Back to reality. Still 400 km to go. Having had my bout of feeling sorry for myself, I got back on the bike and was fine. I wanted to call this section “The Sprint to Rome” or “Go like Hell” but “The Slither to Rome” or, maybe, “The Slump to Rome” would be more accurate.
Essentially the first day was a straight run down the coast then a bit of left hand down a bit until I hit Pisa.
And so it was. There were a few small things worthy of note in the opinion of your (not so) humble storyteller.
The date was August 15th. Apparently this is some religious holiday associated with the not so virginal Mary. Actually religion is a real surprise here, nobody gives a toss. It is not just that they don’t know what is the excuse for a mid-summer holiday, there are very few churches so, most of the time, I am guessing the time. Everybody was out on the beach and I didn’t hear any church bells and certainly nobody off to church. Not so stupid, the Italians. (By the way, I have noticed in the last couple of weeks, when looking for a glance at somebody’s wristwatch that only about 20% of people in southern France and Italy where such devices. I have always assumed that it is pretty close to 100% of British adults but maybe I am wrong and lots of people rely on their phones for the time).
I also got my first really good example about Italian beach holidays. I was riding along 100 metres from the Med and barely saw it. It was fantastic. Between the road and the sea is (every twenty metres) a separate block which has, as you approach the sea, a car park, a building consisting of three parts – 1 A restaurant out off the sun; 2 A section which is small changing rooms, presumably hired out by the day; 3 A cafe facing the sea; and then there is the beach covered in sunshades and recliners in straight lines, of course, right down to the sea. The only variation is the roof, which might be covered or open, and the type and shade on the sunshades. If you cycle slowly you can just see the sea occasionally. If I said that this went on for a couple of kilometres, I would be lying, it went on for fifteen or twenty kilometres without a single break. There was a cycle track down parallel to the road for most of it. The trouble is that it is crap. 1. It is shared with pedestrians who wander everywhere, so you can never get up any speed, 2. It is rough, so you can never get up any speed and 3. It is crossed by roads every couple of hundred metres and you have to give way to them, so you can never get up any speed. I quickly changed back to the road and left the cycle track to the bike hire people it was intended for. (Unfortunately, this happens a lot on Italy and I will not repeat the incidents later, but it is a shame, there are many cyclists in Italy and good cycle tracks would be well used.)
It is notable that 99% of the cyclists in all the right gear, with the helmets, drop handlebars, flash clothing etc. are male. Even the casual cyclists, going to work or just out for a gentle plod, are 80% male. Sad.
It was quite a relief to come to something that resembles a proper town with a small harbour, except in the town there were a couple of km on the sort of esplanade where there were lots of people selling tourist shite – who buys this stuff?
Quite a pleasant little harbour and I am just on the way out of town when I get a thump in the back! After three weeks I am no longer a beginner but a competent and confident cyclist so I don’t fall off, just start to slow down when the cyclist in front of me suddenly is covered in water. It is the local kids on scooters throwing water-filled balloons at cyclists. Nobody seems to get upset about this so why should I. I imagine it is something to do with the mid-summer, not so virginal Mary holiday. Anyway, the next time one hits me, I realise that it hadn’t burst and stopped to pick it up and put it in my handle-bar bag. Sure enough moments later I saw a pedestrian this time get doused. Am I quick enough to extricate the balloon from my bag in time to hit the kids on the scoter? Stupid question. I dumped the water bomb about 15km later when I thought that you would all miss these pearls of wisdom if the little machine that I write them down on got drowned by the balloon exploding in the handle bar bag. See how selfless I am, I think of you all the time, dear reader.
Naturally, after all this I had to retrace my steps into town. The Italians are good at dead-ends. They mark “No through road” when there are no turnings off the aforementioned “No through road” but if there are other turnings why bother. The fact that they are all dead ends is hardly relevant, it seems. Perhaps that is not clear. If you go down a road that splits into five branches, none of which reaches another road, each branch when it splits off will have the appropriate marker (usually) but there will not be one at the original point to suggest that all options will reach dead ends. Not helpful and, of course, makes you think quite often “Is this a ******* dead end” when you make a choice. So I did an extra three km just for the fun of it. Of course, in the main part of the next town everything is equally well marked so I only wasted another twenty minutes there.
Despite my not-so-early start, I do some serious pedal pounding for the last 20km and reach Pisa at 4. Even with my navigation it was only an 80 or 85 km day.
Oh yes, I haven’t bored you with my early start theory have I. 1 ½ hours equals 25km. A fifteen minute break. This means that if you start at 8 you will have done 75 km by 1 and you can call it quits for the day if it is a nice place or you can have a long lunch, start again about 3.30 or 4 and you will have done 125 km by about 7; a very full day.
