In which Sid and Doris take a long, careful look at the map.
The original inspiration behind this trip was when we found out about the Francigena – an old pilgrim route from Canterbury to Rome via the Great St Bernard Pass.
The Francigena is a walking route, not a cycling route, and it is well-defined at the Italian end but gets somewhat vaguer as you look further north. And given that we went to Canterbury on last year’s Tour De Kent, our goal was to set off from our new home cathedral of Salisbury instead and intercept it somewhere before the Great St Bernard Pass.
Well the coloured lines on the map shown how our plans changed several times as we decided to go under rather than over or through Paris, and make more use of the Loire. But eventually we did intercept the Francigena at St-Sulpice just before Lausanne on Lake Geneva. You kinda have to go through Lausanne if you are going to do the Great SB, and for some inexplicable reason I was strangely attracted to that pass.
It was very satisfying to find this map on our way out of Montreux and you can see that we followed the route all the way to Ivrea. At that point our paths were going to diverge – the Francigena goes for a long slow trip down the Po valley whereas we were thinking of heading more for the north Italian coast and thence to Tuscany.
The next map shows our “planned” path. And as we sat in our nice hotel near Trino, after an interesting but somewhat flat journey across the upper Po valley, considered the damage to our knees done by the three previous tough days and recovered from some of the nearer brushes with death with Italian drivers, we thought “what on earth are we doing?” We don’t even LIKE Rome! And we really really like France.
Just as a side note, let’s talk about traffic habits. French drivers have been carefully drilled to allow 1.5m between their cars and cyclists, it doesn’t always happen but generally people make an effort. In Switzerland we came to the conclusion that drivers only have two pronouns – I and They. Everyone not in the car is not a person and can be cheerfully ignored. Helped because almost all Swiss cars are top-of-the-range models and so the soundproofing renders you unable to hear the shrieks of the catastrophes left in your wake.
In the countryside, Italian roads usually have a solid line down the middle. Italian motorists REALLY respect that line and they may squeeze up to but not over it in order to get past you. And you get the space that’s left, if there is any. Even if there’s nothing coming the other way. Even if someone is doing about 100kph on a dead-straight but fairly narrow empty road with a speed limit of 50kph.
Now Sid and Doris are keen cyclists but we are not dying to get to Rome in any sense of the word. So today we have decided to move our goal from Romin’ to Tourin’. We’re turning left towards Turin and back to France over another Alpine pass. We’ll keep Italy for holidays in a car.
Here is a picture we took of the first Via Roma sign we saw, followed a couple of days later by our thoughts on considering the alternatives.
The map has been updated on its home page here and this link should work too: