Riva Del Garda - Marmirolo (64 miles)

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 sure I do keep it all together. While I am sat on my bed, watching American music videos, drinking coffee and doing exactly what I normally would do at home, I don't want to just leave all I have experienced in a photographic montage. I want it to stay with me.

So 'hello.' 'This is me in Marmirolo. And so I don't forget here is what happened to the me in Lake Garda.

Lake Garda

It is a beautiful and strange utopian world, a canvas which human race has been very careful not to disturb. Around the side we have dabbed our brush here and there but in the centre the water remains untouched – a blue womb in the centre of mother earth – calming, bringing us back to where it all began. I feel like I can dive in and sink to heaven. If I stare at it long enough my mind will be cleansed and ready to start all over.

Shhhh

Come down

Come down in me

Blue

Beauty

Empty

Empty

I am not here to start again. I am here to live in the world. I am not ready to sink. The brushstrokes – these are what I want to consider – what they mean and how we can make them better.

The road that circumnavigates the lake is drawn from the easel of a master. As an undertaking it is a great example of how we can use ambition and technology in harmony with our environment and achieve an end result worth doing. To be on it is to not just look at the picture but be in it and move inside.

The small marinas.

The rowing boats.

The birds skating over the creamy surface.

The sails flapping in the morning breeze.

Riva Del Garda

The Italians are good at rendering. They don't destroy what has God has given them. If you have a Botticelli in your houses you don’t put it behind the fridge – you design the room around it. Lake Garda is the same. The resorts, the amenities, they are all there but they are placed well away from the main attraction. The Lake is the work of art and we are never distracted from this.

Okay, so it does have its ugly moment – theme parks, bars, some tacky Brighton-Pier constructions, a shit load of hotels which are all horrible of course, the uber-posh houses take up much of the West side of the lake - but there are some beautiful areas of simple natural forms and the road caresses these like a ribbon. The rising alpine peaks, the clouds resting on the water like sleeping angels and the water, always there, pure and blue as can be – this is what we see on our tour through the divine.

I thought of Garda and I thought of wealth, like a Monte Carlo but it is so different to that. The houses are more artistic – and art is part of human heaven for sure – but there is more of a focus on sport and recreation rather than thrills and gluttony. There is a lingering stench of wealth however, in the foundations of more bars and hotels and in great gaps of mud and concrete in the hills, and I wonder how long heaven may last. Money and wealth, no matter how creatively you wrap them up, still encourage ugly behaviour – jealousy, want, competition, etc. - and this is not for a heavenly vista. But now to cycle round, even at the point of total exhaustion, is a wonderful experience indeed – pure, breathless and sensual.

The beauty of it was so still and so sumptuous that I felt like I could dip my finger in and lick sugary syrup.

Did I realise it at the time? No, because I was in my Lake Garda self and I had adapted to all that surrounded me. Do realise it now? It is four hours since I left the shore and already I realise - I have left the womb and been expelled into a much uglier world. Take me back to the Lake!

Outside of Heaven

And yet...and yet it is not such a bad world I have emerged in. I may be in a rather tacky resort-town, and I suppose it has taken me a few minutes to get used to the tourists (of which I am one), the traffic and the garish colours, but now I have sat down, had a coffee and an ice cream things are not so bad. Wherever you are in Italy there is always the piazza, and the piazza is always what it is. You could be in the hills of Tuscany or the centre of Turin, or indeed on the outside of 'Gardaland' and there will always be a square of cafés, churches, fountains and pretty people on Vespas. Four walls of social Mecca. Why? Why do we not have such a haven in England?

How quickly I forget. When you have these fluctuations of personality your mind quickly adapts to its environment and adapts emphatically. Yesterday a rainy urban hell-hole. Today a sunny beach . Happy. The sun always shine doesn’t it?

No it doesn’t, not in England and certainly not by the beach. Sitting outside in a town square is not quite such a communal experience when it is hacking it down with freezing rain. There is not much point in a piazza if everyone is caged inside. That's why.

However,in Garda's utopian micro climate there are no such problems, so at one o'clock in the afternoon time is ripe for an espresso, a sundae and then maybe a siesta. Back in England you may scoff and lock down at this apparent docility but yours is a different world. In constant sunshine there is not such a need for productivity. The Italians are sure happier for it and so understand, better than us I think, that work is not the most important thing.

