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It was going to be a major turning point in the tour, and after this night I would spend a lot more time talking to people, sharing stories and experiences, being social. But as I left Benevento, I didn’t know yet what was about to happen.

I rode my bike out of the city early in the evening. A traffic cop told me the way, and soon I was cruising along a winding, hilly country road in the failing light.

I didn’t have plans for where to stay that night, but here’s the great thing about touring southern Italy by bicycle. Your tent almost anywhere in the countryside.

In fact, when I met an old man walking along the side of the road and asked if he knew anywhere to camp, he smiled and gestured magnanimously across the forests and meadows around us.

“You are welcome to camp anywhere you want in my country,” he said.

This was just my second night of stealth camping on the tour of via Appia, but I’ve always had great luck when I leave things up to chance.

The land was deep green, with beautiful oak forests and grassy meadows. At one point I passed a sign leading to the Ponte Rotto, where I would one day fulfill my dream of camping out in ancient Roman ruins. But not this night.

I rode my bike down into a broad valley as the last glow of the sunset disappeared. The world was pitch black. The only light came from my flickering Cat’s Eye bike light and the silver points of stars up above.

I came to a farm at the top of a gentle hill covered with olive trees and grapevines. Nobody seemed to be home when I went to ask permission, so I found a level spot near a bunch of olive trees and set up my tent.

I was ready to crash when I saw a dim light gently bobbing near the spot where I had wheeled my bicycle off the road. It looked like someone walking with their cell phone, so I shouted a friendly “Buona sera!”

No answer, but the light kept coming closer, taking its time.

I didn’t want to startle anyone in the dark, so I turned on my flashlight, pointed it at my own face, and called out another greeting down the hill.

No reply, and this began to feel creepy.

“Listen,” I said in my best possible Italian, “I’m just passing through here on my bike and I stopped because it is dangerous to ride in the dark. I wanted to camp here for the night and leave early in the morning, but I don’t want to cause any problems. I’ll go now if you want me to.”

The mysterious light stopped, but continued to bob gently in the air, flickering on and off. I pointed my light at it, and saw nothing but the low branches of a young oak tree.

A ghost? This wasn’t the only time I’ve ran into ghosts in Italy (that’s another story) but something felt completely normal and natural about this. I walked down to the light and found a large insect on a tree branch. Its abdomen was glowing, and the branch bobbed up and down in the wind.

I laughed out loud as I walked back to my tent, and suddenly a flash of light in the sky caught my eye. A shooting star! A few minutes later I saw another one. The next hour or so was a treat of meteors, stars, and glowing insects.

What happened next is hard to describe, but I’ll try. Laying there in an olive grove in Italy, I felt like I was coming home. I had found a part of myself, something I had lost over the years.

Italy is famous for her natural and artistic beauty, but I’ve been guilty of neglecting the first of these. When I tour in Italy I tend to obsess on paintings and history, cold sculptures and crumbling chunks of marble. But those things get there romance and their magic from the natural world that shaped them and the people who made them.

The whole point of a bike tour in Italy is to breathe life and relevance into the textbook Italy we all think we know.

It took a natural light show in the olive groves of Benevento to show me the error of my ways.

Come to think of it, this is one of the most important reasons to go on a bike tour. It will get you out of your routing, your regular mindset, and show you what you’ve been missing out on.

I don’t spend as much time in cars as most people do, but even so I’m fixed in my ways, just like we all are.

And there’s nothing like a bike tour to take you out of yourself and show you the world in a new way.

The bike ride to this pillar is phenomenal, and there are at least three good reasons to make the trip. First is the “Tomb of Cicero” at one end of the bike route. Most experts agree that this isn’t the really the tomb of Cicero, but it’s near the spot where he died and that’s enough for most people.

Better than Cicero’s tomb, the bike ride from Terracina to Formia passes through a park which includes the original remains of the via Appia, as well as several ancient Roman and Medieval buildings.

In fact, if you’re riding your bike on the main road, you’ll pass through the park several times. The road winds up the mountain in endless switchbacks, while the Appian Way shoots up in the classical straight line, defying gravity just as easily as she defied the Pontine marshes. You can ride your bike up this way if you choose to. I didnt.

But my favorite thing about this section of the Appian bike tour is the town of Itri. I hadn’t meant to stay there, but I was intrigued by the scenery, the friendly locals, and the castle. After taking a long hot shower and stuffing my gullet with fresh pizza, I spent hours wandering around the dark, twisting alleys of the immense fortress on the hill overlooking Itri.

