Like most folks who love to travel and ride bikes, I daydream of pedaling through all sorts of idyllic places around the globe.
Trouble is, I’m jittery about sharing roads with drivers — even in my adoptive hometown of Tampa, where I often ride alone and with members of several local cycling clubs. I’m especially chicken when I think about riding beside motorists who may follow very different roadway rules and customs.
That is, until some fellow bike nerds turned me on to the joys of gravel riding in Italy.
Booming in popularity at home and abroad, gravel riding means cycling on unpaved roads. Though it combines elements of off-road and mountain biking, it manages to be both more urban-yet-plenty-bucolic, and often safer, with roads that typically have far less automotive traffic.
To be fair, I could have tried gravel biking closer to home. But some local pedal-happy pals raved about Veneto, in Italy’s northeast. The region may be home to the nation’s most famous car-less city, Venice, but they assured me there’s a very good reason why recent gravel world championships for pro cyclists were held there twice in recent years: miles and miles of well-tended and near-car-free unpaved roads.
What’s more, for a flatlander like myself, the Veneto’s hills would be challenging but not daunting. That the area also produces some of Italy’s loveliest still and sparkling wines, along with fantastic food, further fueled my desire.
Which is why, one recent September day, I flew to Venice. Barely glancing at the celebrated floating city, I took a short train ride west to the town of Montebelluna, where the next morning I would begin the first of three days of gravel bike rides throughout the region.
Though the area’s 6,000-plus kilometers of prime gravel roads and paths are well documented by local enthusiasts, and are available to anyone with a cellphone or other GPS-enabled gizmo, I opted to hire a guide, partly for the company and also so I could practice my mediocre Italian with a native.
After a breakfast of several freshly baked cornetti pastries and as many cappuccini at my hotel, I’m met by affable home-grown cycling guide Riccardo Trevisi, who has brought me a Kross 10-speed gravel bike that looks much like your typical road bike, except for a pair of wide, knobby tires that wouldn’t be out of place on a mountain bike.
Each of our trio of daily rides will take us to a different area of the region, with the longest approaching 60 kilometers and the shortest about half that. Hardly a hardcore rider, I’ve chosen a trip with moderate distances and pace. Those even less sporty can choose from any number of shorter and easier routes, and may also select e-bikes.
Into a van we load our bikes. A few kilometers later we’re out and pedaling along a dirt and pea gravel road, lined with vineyards and patches of trees.
We chat, riding side by side. A former corporate manager, Riccardo several years ago decided to turn his love of cycling into a new career, teaming up with likeminded friends to start Treviso.bike, which offers guiding services, and sells, rents and repairs bikes and e-bikes. Judging from the chill look on his face this Thursday morning, I’d say he made the right choice.
Meanwhile, I’m checking out my gravel bike, surprised how well it handles on such a rough surface.
I sneak glances over my shoulder for a glimpse of the inevitable approaching car, but there is none. Just as I begin to wonder if we’ll encounter any motor traffic, ahead comes a battered old white Fiat Panda, the driver smiling and waving as he slowly passes. Minutes later, I realize what’s missing besides the cars: their noise. Here the only sounds are the soft crunch of gravel beneath our tires, birdsong, and the occasional distant bark of a dog or faint rumble of a tractor on its way to or from harvest-time vineyards.
I tell Riccardo as much and he smiles conspiratorially. I’m clearly not the first gravel bike noob to marvel at this.
We stop atop a gentle rise, getting off our bikes to climb a short, steep ridge. Here are the remains of a World War One earthen trench, one of several arrayed around the valley that were used by Italian soldiers to repel advancing German and Austro-Hungarian troops. Below, hidden by trees, is the Piave river. Vineyards stretch along the valley and into the hills beyond.