Never happened, the only starts before 9, at the earliest were ditch days or the odd scratched car. Lunch time and siesta time are the quietest times on the roads so you want to maximise distance between noon and five. If you are not plodding uphill there is a breeze to keep you cool, even if it is normally developed by my going at rather less a speed than Fabien Cancellara did in this year’s Individual Time Trial. He averaged, AVERAGED, 51 kilometres an hour for over an hour. If I ever reach 51 kms per hour it is downhill and it has to be a very, very smooth for me not to be braking; and that is what Cancellara averaged. Oh well, it was an interesting theory – the 75 km by lunch bit – based upon my knowledge of geography, confounded by the reality of French and Italian life. The thing with doing lots of distance in the heat of the afternoon is that, you may feel OK but you do dry out very quickly so you have to stop every hour or so to refill your water bottle and take on other liquids. How sad.
Pisa is splendid. There are huge numbers of tourists, of more nationalities than Avignon, but they don’t overwhelm the place. The main architecture is in marble and 12th-14th century when Pisa was a real power (before Florence bullied her into shape) but the rest of the place is pretty good too. Despite my antipathy to religion (and particularly the three evil Middle Eastern, monotheistic ones) I was impressed. There was an echo from Avignon in making comparisons to the Aghia Sophia in Instanbul, again. Not really up to the mark, but not bad. I was impressed by the cemetery (this is a building) and the leaning tower is white. I didn’t go up it. I wasn’t prepared to pay 15€. When you have been up three of the four largest TV towers in the world, you don’t really expect a fifteen metre tower to be worth the bother. Nice place though, well worth a visit if you haven’t been. Nice hotel too (Hotel Roma) just outside the tourist stuff – decent room but it was the good staff that I liked.
One small incident. Somebody commented that my beer was big enough. I explained that 200 ml cost 4€, 400 ml cost 6€ and a litre cost 8 ½€ so there was no real choice. That was my first conversation with a native English speaker since Bart left. But then I am a cantankerous fart who doesn’t waste his breath on many people.
To give myself an easy ride into Rome my objective the following day was do 100km so that I would only about 240 out. Well I did my 100, in fact I did at least 150 but only ended 120 nearer to Rome and where did I spend the night? Yes, you guessed.
I supposed I should have guessed at the start of the day. Livorno seems to be the right road so off I go. Troubles are: 1. It is due west, I want to go south-east; 2. There is an airport and a railway line running parallel south of the road so there are no turnings; 3. There is a headwind of 20-30 kph so I am down about four gears and working hard; 4. When the wind starts blowing pine cones off and they smash apart on the road in front of me, I do begin to wonder whether my head gear decision was soundly based, even if I could get my straw hat to stay on it would not have been a great deal of use. Thank god for the balloons yesterday, nothing that hits me will make me panic now.
Shortly before Livorno I was directed south, thank goodness. As one does, I noticed a rather attractive young lady sitting under a tree on her mobile and wondered what was she doing there. On this sort of trip one wonders many things. I had bought a device to tell me current speed, trip distance, average speed etc. to counteract such issues but it had never worked, Bart had failed to get the instructions and there are only two buttons to press. It was useless from the start. It did occasionally show current speed, normally 32 something when the bike was stationary, It did for a couple of days after Bart had left show English time but didn’t like that so stopped, it sometimes shows lap time of 54 minutes odd and, more recently it started showing 199.1 and has now crept up to 234.3. Trip distance perhaps?
Anyway I digress. A couple of km later there is another girl, and then another. They must be working girls. It is noon on a Monday morning. These girls must be desperate. How do the punters know to come down this particular road (Livorno is a port) and who is looking for a quickie at noon on a Monday morning? The world is still a mysterious place to me. I could have sworn that the last one I saw said “Habari garni” to me but I must have been imaging it. “Habari garni” is “How are you” in Swahili.
Nice road though and I am now definitely good at pounding those pedals. Colourful flowers but it is difficult to see anything special about Tuscany – I clearly lack St Tony’s perspective. Get back towards the coast. Life is pretty good. The only problem is those dead ends. I had two during the normal day, mainly due to do with my favourite road, the SS1, now having motorway restrictions.
But the country has changed. Previously I had seen little actual agriculture, except the odd ploughed up wheat field, since La Spezia. Most of the land was left fallow – EU subsidies? How would I know. Now the olive groves started to appear, there were still some very tired sunflowers, there was even the odd vine grove as well as a bit of maize and the aforementioned ex-wheat fields. Obviously the vine groves are unusual because a very large percentage of Italian wine is industrially produced and has little to do with grapes. I should know, I have been drinking sugary water (sorry dry white wine) for a few days now.
