A Cycle Tour of Southern Italy

After a chastening week in Montenegro, Albania, then Montenegro again, during which we saw the best and worst of the Balkans and were chased by wild dogs through piles of rubble, we were ready to head for the more familiar themes of Western Europe again.  We boarded a tired old ferry from Bar to Bari for a month-long tour of, we hoped, the best of Southern Italy. 

We weren't disappointed. Italy is, truly, beautiful in all senses. First you have the Italians themselves, whose instinct for the sartorial is something to behold. It's as if they come out of the womb wearing a perfectly matching pastel bonnet and blouse combination and go from strength to strength thereafter, moving effortlessly from their teenage gilet-wearing phase into the polo necks of adulthood, finally segueing into dignified, flowing old age - sporting a classic wool jumper and complementary chinos as they ride immaculate Vespas on their final journey toward oblivion.

A lively game of backgammon in a park in Bari. We thought they were going to come to blows, but then they all started embracing each other. Classic Italy. 

The town and city placement in Italy also puts aesthetics first and foremost, often to absurd lengths. In other parts of Europe, towns would be situated at strategic, lucrative or fertile points on the landscape; say, just before the point a river gets too narrow for seagoing vessels to dock, or on a fertile agricultural plain where food is plentiful and expansion is straightforward. The Italians see it differently. Defying all the normal rules of town planning, the first consideration in any Italian town planner's mind appears to be 'does it look beautiful?'; thus you have many cities clinging dramatically to the edge of a plunging escarpment, or shining atop a distant hill. Not so good for expansion or access, but fantastic for postcards. 

"Who cares if there is no water? Look at how beautiful it is!"

Not to be outdone, the countryside in southern Italy is varied and lovely, with windswept coasts giving way to rolling low hills; then the stony, wrinkled mountains and plunging ravines of the centre, whose lower slopes and valleys are covered in forests of cypress, pine, and golden oak.

Essentially, if you are looking for a perfect cycle tour, southern Italy would almost certainly deliver it. It has everything you need; loads of potential wild camping spots (as long as you're a bit creative and can stand spooky abandoned buildings), excellent fresh groceries (and cheap wine), beautiful countryside with well-surfaced side roads, and a wonderful clear and mild climate in autumn. Not to forget the charming locals, relatively easy language, and the ruins of an ancient civilisation wherever you look. 

It's all about the 1 euro litres of wine, though

PUGLIA 

We started our tour in the bustling ferry port of Bari, on the coast of Puglia. This city is known mostly as a major transport hub, but is actually a very handsome town in its own right. Wide pastel buildings frame straight avenues frequented by the eponymous Vespas and little Eurocars of the Italians. These open out into a series of handsome squares where you see many old men playing backgammon and gesticulating excitedly. The outer suburbs are grey, industrial and bleak, but they did contain a Decathlon, so they are at least useful. 

An afternoon in Bari and we started to cycle down the Adriatic coast, in the direction of Monopoli. Unlike the coast on the other side of the sea, this stretch of Puglian coast is flat and somewhat forlorn; mostly salt-sprayed cactus fields amidst listless beach towns and the crumbling remains of hotels. Our first camping spot was in a seaside field of dry grass, where I sampled a wild prickly pear and received a painful handful of thorns as a reward. It's a good thing these things are supposed to have health benefits, as they taste like flat cheap fizzy pop and have the texture of coarse gravel. 

Here's me committing a crime against Italian food with a fish-paste sandwich

Turning inland, we headed towards the hilltop town of Locorotondo. The salty coast quickly gave way to an more attractive undulating patchwork of pastures and stone-walled olive groves. Many of the cottages around here are built in the 'Truli' style; this is a kind of house which is completely unique to Puglia, comprising a series of low, cone-shaped dry stone roofs with whitewashed tips.

A typical Puglian Truli house

The hobbit-like Truli houses, along with the drowsy fields of sheep and sentimental Italian skies, gave us the sense of heading into some calm and surreal dreamscape.  Our reverie was only broken by the occasional angry buzzing of a farmer's three-wheeled Piaggio rickshaw, growing and diminishing as it struggled past us. Following roads which dipped and snaked through the fields, we approached the outskirts of Locorotondo, arrayed bright and proud atop a modest ridge. 

We thought we were in for a difficult night as we neared the town. Our searches for camping spots had thus far only uncovered a rubbish-strewn plateau by the side of the road, and night was closing in. Sarah suggested we try a dirt track off the main road; I was sceptical, but the gamble paid off handsomely. 

