Umbrella pines and the Pontine Marshes

I woke up to a cold fog, and couldn’t wait to get back on my bike and start moving. I was in the Pontine Marshes, and the Romans were in a hurry to get through, too, when they built the via Appia.
Here the Appian Way shoots forward in a perfectly straight line.  the Romans probably […]

The first day biking via Appia: “A place clean and civil”

Riding out of Rome on an old Raleigh 10-speed, you’re going to feel like a gladiator that just walked out into the ring. It’s a battle getting out.
In fact, you are in a ring, the Grande Raccordo Annulare, the highway that circles the outskirts of Rome. Several main roads cut across this ring and […]

“Impossibile!”

Dottore Pascuale Grello was incredulous when I showed up at his office unannounced one morning and told him what I wanted to do.
“Impossibile!” he insisted, pronouncing the word with long vowels: eem-poh-SEEEEEE-bee-lay!
Nobody knows how many millions of nobles, senators, philosophers, soldiers, merchants, prisoners, slaves, poets and bandits have followed the route of the Appian Way […]