One of the positive aspects I often cite when talking up the place where I live is that I can be in fields in ten minutes' ride from my front door in the old town — as in, my windows look out onto the old city walls.1

Once out in the fields, though, you never know what you might find. Here are some scenes from my latest ride.

Roadside shrine to the Madonna della Notte, complete with offerings and ex-voto (thanks for successful prayers).

Not sure what's up with this old Lancia planted in a farm yard, but it looks cool!

Here I just liked the contrast between the red tomatoes waiting for the harvest and the teal frame of my Bianchi.

Bike rides are so great for getting out of my head, whether it’s a technical piece of single-track on my mountain bike where I have to concentrate so hard I can’t think of anything else, or a ride like this where I’m bowling along the flat with a podcast in my (bone-conduction) headphones. The trick is staying off main roads as much as possible — hence the gravel bike.

  1. Which are actually the newest city walls, dating from the sixteenth century CE, post-dating various earlier medieval and Roman walls of which only traces remain. These Renaissance walls were later turned into a linear park (pictures) known as the "Facsal", a distortion of London's famous Vauxhall gardens, among the first and best-known pleasure gardens in nineteenth-century Europe. In more modern times, the Facsal was part of the street circuit for the 1947 Grand Prix of Piacenza, famously the first race entered by a Ferrari car — although not the site of the Scuderia's first win. ↩