Milan - Bergamo (50 miles)

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 just is. Peace, happiness and the sublime. Nothing more.

So what's happened? Why is life so seamless now when hours ago it was an asphyxiating morass? How do I stop myself from going back?

1) Stay out of the city

I found this out a long time ago. The city offers no answers. I entered Milano with an open mind, that maybe this time it would be different, but look what happened. A few synthetic pleasures and a head full of frustration. I know there is more and the moment I see the mountains I know what it is. Designer shops and fancy restaurants just aren’t it. Art comes close and is still only a momentary glimpse.

It is only in this harmonious setting, the peaceful university town, with the floral hills and the chapel spires and the veneer of a sunset sky, that I feel content. Not empty – content. Wanting for nothing. Having all that I need. Happy with what I've got.

The city will never allow this feeling because the city needs you to want. You can never be happy. The city is not bellisimo.

2) Live in the real world

I am not completely impractical. I know I cannot spend every day sat on a balcony on the side of a mountain. I realise that I am going to be able to ride 70 miles a day forever, and that is why asking the questions that I am. How can I live like this in the real world? How can I work, socialise and have relationships and still feel this perfect freedom?

I don’t simply want this happiness to exist in an abstract universe and for my normal life to remain empty and hollow. I want it to apply to real life as well. Is that too much to ask?

I hope this next ten days are going to give me the answer and I am convinced that the country of beautiful art, stunning lakes, sun, beaches and tanned bodies, is the place to do it. The Greeks gave us the concept of love but the Italians showed us how to express it.

(Where would be without Botticelli?) So I reckon it is a pretty good place to find out how to understand beauty and live a beautiful life as well.

3) Stay in Hostels

Travelling alone is an important place to start. The capacity can only exist in this way. You can change to match someone else, change with a new group, but to actually change as a person you have to be without company. And you also must be in hostels.

They are the quintessential blank canvases – stripping you of all unnecessary ties to leave the bare essentials – a bed, a sheet and roof, and little else, with everyone is in the same boat. We all have to sleep together, warts and all. There is no class, no sense of superiority so it is much easier to feel comfortable. When you have slept in the same room as someone you hardly need to worry about being shy. And anyone who is willing to do this, over the age of around twenty-five, must be an interesting person.

Try these chaps from my room in Milan.

Alessandro the school teacher from Sicily. Hardly able to speak any English but still determined to pass on every ounce of local knowledge he can. Much drawing and gesticulating but all good information at the end. He is a strange premonition of exactly the Italian I am looking for.

David, the young French guy driving from Lyon to Modena to realise his life dream. Soon he will have a girlfriend and children, so he needs to do it now. What is he doing? Visiting the factories of Ferrari, Lamborghini and Maserati and Pagani, which all operate in a 20 mile vicinity of Modena. He has paid a lot of money that he does not have to do this, but hey, after this he will live in the real world and that is okay. We must work non? I admire his pragmatism. I agree with him. I accept the real world, but I don’t want to stop dreaming.

What about Marcos, the confident Belgian joker? He has his dream it seems – a very beautiful girlfriend - and is very happy because of it. He is only in Milan to go shopping. I like him much in the same way I like all Belgians. He is funny, self-deprecating and not willing to be taken in by the Milanese façade. He sings with the operatic busker outside the Duomo. He mocks me with English football chants.

The old German guy, I am not sure of his name. He is in his later forties and is here on...a cycling holiday! He has maps like me, and is doing similar distances - albeit on a much better bike and only for a few days - God bless the Germans! They make every thing I do seems alright. Stay in hostels at the age of 33? No problem. Walk around in Lycra shorts? Fine. A bit socially inadequate? Not a problem.

I like all of these people and in way I want to live like they do. But they all seem to have something to go back to. The Belgian has his girlfriend, the German his wife and family, the French kid his 'real' future. I am here to let something stay with me. I want a different person to emerge.

4) Figuration

I look out at the mountains and the sun setting.

How?

How can I represent this in my life?

How can I keep this world?

If I cannot exist in a dream world, then what do I do?

Milan must have told me something about this.

'In the evenings one should dress to impress.'

'A good house is decorated with at least twenty statues.'

'There is nothing wrong with making yourself look good.'

'It is okay to make the real world beautiful.'

How do you do this?

It is figuration! That is how to keep the mountains in your life!

Lets try it. How can I express where I am now?

Open

Expansive

Square walls

Height

Hope

Panoramic

Belief

Greater life

Triangle, circle, square.

Free.

In God's embrace

In the mountains you do not feel small or insignificant. You feel cosseted by nature, held in by the greatest arms in the universe. It makes me feel okay to think how I do – to believe in a body and a soul.

So to express?

Four walls surround by the art of the world. Space and natural forms. Minimal centre to outer sublime. No ugly blurring.

Maybe that should be my life.

Bergamo

This scenic town is quite the architectural oasis. After cycling through the commercial ugliness of the Milan suburbs the gradient begins to rise and Bergamo appears as a phalanx of Gothic spires and Baroque towers. It is like crossing the street into an open air museum.

This is of course, one of the oldest university towns in Italy and as I climb up the cobbled streets and dip under bridges into plush piazzas, I feel Cambridge and Oxford. It is different though. We may be in the Alps but the Lombardian subtleties remain. The overbearing grandeur of Kings College replaced by more natural forms – spires and gargoyles become fountains,and bell towers. As I climb to the Piazza Vecchia, and its medieval abbey I am reminded of Mont St Michel in Normandy, the winding alleys, boutique shops, however, the Piazza itself is different. A relaxing square of monastic cloisters and small fountains,much less showy than is French counterpart. Perhaps that is the Italian ideal – a communal utopia rather than a triumph of the self.

It is a pleasing contrast to the Milanese Duomo or the traditional English cathedral - gargantuan monuments that reach up to the heavens. I suppose this is what happens when you are surrounded by mountains – a much more diminutive form of reverence emerges.

What does it tell me about figuration and artistic thought? The mind looking over the machine of the body – a divide in Descartesian dualism. From the chattering commercial centre the bell tower and the abbey look over from the mountains – a spiritual plateau. This is a university town built for developing minds. This is the route to which they should aspire.

Aspire.

Look up.

Bergamo, I don’t know, is is perhaps too beautiful? So far it seems the Italians have this certainty about themselves – morality, expression, design – that they become aloof, non-human. It is not arrogant like the Americans can be, but it is has a Roman superiority about it.

It is the reason why they will never change the world in the same way I think, much in the way the British won't. The architecture seems stuck in a past so grand that nothing can be added to it. If I had been Raphael or Michaelangelo I would be been pretty happy with my lot as well thank you very much. However, walking through the streets of this town as a citizen of uncertain, secular age I still feel something is missing.

Socialism

The reason I, and I think everyone else in the world has an affection for Italians, is because of their capacity for expression. Their language, their mannerism and their existence as social beings is unsurpassed by any race in Europe as far as I am concerned. It is hard not to take pleasure in the company of an Italian because it is what they do – with family, friends, whoever. Their culture demands it. In Italy you does not cook a meal for one. You do not drink wine alone out of the bottle. You do not go to the piazza to be alone.

This is not a rich nation. There is not the disposable income to keep oneself amused. And because of this everyone is quite happy to talk to everyone else. Why wouldn't you? You are Italian! You can say what you think. You have been saying it all your life with your family and in the café, and you will keep saying it now. You don’t spend your time staring at a screen and considering new ways to make yourself sound awesome. You just do as Italians do.

What doesn’t necessarily follow is that what you have to say will be of any vast intellect or wit, but it does make you a good person to have around.

The longer I sit in the piazzas the more I see how simple it is. In my world 'having a chat' is something from a forgotten age, like open front doors and kids kicking footballs on the street. Does this make the Italians less evolved somehow than us super-modern nations? Spending most weekends with the family, eating together, sitting for long hours with your friends, it doesn’t quite happen in the same way any more. We mix with higher speed, in more synthetic environments and talk ourselves, but we don't simply socialise. We don't stay still for long. We can mix with anyone but don't ever take the time to bond.

Here there is just the one way and it is beautiful. Chattering hands are authentic, mouths passionate and eyes expressive. It is a Greek symposium, a factory tea break and a Christmas dinner. It is a family occasion every day. It is...it is...it is...it feels antiquated. I feel sat in a memory, a snapshot of how like once was, a place which does not meet up with the requirements of the modern age. We are more than our social group. We have a greater self. The Freudian ego is in control of all that surrounds us. We don’t need to dress to impress. We don't care about what our mother's think. There is a world outside the town square. We are bigger, we are better.

Let me out it another way. What is an Italian without being Italian? Compared to say a Belgian without being Belgian or a Dane without being Dane, or even a German without being German. Only the former feels entrenched in its milieu.

This does not necessarily mean that Italians are not great, cool, fun people but...but isn't there something a bit old-fashioned about being in a club? Aren't we not all now liberal, liquid, malleable, self-knowing human egos?

Then again, is this the right thing to be?