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 […]

“In Appia is my salvation”

“In Appia is my salvation,” I wrote in a journal entry shortly before I rode diagonally across the southern half of Italy, from Rome to Brindisi, following the historic route of the via Appia as accurately as possible.
Why do we make these trips, anyway? You’ve got your own personal reasons when you travel by […]

Now you can ride with me in Italy, even if you don’t ride with me

I’ve been getting a lot of emails (as well as a few comments added to old posts) from people wanting tips and advice on biking in southern Italy. Some of you are riding (or even hiking!) the Via Appia, and it’s a shame that it’s so hard to get a group of people together when […]

Biking in Italy–the sad truth and the happy implications

OK, this has bummed me out as much as it has a lot of you. After looking at the euro vs. dollar exchange rates, seeing how much touring Italy by bicycle is going to cost right now, and considering some interesting and exciting business prospects I have right now despite the general economic doom and […]

Touring Italy by bicycle in the age of the Euro

If you’re Canadian, British, Australian or from any English-speaking county other than the United States you can probably ignore this post.
But if you’re from the USA, and you want to tour Italy by bicycle, you may be worried about how much (or how little) your dollars will buy when you exchange them for euros.
Good news. […]

The bicycle touring class

I just got back a few days ago from a class put out by the Adventure Cycling Association–on how to “lead” a bike tour.
The takeaways are pretty well in line with what I’m planning for the bike tour in Italy this coming spring:
You don’t really lead as much as you provide support and guidance so […]

On Biking and southern Italian wine

I made a small discovery this week. And it ties in with my plans to bike the Appian Way in southern Italy. I’ll tell you more about it in a minute, but first you need some background.
With all the air pollution, even in rural Italy, you need your antioxidants. An Italian study compared the antioxidant […]

The southern Italy bike tour: How much will it cost?

A lot of people have been asking what it’s going to cost to trek across the via Appia from Rome to Brindisi next spring.
I posted this on a separate page that I thought would just be for touring Italy by bicycle, but I’m still learning WordPress and the FAQs page is hard to find, even […]

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