Urbanus Magnus

We arrived safely back home at around 11:30pm Toronto time Monday the 18th, after 2 stopovers (one in Frankfurt, the other in Washington, DC), and a lot of confusion in the Naples Int'l Airport. Certainly a bad experience with staff, which lead to us both nearly missing our flight, and also damage to our bicycles. But more on that will come with the Naples posting later. Internet from Rome and south of there had been extremely spotty, and expensive at times (5 euro per hour at a few of our hotels - and still slow by N. American standards), so we haven't yet posted about our visits from Siena onwards. Besides, making time for blog-writing was difficult, what with all the sights planned. For the next few days, I will be writing-up the log of the rest of the trip. So, expect Montalcino's write-up tomorrow, then that of Montepulciano on Friday, followed by posts for Orvieto, Viterbo, Rome, Pompeii, and Napoli and our returning flight in the next week-and-a-bit. After a G...

Since we arrived late in Volterra the previous day, we had a quick walk around the town before we packed up and hit the road to Siena.   Starting with a height advantage helped, but the overall trip was still long, and it was a brutally hot day at times. We stopped for a break at the medieval fort of Monteriggioni halfway along the route to Siena. The road up and through the town gate was so steep that it had ridges created by interleaving the paving stones to give extra traction! One of the gates into Monteriggioni. The fort/town is one of Siena's defensive structures built around the 13th century to protect trade routes against attacks from their rival Florence. In fact, this is where the Dante Alleghieri hid out after he had angered some powerful Florentines with his caricatures of them in his Inferno.  It still has all of its tall walls and 13 turrets intact. Main square of Monteriggioni Siena is possibly a challenger to Florence, in terms of having impre...

We had a good ride from San Gimignano to Volterra.   We were mentally psyched because we knew the ride up to Volterra itself would be very steep.  We stopped by the Super Mercato located just outside of the walls of San Gimignano and bought some fruit, pane, formaggio and salami just before we left for our ride. This worked out well because there weren't a lot of little towns between San Gimignano and Volterra.  The first leg of the day was very ejoyable. It was fairly quiet with few cars. We did have the company a lot of little green lizards who were sunning themselves every few meters along the roadside. They would scury under the scrub brush and grass as we approached them. At one point we road along a gravel road with beautiful vistas of colourful Tuscan hills with rich olive groves, vineyards and grain fields.  Small volcano-like mountains jutting out of the hills in the distance; very picturesque. Riding along an old country road We learned...

We are finding it difficult to find time in between cycling, sleeping and seeing sights to update the blog. We made a few mental notes though, to remember what happened where and when, so we can write up the visits to all the towns we have seen once we reach Rome (or possibly Viterbo). Right now, we are in Orvieto, just preparing to see the town briefly and then check out and cycle to Viterbo.

Note: we are staggering our posts as we have been finding the internet to be slow and spotty coverage. All our posts are behind a few days. June 4 was our first true riding day, where we were tested by the Italian hills and our fully loaded bicycles. The weather cooperated with us for the most part, but we did have to stop around 2pm for about 45 minutes to avoid a down-pour. We found refuge under the overhang of the roof of San Andrea, a tiny country church, about a third of the way between Florence and San Gimignano. We were certainly expecting hills - but I think we (*Ryan*) somewhat underestimated the actual magnitude of the climbs. Here are some stats for our Florence-San Gimignano trek: Total Distance: 60.5 km Average (Moving) Speed: 9.98 km/h Max Speed: 49.3 km/h (gotta love the ride down, after the long climb up!) Min Elevation: 81 m Max Elevation: 443 m Total Elevation Gain: 2087 m We found that our unlocked Galaxy Nexus phone was invaluable for gui...

On Friday we flew in to Florence, after a 7-hour flight from Toronto to Frankfurt, and then a short 2 hour commuter jet brought us into the Gallileo Gallilei airport of Florence. Understandably we were slighty worried about how well our bicycles fared in the flight - or if they even followed us to Italy in the cargo hold of the plane. However, everything went smoothly and our bicycles survived undamaged - likely due to our "leave them no chances to break something" approach to packing them. It took us a little over and hour and a half to unpack the bikes again and move all our equipment from the duffel bags to our panniers, and then off we went. But very slowly, due to the narrower italian roads and zippy cars scooting about haphazardly. Our babies - they are ok! All packed and loaded on the way from the airport to the hotel. Although initially scary and seemingly devoid of order, we have come to find that Florentine roads have polite and highly skil...