Apples! 

There, between a fenced off office building and a little cottage, stood an abandoned Truli house. Perfectly preserved and sitting within a sun-dappled olive grove, it even had its own apple tree and grape vine to pick at. After stuffing ourselves with apples and a plastic bottle of local wine, we set up our tent in the arched doorway and drifted off. It's times like these that make the anxiety and occasional squalor of wild camping absolutely worth it - a unique experience that no hotel or campsite could ever offer. 

Getting ready to camp

The house itself, incidentally, appeared to be full of nothing but enormous, dusty earthenware vases. I found the front door key as we were sweeping away some fallen whitewash, but only went and lost it again, along with my chance to own my very own Truli house in Puglia. Damn. We packed up and cycled the short uphill to Locorotondo. 

Locorotondo was one of our highlights of Puglia. Unlike its nearby sister, Alberobello, this one is reasonably free of American tourists. Not only does it command sweeping views of the surrounding landscape, its old centre is a soporific maze of blindingly white, hushed streets where the only sound is laundry flapping in the breeze. Even by Italian standards, that's pretty nice. We spent the greater part of a day in a park overlooking the land south of the town, taking advantage of the bright breezy weather to wash our clothes and drink some wine in the sun. 

The view from the park

A mellow old town indeed

Even the church was light, classy, and there was no wooden Jesus in sight

We packed up and headed the short 10km to Alberobello, featuring at its core a jumble of closely-packed Truli houses, the cone roofs jagged against sky now heavy and grey. It soon became apparent that this town is a honeypot for moneyed foreign visitors; the place had become a leeching set-up with little charm. Outside the old centre, the town is modern and nothing special, and we left late afternoon, camping in a rainy field on our way to the province of Basilicata. 

BASILICATA

Wilder and starker than the breadbasket of Puglia, Basilicata is red and gold, a landscape of yellow hills and twisted trees. Ruined cottages dot the hillsides, atop a few of which stand old fort towns, bright and magnificent. The traffic on our route was light, and the weather was clear and bright; warm in the sun and cool in the shade, with a pleasant chill at night. We would scope out a ruin as a camping spot and cook delicious meals of fresh Italian pasta with tomatoes, garlic and Parma ham, washed down with slightly steely Puglian red wine. The food, scenery, and pleasant drudgery of life on the road produced a contentedness in us. I can't remember how long we spent on the road here, as one glorious day tended to blend into another. 

Looking out over the faded fields of Puglia

Our first major stop in Basilicata was Matera, where we were to stay a couple of nights. This town really has to be seen to be believed - the older part of the town is the second-oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the world (after Aleppo). 

The oldest district, the "Sassi", is built down the sides of a plunging ravine, the stacked blank-windowed stone houses concealing an enormous lattice of caves and tunnels. Across the far side of a yawning gulch, the ravine is unsettled and the cliffs are dotted with a similar series of natural caves. Each turn you take along the town's completely nonsensical street network yields another staggering view of the city itself and its surroundings.

The Sassi

The town itself, incidentally, has an interesting history. Initially settled due to the natural defensive advantages offered by its caves and the fertility of the surrounding plateau, Matera's fortunes rose steadily over thousands of years and by the Middle Ages it was a picturesque, prosperous market town attracting immigrants from all over southern Italy. 

However, things took a dramatic turn for the worse when the provincial capital was moved to Potenza, some 80km or so north, along with many of the farms and jobs. This didn't stem the flow of poor rural Italians coming to the town to vainly search for labour, however, and by the early 20th century Matera was in a mess - a network of filthy subterranean hovels where malnourished people and animals competed for ever-decreasing amounts of space. Often, the marital bed would have the family donkey tethered behind the headboard with families sleeping wherever they could. 

An "authentic" interior of a Sassi house (minus the squalor)

Carlo Levi's damning 1930s memoir, "Christ Stopped at Eboli" described smoky, hellish caverns where dead-eyed people lay listless, barely bothering to bat the flies away from their eyes; the visceral account prompted a public outcry and calls for the Government to take action. 

After many abortive attempts to clean up the town and incentivise residents to move elsewhere, the government threw up its hands and evacuated Matera entirely in the 1950s, sticking most of the residents in a new town a few kilometres away and leaving the Sassi abandoned. There it stood, crumbling and forgotten, until film-makers rediscovered its potential and started using it as a backdrop for historical films, most notably standing in for Ancient Jerusalem in the Passion of the Christ. This sparked a resurgence of interest in Matera, and a new breed of residents - artists, mostly, plus a few far-sighted profiteers - started moving in, followed not long after by hordes of tourists. 