I can’t tell you much about the history of the castle, but I’ll introduce you to someone who can. On our next bike tour through southern Italy, one of my local contacts has offered to hook us up with an archeologist in Itri who can give a tour of the place. I asked him how much something like that would cost and he said, “some cafe in a bar, I assume, but not more…”

So if you’re up for an expert tour of Itri for the price of a cup of coffee, not to mention a zillion other great experiences that you can read about all over my blog, get in touch with me and join us on this trip. The dates are May 15th-June 1st 2010, approximate cost is $1500 plus airfare and bike (rental, purchase, or transportation of your own rig), and I’ll be happy to answer your other questions by phone or email.

An actual road sign in Puglia, Italy. Which way to Corato? I asked a farmer, and he said "straight ahead."

We’re going to be touring from  May 16 through June 1st, 2010. On June 2nd we’ll be driving a rented van with our bikes back to Rome.

This is longer than originally planned because we’re not ending the tour in Brindisi. We’ll head south to Lecce, which is a beautiful city with a rich history down in the very heel of the Italian boot. I’ve never been there, but an Italian I met on the plane during my last trip told me it’s “The Florence of Southern Italy.”

The longer schedule is also going to give us a lot of time for a long, leisurely trip, with a couple extended stops along the way for rest and laundry.

I’m hoping to arrange a group ride with the Terracina Cycling Club, and a couple of archeologists in Itri and Aeclanum may give us special tours. We’re also going to stopover for 2 nights in the Venosa/Gravina/Matera area so we’ll have plenty of time to see the sasse (beautiful caves that were used as homes and churches for centuries) and several other amazing sites that are off the usual tourist path.

After talking it over with a few people, it seems to make sense not to camp on this tour. We won’t save a whole lot of money by camping, because the areas where camping is available tend to have the nicer and less-expensive lodging options.  We’ll be staying in agriturismo spots most of the time.

Expect to spend an average of 60 euro per evening for lodging. This will usually include breakfast and sometimes dinner. (Keep in mind that the portions will be very small by bicycle touring standards!)

You can save money by sharing a room. I’m willing to take on a room-mate, as long as you don’t snore! Let me know if this interests you.

It looks like there won’t be enough people to get group discounts on anything, so I’ll leave it to you to take care of your own plane tickets and bikes.

If you bring your own bike, we will have a van so you can carry it back to Rome at the end of the tour. I’m planning to either rent a bike there or buy a cheap one at the Roman flea market, Porta Portese. I’ll help you with this, if it’s what you prefer.

That’s it for now. Keep in touch, and I’ll see you in Italy!

But not everybody likes to read, and a lot of you probably won’t travel with me–whether it’s a schedule conflict or my smelly feet.

So here’s another option for you. I’ve put up the full route on a squidoo lens. You’ll get a basic outline of where I go, along with a few brief notes about some of the cool things to see and do while you’re biking the Appian Way. You can dig up the maps yourself, get some relevant books from Amazon, or even shoot me an email if you’ve got a legitimate question.

Here’s the link:

http://www.squidoo.com/bikeappia

By the way, if you’re not already familiar with Squidoo, you should check out my lens just to see what it’s all about. Pretty soon you’ll be posting your own pictures and stories of your bike rides and bike touring adventures. You might even make some money. (I’ve already got $1.40 in pending earnings. That’s almost enough to buy a cappuccino when I get to  Rome!)

If you’re reading this, some part of you wants to be stronger, faster, to travel, to be free. Don’t limit yourself. There’s more than one way to ride to Brindisi, and if that’s not where you want to be, you have as many challenges and adventures awaiting you as there are stars in the sky and dreams in your heart.

The trouble is, we don’t know exactly where each of these milestones stood. Throughout the centuries, collectors and even well-meaning archaeologists moved the milestones and put them in museums, gardens, piazzas and palaces.

That’s why nobody really knows with 100% certainty exactly where the via Appia really went.  We do have a fairly good idea for most of it. On my own bike trips in southern Italy I try to strike a balance between following the known original route and having a scenic, safe, and interesting bike ride.

But now we know a little more.

Yesterday, a southern Italian newspaper, the Corriere del Mezzogiorno, reported the discovery of a milestone on the ancient via Traiana. Here’s a quick history lesson on what this means:

Once you get past Benevento, you’re in unknown territory for a lot of the Appian way. This is always the most confusing (and fun!) part of every bike tour, and things weren’t much different in ancient Roman times. The via Appia was twisted and difficult after Benevento. It winded over mountains and was sometimes little more than a few cuttings on the rocks.

In 109 AD, the emperor Trajan built an alternate route, the Trajan Way–or via Traiana in Italian. This route starts in Benevento and follows the coast of the Adriatic sea to Brindisi. It’s longer in the number of miles, but was easier to follow. I haven’t biked the via Traiana yet (please leave a comment if you have!), but I’ve been to a lot of the towns it passes through. Highly recommended.

Anyway, the via Traiana poses a lot of the same challenges as far as knowing exactly where it went. This latest milestone dug up is a fantastic piece to the puzzle, one of the very few milestones for which we know the exact location and orientation.

You never know what you’ll dig up.

If you’d like to bike the Appian way with me next spring, leave a comment below and I’ll give you the details, which will be posted soon.

“I’m doing everything I can to make this happen for you. I’ve even found a way you can pay for it. Here’s how it works.”

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You weren’t put on this earth to be a worker bee.

To be human is to continuously learn and grow, face new challenges, seek out new experiences and help other people. If you’re not getting a taste of this true life every once in a while then you’re doing yourself a disservice. You can’t spend your entire life sitting behind a desk.

When I wrote my first draft of this post I spend an hour deleting entire paragraphs because I was trying to find the one single event that would capture the essence of my trip. But the truth is, there isn’t a single time or place that can cover it. If there was, you could just take a bus to that particular spot and be a tourist. You’d have no need to bike the entire via Appia.

It’s not about huffing up to the Piazza dei Paladini at the Temple of Jove Anxur, sitting among the wildflowers while the waves of the Mediterranean sea crash among the rocks a thousand feet below you. It’s not about crossing an old bridge guarded by stone lions made of lava that erupted from Mount Vesuvius.

This isn’t just something you do for the random friends you meet in a tavern in the middle of the Apennines, drinking local wine while an old soldier tells you stories of parachuting into Montecasino at the end of the Second World War.

When you’ve found the nearly invisible “Strada Vecchia” though sheer persistence and hints from the locals, and you cross a dark swamp to come upon a legendary ancient bridge, you still haven’t completed your quest.

And if you arrive intact at the port of Brindisi, where one of the ancient marble columns still stands in defiance of graffiti and the elements, looking east towards Greece and Turkey, you celebrate at bar where the locals mysteriously warn you that “even the walls have ears” and enjoy a lively dinner at a hostel with fellow travelers speaking Italian, French, Spanish and Greek-that’s still not the end.

If you’ve really lived this journey as you were meant to, then you’ll be at a total loss for words whenever somebody asks you, “How was it?”

There’s no quick fix here, no shortcut. You have to ride the whole thing, from Rome to Brindisi, to get the real experience. We can’t do this halfway.

That’s why I’m doing everything I can to make this happen for you. I’ve even found a way you can pay for it. Here’s how it works.

This ride is going to be an informal fundraiser for the Adventure Cycling Association (ACA). I’m asking that everyone on this trip make a contribution to ACA, but there’s no fixed amount.

This trip is going to cost roughly $1400, depending on the exchange rates next year, so I recommend a goal of raising $2000 in donations and giving the extra $600 to Adventure Cycling.

This means you can solicit sponsors and tell your donors that 30% of their donation will support the Adventure Cycling Association while the rest will go to cover the costs of your trip. I’m putting together a fund raising packet with tips and ideas for raising money, letter templates you can send to local businesses to ask for funding, and other resources to help you out.

One thing to keep in mind: Your enthusiasm can be contagious. When I told the lead architect at the Via Appia Regional Park about my plans, he shook his head and declared, it was impossibile.  He asked me why I would ever want to do such a thing. My answer won him over, and I even surprised myself a little bit.

If you’re determined to make this journey, your excitement and passion will open doors which didn’t even seem to exist before. If you can cross a famous subcontinent on your own physical power, what else might you be able to do?

I was just starting to become fluent in Italian, and I was a little bit overconfident. I knew that pompa means a large pump, such as a water pump or a gas pump. Since I wanted a small, portable bicycle pump I added the Italian suffix, ino, which means little.

I got some strange stares when I walked into a bike shop and asked for a pompino. Nobody would answer my questions or help me. At the second place I went to, the owner told me I was disgusting and threw me out.

Finally, someone explained to me that pompino is a vulgar slang word for a specific sexual act. As I said, be careful what you ask for.

