homesick, so thanks.

Huge thanks for this stretch to Aldo and family, Donatella and Luciano, Alberto Sabrina and Agata, Francesco and Elena, Francesco and Giulia, and all the retired Italians who have marvelled at our journey so far…

North of the Alps we were rarely given more then a cursory glance; travelling by bike in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Switzerland is nothing to write home about. We blended in. But, welcome to Italy, the country where two girls on heavily loaded bikes with GB flags on are not the norm. When car drivers overtake us, most slow down and follow us with their stare as they pull back in (which involves them looking out of the side window behind them rather than at the road), often with open mouths. Old Italian men seem fascinated by the bikes and the luggage, often chatting away to us in Italian whilst counting the number of bags we have, unperturbed by the fact that we just smile and nod. Mouths drop open when we say we have ridden 2000 kilometres, a phrase even we can manage in Italian.

Crossing the Alps was not just a physical boundary between the ‘warm up’ ride to get there and the ‘real adventure’. Life on the road is different in many ways this side of the mountains. Italy is the first county we haven’t cycled in before, so everything is new. Bike routes are limited so we spend a long time finding routes on quiet roads, only to scrap them later in the day and stick to a bigger straight road in order to get anywhere. The language is almost unknown to us; we are learning the basics but it is hard not to be able to converse with those wide mouthed Italians who greet us in every town and fire questions at us. Road cyclists in full gear fly past all day. Campsites are closed. Also the clocks changing has made our riding day even shorter. But the sun is out (mostly). Also, we are slowing down. Our mission to get over the mountains in search of warmer climates and new places to cycle meant that we pushed on most days, whereas now we are meandering more, joining up places we want to visit, taking a day off here and there.

The descent from the mountains took us through Italian Swiss territory, where everyone spoke Italian and the driving became a little more crazy. Italy in everything but the name (and the prices). Our first lake stop was by Lake Maggiore, where we didn’t see George Clooney but with did meet Benardo, a cafe owner (and interestingly the designer of the first electric car) who invited us to camp on his ‘balcony of the lake’. Our tent could not have been closer to the lake shore, a perfect spot to wake up. Dennis from the Netherlands was also camping there and helping Bernardo with his work; Dennis had cycled over the Gotthard Pass too but on a Dutch shopping-style bike in bad weather. Made our ride over look easy. From Lake Maggiore we road east mostly in Switzerland, spending our last francs before staying in Como back in Italy. A sunny day was spent riding up and down the ‘inverted y’ base of Lake Como, ending up in Lecco where we actually found an open campsite on the lake. The following day we wound our way through small villages to get to Bergamo. Our route crossed a charity run/walk/bike ride several times – at one point we came across a fundraising stall selling fruit who did the usual open-mouthed gasping at our bikes and journey and then plied us with coffee and cake and filled our panniers (well actually Debs has the food pannier much to my relief) with oranges and mandarins.

Bergamo has an old town, ‘citta alta’ on the top of a hill, and riding towards this we were reminded of how great it is to arrive by bike – views emerge slowly and you can appreciate the shift in terrain to get there (although maybe not during the ride up steep cobbled streets, but definitely after). The narrow streets and busy Sunday crowds were a bit of a nightmare to navigate walking the heavy bikes but it gave good opportunity for more staring. After a good look/walk/ride around we rode to the youth hostel up on another hill that had a great view of the old town. We checked in, sneaked our bikes into the room (becoming standard practice for us in hostels) to find that we had our own balcony and amazing view. Drinking €2 a bottle (this is not the cheapest) red wine from plastic beakers and watching the sky turn red over the old town, life in Italy was not bad at all.

Thanks to Bernardo and Dennis, the Italian road cyclists who encouraged us up the hills and the volunteers for ‘friends of Africa’ who fed us…

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Italy part 2: Cities and cobbles

Italy part 1: Sunshine and staring