The old boy limps determinedly towards us, intent etched across his weathered face. “Here we go,” we think, struggling to finish our mouthfuls of cheese and bresaola rolls and sticky jam crostata. Had we parked our support vehicle in a restricted spot? Perhaps strayed on to the wrong cycle path on our approach?
As he arrives, his face softens. His bald head is creosoted by the sun, and he bears the distinctive tan lines around elbows and neck of the career cyclist. Ninety-three years young, he wants to talk bikes — surveying our super-light, carbon-fibre numbers like he might an old friend who’s had a facelift. His daughter keeps pestering him to sell his own aluminium racer, he tells us, but he’s resisting. “I like to go out to the garage in the evening and just stare at it,” he explains. “It makes me happy.”
Our nostalgic Florentine friend is in for quite some treat later this month. For not only is cycling’s biggest race starting in his nation for the first time in its 121-year history, it’s practically passing his front door. Le Grand Départ, the nomadic, gospel-spreading Tour de France curtain-raiser, will feature three Italian stages, the tastiest of which is the opener, Florence to Rimini: 206km from the cradle of the Renaissance to the Romagna Riviera via the unforgiving slopes of the Apennines. And we’ve come to ride it.
A half-hour earlier we’d set off from beneath the crenellated walls of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence’s tourist-thronged Piazza della Signoria, as the Tour riders will do on June 29, and threaded our way across the Ponte Vecchio — dodging the selfie-snapping pedestrians who’ll be safely stowed away come race day. Then, through the haze of a late-spring Tuscan afternoon, we’d glided along the south bank of the Arno to the suburb of Bagno a Ripoli, our nominated fuelling spot and the place where, for the professionals, the opening procession will give way to the proper racing.
I’m riding with Jaron, an old friend with a strong cycling pedigree and an even stronger cycling wardrobe. He looks every inch the Tour pro; I look like a rugby player with a driving ban. But our appreciation for this dangerously compulsive pastime runs equally deep, as it does for the third member of our makeshift team: Alessandro Piazzi. The 62-year-old is on support duty, driving a high-spec Elnagh camper van packed to its retractable roof with tempting victuals. A veteran employee of bike tour specialist Via Panoramica, Alessandro has the quiet self-assurance of someone who could incinerate you on a climb and be two cappuccinos deep by the time you reach the summit café.
The opening 30km or so flies by, the Tuscan capital reduced to a distant smudge and the dense green Apennines massing around us like waves in a gathering storm. This, as we’re well aware, is just the loosener. As we head off to bed in the rustic retreat of Poggio Marino, set in the serene foothills above the town of Dicomano, Alessandro has some calmly ominous words. “I always say, it’s not a ride without a climb,” he tells us. “In the morning, you climb.”
And so it proves. Ten minutes in, we’re sweating heavily and I’m regretting that second breakfast brioche. Up and up we go, our pace matching that of life in the hamlets through which we intermittently pass. An ironmonger taps away lethargically in his roadside workshop. A farmer on a noisily underpowered tractor does battle with a steeply undulating field. Florence feels a long way off.
As I climb I think about the giants of Italian cycling in whose tyre tracks we’re following: Ottavio Bottecchia, who returned from a Great War spent pedalling his military-issue foldable Bianchi bike deep behind enemy lines with a machine gun strapped to his back, to become the first Italian winner of the Tour de France. Gino Bartali, to which this opening stage is dedicated: a ferocious climber who won two Tours, bookending the second world war, and whose clandestine work for the Italian Resistance under the pretext of training rides was said to have saved the lives of as many as 800 Jews.
In their eras, Grand Tours such as the Tour de France were even more sadistic affairs, with daily stages of up to 480km. What they would have given for an Alessandro waiting, as we find him, at the top of the 930-metre Col de Valico Tre Faggi, with awning extended and little fold-out table laid with cubes of crumbly Parmigiano Reggiano (“good protein”), fruit juices, dates, figs and custard treccia (braided bread).
Tuscany may be the more celebrated region, but it’s Emilia-Romagna, into which we pass shortly afterwards, that is to provide the scenic high points of the trip. The Parco Nazionale delle Foreste Casentinesi, a dense swath of beech, silver fir and ash trees from which the timber for the Duomo in Florence was drawn. The canyon-edge town of Premilcuore, as thickly enveloped by nature as a Mayan citadel. The rolling, poppy-strewn hills around San Leo, a fortified medieval hamlet that glows from its huge sandstone-spur perch like an ancient Acropolis.
Fuelled by frequent café stops for thick, tarry ristretti (an espresso without all that surplus liquid), we make good progress and by midday on the third day just one climb remains: eight kilometres of switchbacks to the very top of the microstate of San Marino.
On a clear day, you can see the Istrian peninsula across the Adriatic from the ramparts of the 11th-century castle that crowns its lofty capital. The weather is in indecisive mood as we reach the top: the peaks we’ve conquered to the west bathed in sunshine; to the east, an impenetrable blanket of cloud which cowers at the threshold of the summit as if constrained by a giant pane of glass. I look down into the soupy morass, feeling a wave of vertigo. Somewhere, 700 metres below, lie the plains of Romagna and — 25km or so away — our destination, Rimini.
Truth be told I’ve been braced for an anticlimactic finish. Dipping our toes in the Adriatic, toasting our accomplishment and then departing. Because, as everyone knows, Rimini has had its day: an overrun beach resort, a victim of its own excess. Las Vegas on sea.
It takes scant minutes on arrival to recognise my misjudgment. We swing on to Lungomare Giuseppe di Vittorio, the revitalised beachfront stretch where the Tour riders will summon whatever reserves they have left to sprint for the first yellow jersey of the race, and pedal on towards the glistening new marina.
Over the subsequent 24 hours we’ll stroll broad, elegant avenues, shaded by poplars and lime trees, and hang out on Rimini’s gargantuan beach — forested by parasols and segmented into private beach clubs, sure, but also wondrously clean and efficient. We’ll treat ourselves to an indulgent breakfast at the Grand Hotel — beloved of the city’s most famous son, auteur Federico Fellini — and spend an evening amid the buzzing enoteche and osterie of Borgo San Giuliano. This mural-adorned former fishing neighbourhood is connected to the city’s old town by the Tiberius Bridge — 13 centuries more venerable than Florence’s Ponte Vecchio.
But first we must bid farewell to Alessandro, and — to our quads’ almost audible relief — hand back our bikes. He drops us and our bags at our digs, a stylish houseboat hotel on a secluded arm of the marina. Only once we’ve peeled off our Lycra and showered do we realise how far out of town we actually are. It’s a good half-kilometre walk just to get back to the marina entrance, another couple to the centre.
I call the office/reception. “What’s the best way for guests to get around?” I ask.
“Ah, yes,” says the lady, excitedly. “Now, if you look outside your houseboat . . . over to the left. Can you see them?”
Yes. Yes, I can. Bloody bikes.
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