This happened almost ten years ago, but I thought about it today because of a Monty Python video where a Hungarian tourist finds himself in a similar situation. This has nothing at all to do with biking across Italy, but check it out:

Those busy Romans, always on the move, built their own shortcut during the reign of Emperor Trajan. The city and temple rest on a giant point that juts out into the sea, and the Romans cut a road straight through the lowest, softest part of the point. It’s daunting when you see it up close and imagine them hacking away at the rock with nothing but shovels and picks.

The Roman numbers etched into the cliff face represent the depth of the cut, and go from C to CX to CXX.

This unnatural detour saved the typical Roman a day of travel on the way to or from Rome, and it could have saved me a few hours, but I had other plans.

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You just can’t go to Terracina on a bike and not climb the old, cartilage-scraping route that plagued the hooves of untold  herds of mules and other pack animals. Not to mention, I had to pay my tribute to Jove.

But first I needed coffee.

I bought a mini pizza and washed it down with espresso at a bar near the edge of town, run by a guy named Francesco. He was a cyclist himself, and asked eager questions about my planned journey.

“E’ facile,” he concluded. It’s easy. Clearly he had never talked to any of the archeologists in Rome.

I asked him about riding up to Jove Anxur by way of the “high Appia” and he assured me “It is not steep.” So we parted ways, and I rode confidently up the knee-grinding street.

As far as old ruins go, the temple was a bit of a disappointment. The view was not. You could see the southwest coast of Italy rolling away along the Mediterranean, with the Alban Hills in the distance, the cradle of this ancient city that was the cradle of modern Western civilization.

And you couldn’t mistake via Appia for anything else. A dark green line of umbrella pines cut across the landscape, shooting back to Rome in an impossibly straight line. The southwest route away from Terracina and Rome was almost as straight as it marched up into the hills, but for most of this section I would have to take the modern road which crossed the Appian Way in endless switchbacks.

This was my second day on the Appian way, I only had one small worry. Francesco’s optimistic view was in question. He had told me the route to Jove Anxur was “not steep,” but I felt certain that my knees had lost at least a centimeter of cartilege.

In the old days, before the “Appian slash,” travelers had to climb almost a thousand feet on a steep narrow roadbed. The rest and the view at the top, in a flat area called Piazza dei Paladini must have been a welcome site.  It was for me.

They say when your blood sugar is low, the first thing to suffer is your judgment.

Anyway, I wound up arriving in Aquilonia in the dark, cold and exhausted and a little bit disoriented after a wet day fighting the wind. But Aquilonia turned out to be possibly the most hospitable town in the world. That’s another story, but here’s the point I’m getting at.

There’s a shield in the Pro Loca headquarters of Aquilonia that shows a warrior holding his hand in the fire and the words “Aut vincit aut morem.” Victory or death.

The story is that Aquilonia was Samnite territory, and the site of the Samnites’ last stand against the Romans. They put their hands in the fire and made the oath to defeat the Romans or die in battle. They were killed almost to a man, but today their descendants live on in fierce defiance.

“We are not Italians,” some of the locals told me. “We are Samnites.”

“Do or die” can sometimes turn out to be both, it seems. Like in our case, for example.

My 2009 trip through Italy will be in the fall, not the usual springtime bike tour. But I’d like to tour the Via Appia by bike in the spring of 2009, as originally planned, if you can help to make it happen.

If I can get 10 people to agree on a time to go, I can get us group discounts on plane tickets and a lot of our food and lodging. I’ll help you get your bike in the plane, or buy one in Italy, as I plan to do.

You may have some economic reasons not to do this trip just now, but here’s something to consider.

First, unless you’re really losing your home or applying for food stamps, a lot of the doom and gloom is self-fulfilling. This is going to be an inspiring journey that will change your life forever. You’ll come back with a sense of renewal, the fire back in your eyes, and the strength and spirit to do whatever it takes to prosper in your business or your career.

This is a vacation, but it’s also an investment. It’s worth at least as much as a personal trainer or a life coach. It will cost much less, and give you bragging rights to boot.

Do whatever it takes to make this happen. It will be a victory over the pessimism that’s ruining our economy, a conquest of the fears and self-doubts that are holding you back from living the life you want. If this kind of travel is part of your dreams as much as it’s a part of mine, you have to do it or a small part of your spirit will die inside.

Victory or death. You don’t have to be a Samnite to know what’s at stake here. Ten of us are going to have a blast! I hope you’re part of the team. Send an email to jacob “at” bicyclefreedom.com to get more info about this journey.