So by the time I reached this seaside town about 5.30 I have done my 100 but, because of doubling back, I am still 250 from Rome. I felt OK and decided to do the extra 20 and I flew. Oh dear, Oh fucking dear. There are ten hotels in the desired town and after six had said “completo” I got the idea.
It was gone 7 by then and the sun was going down. Another 10 km retreat off the peninsular so I am still not plus 100kms for the day and head south through this industrial stuff; and I mean industrial. There was nothing growing and all I could see were industrial complexes on the coast two or three km away.
This is getting irritating. I had done the distance, not wasted time and it was going dark in the middle of nowhere. Pound those pedals; something will happen.
Well it does, of course. Lesson number two about Italian beach holidays. Everyone camps and I mean everyone. Well clearly not quite everyone, those bastards in my hotel room for starters. Now I know where all those people hiring changing cabins for the day came from, they are often in plastic wooden huts but they are on camp sites. I stop at a couple. The huts are full and so are the camp grounds. The camp ground is not full but I do not have a tent. I don’t need a tent, I have a survival bag and sleeping bag liner; that is enough. No tent, no stopping. I didn’t actually need a campsite but a shower, a meal (these campsites are large) and a few snifters to put me to sleep seemed quite sensible and I would have happily handed over ten or fifteen euros for the privelidge. Perhaps the campsite staff were concerned about their other guests and had heard about my night noises!
By now it is getting seriously dark. My back light is flashing happily but front lights on bikes are, how canI put this, a complete waste of time outside cities; they Illuminate an area of about one square metre, which is fine if you are standing still but when you are doing 15-20kph they are useless. Apart from that, mine only points upwards over my handle-bar bag! Anyway, who needs to see where they are going except when there is competition. I manage another ten km or so like this and just before a town see a restaurant. This is, essentially, a truckers’ pit stop but it will do me. I ate quite a lot (a long time since breakfast) and drank some wine but ten was chucking out time. I may have been quite tired but I am not Bart, who can sleep at all and any time, midnight has become my ridiculously early bedtime on this trip and that is in a bed so, no way can I find a ditch there and then and “settle in” for the night.
The town 2 kms up the road is absolutely heaving with life. I try a few places but the local hucksters are out and I get offered places at 120 and 100. I decline, retire to the internet cafe and cram some alcohol down me. Service was slow (as in everybody else was drinking soft drinks, nothing or sipping something disgusting) so not enough of the desired sleeping material was ingested – well maybe it was, my cycling was less than perfect afterwards. My battery was running out for writing this drivel so I had to leave.
Ride about 3 or 4 km out of town and wobble off the bike in a layby. I know that the sea is just over a sand dune somewhere but in my search for it won’t leave the bike to climb the necessary lump because I doubt that I will find it again, it was that dark (or I was that ??) Bad decision, bad night’s kip all of five metres from the dual carriageway. I thought I was up with the lark but no, there were some people who had earlier stopped in the layby who were just back from their early morning tomfoolery on the beach. Who makes these people? Don’t they have a life? Surely they should be lying in bed with a hangover. Worst breakfast yet, water and BP pills.
What else to do but pound those pedals. I am getting really good at this; I easily do 20kph on the flat and can even rush a ten metre climb without breaking rhythm or changing down. Well OK, 5 metres.
Anyway, I do lots of km including on a good cycle track for a dozen kilometres but then have to get back on the main road. What happens next, and this is becoming routine, I hit the delightful Autostrada. I have no idea where to go; I want to go the Autostrada direction. Fart about and choose the smallest road that looks like it is going south thinking “Oh God, Oh Jesus, Oh Someone” don’t make me have to turn back again. This definitely looks like a dead end, I have done 3 kms; this looks like a dead end, I have done 7 kms; this looks like a dead end, I have done 10 kms; this looks like a T-junction with lines down the middle of the road, it can’t be a dead end. I start to climb; it can’t be a dead end, I continue to climb – 4 km, 5 km, 6km; it can’t be a dead end. 7 km, 8, 9, and no, it is not a dead end, it is a Tuscan hill top town.
The problem is that Italy does not have many roads. It is not heavily populated (50 million or something) but is quite large. No problem so far. However, there aren’t many villages, just towns, so there are ten or fifteen km between each town and not much call for extra roads, unlike a country with lots of villages or hamlets.
Apart from the paucity of roads for your Derbyshire Oik to wander down, it does tend to mean that what roads there are, they are busy. This had been my problem all through Italy, it is just that I am a slow learner.
Mine host at an aubergo pointed out the best cycling route. I did manage to get to the next hill top town and then lost the route and ended up on a blisteringly hot straight road going ?? Even finding a bit of shade to stop for a drink was getting hard. Besides I had done my 100 since the ditch and I didn’t care where I was going. I had begun to see the attraction of Tuscany though – the fotified hill top towns: the disadvantage of these for cyclists is in the name! Staggered into some other town on a peninsular (sound familiar) and “completo” is normal even at 1.30 p.m. I did not think anything horrible about Italian holidays - honest. The fifth place said “yes” and did I care? There was no shower – hence the availability and it was a mere 35€. After two days without a shower people didn’t seem excessively sociable, can’t think why.
In the morning the only road is my friend the SS1. It is not motorway because it is the only north-south road along the coastal strip so all traffic has to be allowed on it. It doesn’t mean that the traffic is any slower so I go as fast as I can. Sometimes there is hard shoulder, sometimes not. When two heavy trucks are side by side and there is no hard shoulder, it gives you some very nasty feelings. I was glad I had broken my mirror, if I had seen them coming I would have dived off the road. At the first drink stop after 45 or 50 minutes I have done 10% of the remaining distance to Rome. I could get there today. Ho ho ho. I wasn’t going to live to see Rome if I stayed on this road so I got off it as soon as I could. Nice but slow. Back on to the SS1, still horrible and I turn off on to a medium sized road with only a vehicle every minute or so and then on to an even more minor road. There is nothing for 6 or 7 km, I mean neither people nor cars but quite a lot of shade. There even more suicidal lizards than on the main roads; I assume that the heat of the tarmac warms them up quickly and they can hear (or feel) a vehicle coming. If I am in the right gear and the road is smooth my bike runs pretty close to silently so the lizards are a bit shocked when this lumbering mass of sweat is suddenly centimetres from them; it is like playing dodgems at times. Apart from the dodgems it is great, rolling country, no traffic, chance to look around at the fields and woods; in fact, rather sadly perhaps, my most relaxed cycling in Italy and I am only 100 km from Rome. Then there is a tractor then 5 vehicles inside 5 km - horrendous. None of it going my way for the whole 12 km till I rolled in (I should say up) to this hilltop town. The only things that had been going my way were the flies – they know a man who has cycled 300 km without a shower when they smell one. The first hotel has rooms, I accept; I am too old for ditches even if it means 100 km tomorrow, allowing for my navigational expertise.
I begin to see the interest in Tuscany; these hilltop, fortified towns are really rather pleasant. I knew it was touristy though; for the first time since Pisa I heard a language other than Italian (except when people were speaking to me, of course).
In the morning I elect not to go for the SS1. I decide to go to down an unmarked side road. This seems to be heading inexorably towards this massive chimney in the distance. I take the only left turn available. Makes no difference. Then I am the “t” in a T junction. Right for Chimney, left for SS1. This morning at my first drink stop I am 7% closer to Rome. I stick to the SS1 after that and, inevitably 10 km later, go right past the aforementioned chimney.
Most of the traffic has disappeared on the motorway and I am going along quite happily beginning to congratulate myself on my achievement. Stop for a coffee, have an uphill start and the chain comes off! Careful Ed, concentrate, you are not there yet.
I also saw a couple of male cycle-tourists who each two panniers back and front plus handlebar bags and rack bags – six bags each in total. It all looked brand new too. Somebody saw them coming, I have one pannier and a handlebar bag. The amount of stuff they had is inappropriate for any cycle ride beyond doing the monthly supermarket run.
All the towns were off to the side of the road for a while so I decided to have a beer at a petrol station! On the whole trip I had not stopped at any service station (if you exclude the truckers’ stop a couple of nights earlier), I had always stopped in bars and cafes in the towns and villages but had seen these service stations advertising that they had a bar so I decided to try one. It is true, whilst driving in Italy, you can easily pull in for a few snifters!
I stopped for a quick water stop and ate my last two bananas, thinking I won’t be eating any of them again for a while. Don’t get me wrong, I like bananas but you can have too much of a good thing. Just as I was starting off a whole group of cyclists came passed saying “Bonjourno” and I thought it would be safer to keep up with them. I tried, but no chance. When they stopped up the road I saw that they Berlin-Roma on their support cars so I stopped. They had cycled from Berlin in two weeks – put me to shame. One of them asked where my stuff was. I think he was impressed when I pointed to my one pannier. They insisted on filling my bottle with tea and, despite my protests, giving me four bananas!
On August 19th, the twenty-eighth day of my trip, I (having gone the wrong way, of course) rolled into St Peter’s Square at 2.20 in the afternoon.
