Sestri Levante - Piacenza (94 miles)

Another day of perfect simplicity. Climbing, descending, pushing and coasting, trying to stay hydrated, trying not to pass out, keeping positive, staying positive, god its a long way, long way...long way...and here we are again, back in town looking for dinner. Its been just another day but another day where I've experienced a world beyond my dreams, more dynamic and fluid than I thought possible, and that has changed me forever.

The road from the coast, through the Appennino Settentriole and into Bobbio was the most incredible I have ever ridden. I know I've talked a lot about roads and I thought I'd seen it all – the Stelvio Pass, the Cabrillo Highway, even the Lake Garda tunnel-fest – but this was something else entirely.

The climb up to the picture postcard paradise was something I had become used to – villages, green hills, rustic cafés and bell towers, but then I reached a small crossroads by a café in Ferriere and had a choice to make. Take the route with the extra mountain pass or the route without the extra mountain pass. I went with the former. Little did I realise what a decision I had made.

A Drop into Paradise

The descent was around 20 miles in length, but God, every mile was packed with more Italian madness than a thousand Roman piazzas. It varied in design, sometimes a two lane highway, sometimes a residential pothole-fest, sometimes a single-lane track on a deadly precipice, all the while winding through never-ending mountains of rock, a million luscious trees, following the blue cascade of the River Trebbia as it crashed towards Piacenza, 60 miles in the distance.

Turns came like thunder-claps in a storm, slopes like tsunamis. I descended faster, faster...fassstterrrr...boom! - thousand foot drop - break, break, break, then turn again – bump, bump, bump, dowwwwnnnn. Brake!

Parts of the road weren’t even finished. Abandoned roadworks littered the asphalt, perhaps to be finished another day; signs predicated death defying floods from a nearby hydro-electric dam, currently under-construction - I wondered which they were planning to finish first - then tunnels, bridges, more sweeping curves and a truck attempting to climb the other way. The whole place felt like the lair of a dictator planning world domination.

All of which made it almost undriveable for a normal car but incredible for cycling. Once I overcame the fear and accepted my flimsy body being tossed about like a crisp packet, the descent became an elemental love affair

I let the river guided me down. We floating through the tress and gushed through the rock. Tyres rolled through stones and bones shuddered down crevasses; you curve this way then that way, I dive and fly, and we flow forward unfettered, silently speeding towards the sea.

This was cycling as nature, at its most exhilarating and dynamic. I have never felt closer to the world as it moves with me. 

A History Lesson

So to complete this life-affirming day I have had a wonderful evening in the piccolo villagio of Calendasco. There is a lot to write about and a lot more to think through. In two superlative weeks this has been the twenty-fours hours that I will remember the most, for the cycling, for the company and for the understanding.

Okay, so we know about the cycling, which I have now know has taken me through one of the most celebrated descent in the whole Italy, but there is so much more to it than that. Hemingway no less described the road from Bobbio through the mountains as the most beautiful he ever took. Hannibal used it to support his troops as they rode on their elephants over the Alps. Thousands of pilgrims pass through here every year on the way to Rome.

God, I am so egotistical I pay no attention to the history of the places I ride through aside from what they mean to me. Greater men have trod these paths and greater will in the future for sure. Does it matter what I think? Maybe, maybe not, but it is better to be somewhere amongst them rather than

watching in a far away dream.

So where has a hobo like me been gaining this insight? From my hosteliers of course, the mother, the son and the husband, in between cooking dinner, showing off their wine cellar, building a patio and welcoming friends who turned up in a Maserati.

The family were of English descent, which may explain the special treatment, but had lived in Italy for twenty years and had retired to set up this village retreat. While there they also found the time to take in twenty Ghanese refugees and provide them with vocations in the nearby towns, to the detriment of their business -Italians put off staying in a house with black faces (a sad truth about much of this mostly progressive country).

A friendlier, more cosmopolitan atmosphere I could not have wished for then, and the food was beyond wonderful. They fed me first with the 'Cuppa' meat from the neck of the pig – killed six months ago and hung in their cellar – with some local goats cheese that tasted as fresh as the water of Trebbia. After this it was Pasta with home-grown vegetables and then the offer of chicken livers that were the son's speciality.

I gave enthusiastic appreciation and then tried to field questions about my other engagement with the local cuisine. Had I not tried to Florentine steaks or the Bologna Ragu? What about the Ham in Parma? Did I know that Parma had stolen Parmesan from the Piacenzans? Parma – a town of avaricious thieves. They are businessman only interested in money, while the Piacenzans put in the work and the art into food. Branding. Branding is all it is.

I was then asked about my wine consumption. I tried to explain that riding 100 miles a day does cause you to develop different culinary requirements to your average restaurateur. The shocked silence said it all.

'Are you a Muslim?' the father asked.

How well these indigenous Lancastrians had adopted everything I had come to know about this country – its regionality, its prizing of expertise and lack of any respect for outside knowledge, certainly not about food anyway.