Matera's resurgence is now complete, and tourist-friendly slickness has replaced its former squalor. Like most tourist attractions in Italy, though, this does not detract from the charm and it's a fantastic experience. Especially the pizza place called Oi Mari (I've made an editorial decision not to describe every pizza we ate in loving detail, as this piece would quickly become about nothing else). 

After Matera, we headed for the Tyhrennian coast, following a winding route between del Pollino and Appenino national parks. This is a spectacular bit of Italy, a mountain range covered in long stretches of wilderness between hilltop towns. The wrinkled hills and valleys are covered in copses of majestic wild oak, which glow a soft gold as day turns into dusk - producing the kind of refined and warm Renaissance landscape that's so common in Italy and so rare anywhere else. We took advantage of more ruined farmhouses as camping spots, we ate a lot of cured meat and drank boxed wine, and the days continued to bring blue skies and warmth. The nights were beginning to get cold, though, and we needed all our warm weather gear once the sun disappeared. 

We camped here after descending from the Matera plateau

The land quickly rose again...

...And it was bloody cold at the top

There are loads of ruined cottages about

The landscape is beautiful and rugged

Picking blackberries

The valleys of oak forests turn to gold as the sun sets

Our home for a night

We reached Maratea on the opposite coast, after what I recall was about a week's cycling, but honestly this is just a wild guess. Indeed, I've found that on a long tour like this distances of time are chiefly measured in more immediate, practical metrics; like how long it was since you refilled your water, and how many hours until dusk. Concepts like the "weekend" become meaningless (until, of course, you make the enormous mistake of running out of groceries in Germany on a Sunday). 

Dubbed the 'pearl of the Tyhrennian', Maratea is built on the sides of a steep cove and is an altogether attractive and non-seedy coastal town (a rarity even in classy Italy). It's overlooked by an enormous white Cristo Redentor statue, and is generally a pretty typical Italian town, in the sense of being placed in an impracticable but utterly beautiful location. We'd booked an apartment here and had a nice couple of days which I won't describe in detail, because we were chiefly enjoying boring things like a soft bed, a flushing toilet, and so on. 

After a couple of days writing, eating the inevitable delicious pizza, and drinking in the Tyhrennian ambience, it was time to head north up the coast. 

The morning of our departure, waiting for a storm to clear, we camped out at a local café. Within a few minutes of us sitting down, a local began lustily singing rambunctious Italian folk tunes, accompanying himself vigorously on the piano. He was soon joined by a little kid, who seemed to know all the words, and the whole cafe was smiling and clapping along with this indefatigable duo for a couple of hours. It's almost disgustingly charming, isnt it? It would, indeed, have seemed trite and forced were it not for the effortless grace of the Italians. 

North of Maratea, the coast is a brooding mass of sheer hills and little towns clinging to steep cliffs. We had our first, and only, bad wild camping experience here, bedding down in the grounds of an abandoned beach bar only for an inebriated, vulgar couple to turn up at 11pm in their car. They didn't even ask us to leave, or indeed interact with us at all, save for parking their car inches from our tent and occasionally flashing their fog beams at us as the horrible woman cackled her witchy smoker's laugh.  This foul person also relieved herself against our tent with hoarse, animal grunts of satisfaction. Mercifully they left in the wee hours of the morning (no pun intended) and we were able to grab a few hours sleep until just before dawn, when a bunch of local pensioners parked up to begin a morning jog (all with cheery greetings of 'Bongiorno!') Lesson learned - never wild camp anywhere you can easily drive a car. 

CALABRIA

Further up the coast, things flattened out, and as seems to be the case with flat coastlines everywhere, the seedy, listless seaside towns returned with a vengeance. Before this trip I had assumed that the Mediterranean coast is an unbroken stretch of classy, sun-drenched medieval cities, but it turns out much of it, like much of the world's settled coastline, is just as windy, dull and desperate as anywhere. We cycled through a series of towns with ugly promenades and abandoned hotels alongside tired boardwalks and piers which reminded me of Blackpool (still a million times less depressing than Blackpool). 

Bored of the flat, endless coastal roads, we decided to turn inland again, working our way over the hump of hills that make up the western part of the Valle del Lucano national park, towards Agropoli. 