Back on our bikes, we continue northwest, the hills growing steeper, the gravel rockier. Despite being on a bike well-suited to the terrain, I’m timid on descents, falling behind. The trick to confidently riding downhill on such stuff, Riccardo says on the next short ascent, is to scoot your butt back on the saddle and put more weight on the back wheel. And don’t death-grip the handlebars, but let the bike float over the rocks and bumps.
A couple hills later, I’m starting to get the hang of it. The bike does indeed seem to “know” where to go.
We stop late morning at restaurant Al Cartizze da Bepi Boret, just east of the town of Valdobbiadene. Leaning our bikes against trellised grape vines beside an outdoor table overlooking a vineyard, Riccardo cautions against treating this snack stop as a scorpacciata – a pig-out – because the day’s steepest climbs, and a proper lunch, are ahead. But he agrees with the waiter that we’d be nuts not to taste some of the area’s famed Prosecco, especially here in Le Cartizze, a postage-stamp-size parcel of land at the region’s heart that produces its best bubblies.
Between nibbles of creamy and slightly salty local Morlacco cheese, thinly-sliced porchetta and lip-puckeringly sweet and tart pickled eggplant, we sip (OK, I gently guzzle) glasses of house-made Prosecco. Made in an old-school col fondo (or bottle-fermented) style, it’s cloudy, with a floral, fruity and bready taste. Or, as Riccardo and I agree, delicious.
For the next hour, the hills grow steeper, my happily aching leg muscles reminding me that I should have ridden more up-and-down miles before this trip. Past vineyards we roll, waving to the occasional harvest-time workers and slowing down for a look at stubby tractor-drawn trailers filled with golden Glera grapes.
Over a lunch of sweet and warm pumpkin soup, followed by a plate of spaghetti-like bigoli pasta with lamb sauce, and (of course) glasses of Prosecco, Riccardo chides me that the hills we have been riding over today are mere “antipasti” compared with the more main course-like Dolomite mountains, which begin to the north. We agree I’ll save those for another trip.
If not for a rooster’s crows the next morning outside my hotel room, I might have slept through my alarm. Today our ride begins on La Tradotta, old tree-lined railroad tracks converted into a gravel cycling and walking path. Past swift-moving streams we ride, turning onto other gravel and paved roads that grow hillier. By midday, we arrive in the swank town of Asolo. Riccardo tells me that it’s rumored that George Clooney vacations here, as do other celebs. Absurdly picturesque, it does look like a movie-set version of an Italian town.
A few paces from the town square, we stop for lunch at Porchetta A Manetta Bar. Sprawled at a red and white table-clothed picnic table outside under trees, we decide cold beers in chilled glass steins seem best. A plate arrives with porchetta and Morlacco cheese, this time accompanied by a zesty marmalade of red radicchio. Riccardo informs me that this place is a semi-official hangout for area gravel riders. Roadies, however, almost always dine at a café in the main piazza nearby. We roll our eyes at our sadly ignorant cycling brethren.
Borrowing a deck of cards from a waiter, Riccardo gives me an impromptu lesson on how to play Scopa, a card game whose confusing rules I suspect are transmitted only via Italian DNA.
The ride back to my hotel takes us swooping down shady tunnels of greenery and up spiky little climbs.
My third, and last, day’s ride starts a half-hour’s drive southeast by van in Treviso. Tootling around the canal-centric town, I quickly realize why the region’s capital city is nicknamed Little Venice. Only the promise of another beautiful ride tears me away from its historic downtown fish market, located on a tiny island in the Sile river.
The day’s several-hour circuit takes us west along the river, a favorite of trout sports fishermen, to some of its spring-fed origins in the woods, and over dirt and gravel roads as wide as a boulevard and narrow as a cow path, past orchards of identical Poplar trees arranged in neat rows.
Riccardo and I speculate on whether the world pro riders will race on any of the same bits of gravel and paved roads we’ve ridden during their gravel world championships next week.
By the time we’re back in town, I wonder aloud how I can explain to my wife when I get home that I need a gravel bike.
“Just tell her it’s much safer,” he says with a laugh.