A Moment to Consider

Thank God for writing. Without I think I would forever be a stupid and vacillating mess. It seems that I am so used to having it there, that when I am living in the real world I become like a rock tumbling down a river. Expression bonds thoughts in a creative whole, otherwise they all sit in the mind jumping around on a bouncy castle. I am what I write, and at the moment I am writing about sunshine, ice cream and happiness.

Natural Substance

What these last few days have shown more than anything is just how close our relationship is with the world around us. Whilst I only began writing this entry a few hours ago and have only ridden another twenty miles since, I feel completely different because of where I am. In a lakeside café in the sun I am adventurous, relaxed, inquisitive – in a hotel room watching TV I am thoughtful, restless and self-obsessed. On a subconscious level I am good as a different person.

God, it is SO important. There is so little that can make us 'feel' in the modern world that these moments must be recognised and cherished and these environments maintained. You cannot replicate this on a laptop computer – the world or the feeling – you have to experience the difference and change within yourself.

Art can represent some element of it but it is only through direct sensation that it becomes a part of you, like a first kiss, like love, like a journey up a mountain.

There is something in nature, something that affects us so fundamentally that I feel we have not even begun to explain it.

So what? Aren't you getting all metaphysical again Ben?

How does this relate to how to live?

Well, I guess I no longer feel stale and helpless. I do have a capacity for change and if the environment is such then this change can still have meaning. What I do need to do is remember to realise it while I am there, in the moment, rather than so often in retrospect. I must be open to my feelings and express them more openly. Yesterday and today were new experiences and good ones, and that already makes being here worthwhile. I don’t know everything and I'm not everything I am going to be. There are more feelings out there, good and bad, and there will be more to come. Enjoy them and appreciate it because they are the moments that stay with you forever.

Sound of Silence

So away from Garda and into the olive groves and vineyards of the Po Valley and I find my aesthetic sensibilities once again drawn to different canvas. I stop, bring out my camera for a roadside shot and then think for a moment. Maybe there is a reason why I am not appreciating everything in the moment as much as I would like. Maybe it is because of this – this machine, that I am not seeing things as clearly as I should.

Instead of open-mindedness I am trying to render the moment with something familiar, a cliché, like some rustic scene from Jean de Florette or a Dolmio advert, and not just embrace my new surroundings. Fuck, I am really am a child of my time – so trained in film and popular culture that I find it difficult to enjoy what is actually here – particularly in the countryside and particularly when using a camera. I point the lens and I immediately think 'Facebook.' No-one cares! Just think about what is here!

I take a crap shot, get back on the bike and out of self-disgust, empty my mind.

Silence.

An empty road.

A bike chain whirring.

Olive trees and vines.

Sun beating down.

Peace

Its tranquil and frightening at the same time, just like silence always is. Embrace though, and it is the most natural sound in the world.

Vines and olives become my company. There are alive. It is like having an audience lined up, arms linked, cheering you on. They are singing, all together in perfect chorus.

Adaptation

So yes, I am not sure I quite have an affinity with Italy or the Italians yet. This in part due to my own incompetence at opening up to new environments but also not helped by the locals' general reticence to open up to strange, reticent men on bikes. Compared to the Germans or the Belgians, the races I feel most akin to, they do no have a super-sense of hospitality. It isn’t that they aren’t – get taken in by an Italian family for an evening and you will feel like the son they never had - but they do require you to make the first move. They are not going to open their doors that do not knock. I am not complaining. I hadn't bothered to learn the language and so they're not going to help me out. Fine. If I don’t walk up to the counter of that intimidating restaurant then they aren’t going to welcome in. Okay. Would we in England?

The thing is that the Italians are not rude or hostile. They are not like the French and are certainly not being rude on purpose. It isn’t arrogance – I don’t think the Italians have it in their Christian souls – I just think that in the hearts they are just as shy as I am. The Belgians are humble enough not to worry about it and the Germans far too confident, but adapting to the needs of others is not quite in the Italian mentality. They are not reticent with each other of course, but with outsiders there is an element of suspicion and inferiority. This is not Frankfurt or Brussels. Italians are not multi-faceted sophisticates.

I think this is changing, but even in ultra-modern Milan my cycling tour guide couldn't speak good English and every restaurant I encountered was uneasy with my custom. In a way it reminded me of England. It is difficult for us in the same way, we are not used to having to humble ourselves to actually learn a language and assume everyone will adapt to us. I like it because I am forced to try. I just wish I knew more to try with.