Benjamin Evans - Author

This, the third of my cycling adventures, is a trip to discover an ethic. While America was about finding identity and the Alps a journey into the metaphysical the Italian Adventure is about trying to work out how to live my life. How to live a beautiful life. How to live – Bellisimo. I am at a point where I really am going to have to figure this out. I am 33. I am not going to have liberty forever. Soon I am going to have accept an existence in the world of careers and children and marriages and nice houses, and that's fine, I know one day that this will happen and that's okay. Its a nice way to live. But who am I to be as a part of it? Have I become all I wanted to be and if so, how do I know I have? I thought I was all I wanted to be at twenty and I am certainly not the same as I was then. Can I still change and do I want to? At the outset of this adventure the answer to the latter of these questions is a nonchalant 'no.' I am hopelessly secure. I ha...

City Break I don’t think I'm REALLY in Italy yet. I am in a 'European City,' just like I am when I'm in Brussels or Munich or Paris. There are familiar shops in familiar places. There is a station and a line of hotels. There is the historical centre and the big church in the middle. There is the posh bit with nice shops. There is the theatre bit. There is the trendy bit, there is the ugly bit. Once you've been to enough of these places you know exactly what to expect. You develop a routine, you see things in a normal way and so the whole point of travel becomes lost. Yes the shops will be different, the cathedral a different architectural design and there will be a slightly different culture, but fundamentally you are in a 'city' and it is the same all around the world. You aren't broadening the mind, only colouring in a few spots. Not all cities are like this – Berlin, New York, Ghent – but many, many are and they're so well pack...

Sometimes its difficult to explain things. Yesterday evening I was outside my Milan hostel, drowning in a vortex of drunk French teenagers, worrying about the cycling and considering whether just to get drunk and go to a nightclub. It was a hot and sweaty night. I was lost in a swamp. But then this morning I get on the bike, I ride out of the city, I see the mountains and feel the empty road and it all flows away. Now I am sat on a hostel balcony above the historic town of Bergamo, green hills stroking my face and the sunset bathing my eyes, and I have forgotten all of it and I am happy. I spent weeks and weeks trying to work out all the stupid problems in my head, then half a day's cycling with an alpine backdrop and its all solved without me even thinking about it. 2+2? 3x3? 158 x 3.142? This isn’t the way to do it. I know that I now. The answer is already there. Its here – right here. It not right or wrong – its not 2x2 or if-this-then-that, it...

Fuel: Cornflakes – 3 large bowls Coco-pops – 1 bowl Bread rolls x 4 Yoghurt x 1 Cappuccino x 2 Snickers x 3 Kit Kats x 4 Sprite x 1 Ham Prosciutto x 1 Chocolate Milk – 1 pint Ice Cream – 3 scoops Pizza x 1 Lasagne x 1 Beer – 2 pints Mountain passes x 1 Tunnels illegally rode through x 2 Highways illegally ridden on x 1 Beautiful lakes x 2 Torrential downpours x 1 Near death experiences x 1 Up Today was one of 'those' days that will stay with me forever. I feel changed as a person. The intensity, the stress, the beauty, the highs and lows, these do not fade away. They change they way you think about the world. After 120 miles, after all the introspection and soul-searching and feeling like the next breath may be my last, what has stayed with the most is the realisation that in at the end of it this is not that hard to do. A bike, food, water and hope and you're off into a new world. Its that simple. Down ...

A New Normality Let me know try and take stock of the last day and a half, through which I have found new sides to myself and further insight into the staggering beauty of the world. I am in a hotel, of sorts, in a small Italian village and I am watching TV. Nothing has changed. I am back to normal. It as if it all happened to a different person. But it didn't. It happened to me, even though at times I feel like five people at once. Milan was a different person, Bergamo a different person, and the Ben who sat in the Gatwick departure lounge? A person I feel like I have never even met. Did I say yesterday how I balanced I was? Does balance mean keeping hold of your different identities and still finding a whole person at the end? The speed at which I change it is a wonder whether I have anything to hold on to. How do I decide. Why am I the person I am now? 'Now you're just somebody that I used to know.' I think the important thing is to make su...

A New World The more the journey proceeds the more unexpected things become. I am in ITALIA proper and it is nothing like anywhere I have been before. When, for example, have a ridden on a country road that was completely straight and flat for over twenty miles? Not a highway. A country road, with no cars and nothing surrounding it except farms and olive groves. It reached the point where even singing failed to keep me entertained and I know a lot of songs. How about the clouds of pollen that were thicker than fog on a swamp? Like riding through a comfort blanket I wanted to close my eyes and have a nap, not pedal over a concrete expressway. At one point the fluff became so intense that I was worried I might suffocate and my corpse blow off in the wind. Then, when I opened my eyes, the woods around me looked like an Arctic forest and the sun still burnt down on my arms. Was I alive? What world was this? In the Po Valley I took a wrong turn found myself on s...

Marmirolo, was that yesterday morning? Now you're just somebody that I used to know. So here I am, halfway through an odyssey of beauty and the aesthetic wonders just keep on coming. Florence is mind blowing, truly, and I fear I may be never be able to leave. As I stepped into the Duomo Square, Tuscan countryside lingering pleasantly in my thoughts, the Renaissance hit me with a sculpted marble mallet. What the... How... What the fuck? Brunelleschi's unbelievable cathedral was so immense, so ridiculous, that I wasn't sure what to do. I hard never seen a design like it. Its a place of worship, it shouldn't be so liberal, playful, sexual, staggeringly beautiful. What do I do? What do I feel? I have experienced this kind of intensity only two of three other times, most recently stepping into Times Square at night, and the sensory overload, the sheer audacity of the visual experience renders you almost helpless. In...

The Birth of Venus Okay, so I have given myself a day off cycling heaven and what better way to spend it than a visit to the Ulfizzi – the home of Renaissance art. Here it is – the Age of Enlightenment – right here, where our penance finished and man decided that the world was beautiful again. It takes a while to acclimatise. Being here, surrounded by such works, is like waking up next to the most beautiful person you have ever slept with - for a while you cannot believe they are there, that they look like they do, then they open their eyes and speak to you and you, and you still thinks its a dream, until finally they kiss you and you realise it is real. This is what is like coming face to face with a Botticelli or a Raphael or a Di Francesco. You look, then blink and look again, and try and take in what you are seeing. Then you look back, closer this time and open your mind and your soul, and then it becomes real and powerful and intensely beautiful, more...

I haven’t really got on with Rome so far. It's okay, but with every square I step into, every obelisk that rises up, I thank God the for the Renaissance, Florence and for Botticelli. One phallic symbol after another, fountains ejaculating in turn, roads marching in formation, its like walking through one long pissing contest. Here is the world before Venus blew in on her seashell and it is desperate for a feminine touch. A Garden of Gnomes The Trevi Fountain is the first landmark I turn to and I guess it does provide some aesthetic respite. It is grand, mad and wonderfully Baroque. The sculpted white stone is elegant and there is a classical harmony about the design, but...it is preposterous. In the right context there is no doubt this is the most incredible fountain ever built, but sitting as it does, off a side street between some posturing Roman roads, it's like meeting God in the vegetable isle in Tescos. I like it because it is such an o...