Waking up before dawn has its benefits

This is a thickly forested area with a lot of wilderness, and despite some tough climbs we spent a fun couple of days traversing it, followed by a heart-stoppingly steep descent down an incredibly narrow road towards Agropoli. We also had a genuine supernatural experience here whilst camping behind an abandoned house which looked like it had been boarded up in the middle of dinner, with the tableware and furniture spookily gathering a thick layer of dust. It's difficult to explain what happened here;  suffice to say here that we are still yet to come up with a logical explanation for the events that occurred during the night. I'll happily explain it all over a pint when I get back. 

Looking back towards the coast

A ruined fortress

Skirting round Agropoli, we headed along a pancake-flat, 50km stretch of awful coastline towards Salerno. We dubbed this place "Prostitute Alley", for reasons that will be obvious should you be unfortunate enough to visit. You might be aware that the staggering beauty of the Amalfi coast is just the other side of Salerno, which makes the pancake-flat Prostitute Alley's ugliness stick out even more. The only highlights were the enormous remains of an ancient Greek fort town we encountered along the way. But even that was just a big wall.

After the greater part of a day's cycling from the hills, we arrived in Salerno. This large-ish port city is somewhat shunned by visitors as it's outshined by Sorrento and the Amalfi coast to the west, but it's not a bad place, and the people are very forward and friendly. We had our bikes tuned up for free by Roberto, one of the owners of a local cycle café (shout out to Roberto, great work), visited the hodge-podge Duomo with its odd mix of medieval and Renaissance styles, and ate unbelievably good pizza and arancini at a little pizza kiosk opposite our accommodation. 

"I am in love with your bikes"

After Salerno, we grabbed a train to Pompeii, where we were to meet our buddy, good old Mr. Ferris. Fez was joining us for five days from his base in the Czech Republic. We had a few hours to kill before he arrived, so we went up to visit the ruins of Herculaneum for the afternoon. 

Unlike Pompeii, which was a bustling commercial centre, Herculaneum was an exclusive spa resort for rich Neapolitans looking to get away from it all. Like Pompeii, it was buried in a layer of ash following the eruption of Mt Vesuvius and lies almost perfectly preserved in a gulch amidst a down-at-heel suburb of the Naples conurbation. Indeed, we had heard that it was actually better than Pompeii, so arrived with high expectations. 

Sadly, unlike Pompeii, Herculaneum was a bit shit. 

The buildings themselves were well-preserved but completely empty, with all the plunder displayed in a museum in Naples (Why wouldn't you just leave the stuff in context, where it makes sense?). It's much smaller and there's nothing telling you what you're supposed to be looking at. The one potential highlight, the bath house, was closed. And worst of all, all the skeletons were just a pile of bones at the foot of the cliff - they hadn't even bothered to pose them in amusing domestic scenes. Disappointing. 

Such a missed opportunity

Looking down on Herculaneum

We got back to Pompeii and met up with Fez at our hostel, where we ate a 8.5/10 pizza and had a few bottles of chilled white wine. 

Fez had arrived, and we gravely embarked upon the scientific task of rating Italy's cheapest boxed wines

The next day, we cycled towards for the ancient Pompeii itself, which was definitely worth the trip. I won't go into a description of Pompeii here, as many of you may be familiar with it, but suffice to say it lives up to the hype. Don't bother joining the massive queue for the brothel, though, unless you're willing to wait half an hour to see a stone bed and a very faded naughty picture. I've heard you can find even naughtier stuff on the Internet these days. 

After Pompeii, we embarked on our cycle down the Amalfi Coast, with our first stop in Sorrento. Sorrento is a pretty and very commercialised seaside town which serves as the launching point for most Amalfi adventures; the only tourist attractions we went to were an old man's collection of vintage music-boxes, some of which he had made himself (a fantastic half-hour was spent there as he demonstrated them to us), and "The English Pub" where we got two pints of London Pride and a glass of lemonade for the outrageous sum of 17 euros. Please don't judge me. There's only so much Eurolager I can take before I'm pining desperately for a flat, warm English ale. 

We also met up with my family friends Karen, Kathy and Roddy, who happened to be holidaying in the Amalfi at the same time and took us out for a meal at Delfino's, a truly special fish restaurant in Sorrento's fishing village. This is still, perhaps, the best meal we had on our trip, although some food in India and elsewhere in Italy came close. Great work, gang, the meal is and was very much appreciated. 

The wonderful Karen

Next was the Amalfi Coast itself. There's a reason that this little stretch of rugged coast between Sorrento and Salerno is top of many itineraries - I have genuinely never seen anything like it. The lush coastal hills seem too stark to be credible and the little seaside towns nestled in its many bays are among the most aesthetic in Italy. It's great cycling, too - in autumn the roads were not too busy and the inclines are gentle enough to make the uphills doable and the downhills exciting but not scary. We drank a lot of San Crispino boxed wine, swam in the sea, and even managed to sneak in some wild camping, bivvying on the edge of a cliff overlooking the twinkling lights of a cove far below. 

Swimming in the oily waters of Sorrento harbour

It was no longer even remotely warm at night

The glorious Amalfi

We spent two days cycling the Amalfi, doing a large stretch of it twice over because it was so good, then arrived in Salerno again.  

THE FAILED CLIMB OF MOUNT VESUVIUS

Fez and I had concocted an ambitious plan to cycle to the top of Mount Vesuvius from here, but Sarah, perhaps sensibly, wasn't keen, so she grabbed a train to Naples whilst Fez and I set off to conquer the brooding volcano whose shattered peak dominates the bay of Naples. 

Could we climb it? 

I'll save you the suspense; we didn't make it. It took us around two hours to get to the base of the volcano, and when we got there we found the lower slopes gut-bustingly difficult; the road was not only extremely steep but cobbled and broken. With all the gear on the bike, it was slow and agonising progress. Upon reaching the gates of the volcano's "national park", on its lower slopes, we were told by a surly guard that the only way up was by bus (at 30 euros each!) and if we wanted to take our own transport we would have to "take it up with la polizia". Essentially, it appeared that access to the mountain is controlled by a private tour company with a monopoly. We had to turn back. 

Chastened, and with afternoon turning to dusk, we attempted to get a train to Naples, but the only trains with bike space departed the next day. We had no choice but to cycle all the way, so we duly steamed ahead and took in all the worst Neapolitan suburbs and satellite towns, arriving in Naples as dark was falling. We had cycled roughly 100km and entirely failed to achieve our one objective. Result. 

NAPLES

Many people come on a trip from Rome and unfavourably compare Naples to the grandeur of the capital, but I feel that's missing the point.  Naples is a dark, confusing maze of soot-blackened buildings and cheap restaurants, where grand cathedrals and porticos jostle with each other down narrow alleys. Rome is expansive, spectacular, with umbrella pines and clean shades of white and terracotta. If Rome is Heaven, Naples is Hell - but the cool kind of Hell, with leering stone gargoyles, pizza joints, and cheap alcohol. 

We ate at a pizza place where the pizzas were 4 euros and - amazingly - that was also the price for a litre of white wine. After, we went out into the dark shrieking jumble of the city for gelato, and the pineapple flavour was so spectacular that I went back in for seconds. We collapsed in our beds after a hugely full day and slept like the dead. 

We sadly took our leave of Fez at this point, who returned to the Czech Republic after being thoroughly introduced to the delights of San Crispino boxed wine. We moved on, taking the slow train to Rome, unable to cycle due to time constraints. 

ROME

I'm not going to go into great detail about all the sights we saw and food we ate in Rome. If you haven't been, it's more or less one of the only cities in the world that's impossible to overhype. 

You almost get the sense that it could actually do with fewer grand old buildings. On your way to anywhere in the centre, you will walk past a few thousand-year-old ruins and spectacular Renaissance cathedrals that don't even warrant a look because there is simply so much to see. If that wasn't enough, the food is unbelievably good. But you'll know this already if you've been. So I'll dispense with the details. 

Something worth saying, though, is that Rome is a great city to experience on a bicycle. Despite hysterical rumours, the traffic in the city is extremely orderly since a huge routing overhaul a few years ago. The centre of the city is compact enough that you can get between most sights in 10-15 minutes, and there is so much to see that those 15 minutes will be spent gawping at sight after sight. 

After three gluttonous days here, we cycled out past a procession of aging prostitutes (seemingly a fixture of Italian suburbs) to the slightly sad coastal town of Fiumicino. Fiumicino is an unremarkable town with an amazing pizza place -you buy the pizza for a kg there, and it's cheap as hell. The salmon pizza is a particular highlight.  

The next day, we wrapped our bikes in plastic and hopped on the plane to India. But that, of course, is another story.