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Last week I had a conference call to hash out some bike tour details with my fellow riders. If you’re on my email list you’ll get a message about this. If you’re not, but you’d like to be on the list, just shoot me an email: jacob “at” bicyclefreedom.com.

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!

It’s true I want to lead a kick-ass, life-changing bike tour next spring so I can charge money for the same service in the future. It’s true that I’m going to publish a guide-book with some of the best-kept secrets about bike touring in southern 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.

When the ancient Romans built the via Appia and other roads, they marked the way with milestones. The milestones usually showed the distance from the nearest large city, so you could look at one and know, for example, that the Appian Way ran right at this spot, and it was 17 miles to Benevento.

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.

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“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?

Be careful what you ask for. The first time I tried to tour Italy by bicycle, I needed to buy a pump.

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:

It was still morning when I got to Terracina. It’s like Venice Beach with a giant walled city on a hill. A steep road leads to a foreboding gate the gives entrance to the walls of the city. The Appian Way went right through the city and even higher up to the Piazza Dei Paladini and the Temple of Jove Anxur. At least for a time.

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.

There’s a fierce cold wind blowing through LA today. Riding against it this morning reminded me of a similar day crossing the Apennines on my last Italy tour. I made a bad decision on a rainy day, based on something I thought I’d remembered reading about Aquilonia.

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.

I woke up to a cold fog, and couldn’t wait to get back on my bike and start moving. I was in the Pontine Marshes, and the Romans were in a hurry to get through, too, when they built the via Appia.

Here the Appian Way shoots forward in a perfectly straight line.  the Romans probably could have established a winding route along sections of dry ground, but instead they pounded strong pilings into the water to support the road where they wanted it to go.

Two straight lines of Umbrella pines flank the road on either side, and I wonder if the Romans originally planted pines as shade for their travelers. Throughout my trip, these trees always seemed abundant along the roadside, and whenever I was unsure of the way I could go up on a hill and look for the clear green lines cutting across the land.

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The Pontine marshes are drained now, and mostly used for agriculture. A drainage ditch runs along the road just beyond the trees.

It would have been easy to die here. Trucks emerged from the early morning fog, and there was no room for them to pass, and no space to get out of the way. The trees and bushes grow up flush against the roadway in most places. Lots of flowers and other monuments to the fallen dot the roadway.

I could have taken a parallel route about 10 miles south, through a national park. I recommend this to anyone else. But I’m a purist, and I wanted to follow the Via Appia as faithfully as possible.

Luckily, some of the most considerate drivers I’ve seen in my life drove the Appian Way. They would slow down and follow me, sometimes for as long as 15 minutes, until it was safe to pull over and let them go by. People are generally in less of a hurry in Italy, even on the Romans’ most important highway.

Beyond the thin ditch of water and the umbrella pines, endless pastures, crop fields, stone walls, vineyards and olive groves roll out among the occasional milestone or chunk of marble. It’s as if nothing has changed over the centuries The cars are an anachronism, as if some mischievous god dumped a layer of asphalt over the whole thing and let the drivers in as a great circus to entertain the masses.

Long before you get to Terracina, you see the Temple of Jupiter Anxur at the top of Mount Sant’Angelo.

I was destined to get to know Jupiter very well (to be continued…)

Riding out of Rome on an old Raleigh 10-speed, you’re going to feel like a gladiator that just walked out into the ring. It’s a battle getting out.

In fact, you are in a ring, the Grande Raccordo Annulare, the highway that circles the outskirts of Rome. Several main roads cut across this ring and merge in the center of the city, dividing all the area into wedges like a giant pizza.

I almost became road pizza. There are places where the Appian Way has no shoulder and there’s a sheer stone wall on each side. So you literally can’t get out of the way of a moving vehicle.

Eventually you’ll reach the Porta San Sebastiano, the port of St. Sebastian in the Aurelian Wall. If you happen to be there between 9 and 2, look for a door with a buzzer on the right. If you push the button they’ll let you into a museum dedicated to Roman engineering. But the best part is you can climb up to the battlements on top of the wall and walk along it for a good kilometer or so. Watch out for Sabines, Samnites, and Barbarians!

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A bit further on you’ll be at the Catacombs, and you can cut through the catacombs of St. Calixto to get out of the traffic for a while. This takes longer, but you’ll be looking at gardens instead of stone walls, and you’ll have clean air and some shade.

On my trip I got past the catacombs and headed into the via Appia park, where the original road bumps along for almost 10 miles, past fields of wildflowers and crumbling Roman ruins. This park is the history buff’s dream!

If you go there you’ll see the tomb of Cecilia Metella that looks like a castle, the stone skeleton of an early Church, aqueducts and endless monuments to people who died centuries ago. You can stop at the “Domine Quo Vadis” church and see footprints in the marble–thought by true believers to be the footprints of either Christ or St. Peter. You’ll see the ruins of old houses and villas and you might even get a wheel caught in the ruts left by hundreds of thousands of carts and wagons.

When the Appian way hit a dead end (actually the route was still in a straight line but it was closed off by walls and fences), I took a few side streets that I knew would lead to SS7, the modern highway equivalent of via Appia.

There was a strong stench of sulphur coming from a fountain at the intersection. The water was pierced with tiny bubbles and tasted tart. An old man told me these natural minerals are good for the health. I’m still alive.

I had lunch in a small park with a picket fence. A sign on the fence informed me that this was “A place clean and civil.”
The afternoon was a whirlwind of vineyards and fields of crops and a huge viaduct at Ariccia.

Just outside Genzano, another long section of the original roadbed was exposed, and I followed this past still more crumbling marble pillars.

When Seneca traveled the Appian Way, he often camped, saying, “The mattress lies upon the ground, and I upon the mattress.”

I ended my first day the same way, pitching my tent in an empty field.

Dottore Pascuale Grello was incredulous when I showed up at his office unannounced one morning and told him what I wanted to do.

“Impossibile!” he insisted, pronouncing the word with long vowels: eem-poh-SEEEEEE-bee-lay!

Nobody knows how many millions of nobles, senators, philosophers, soldiers, merchants, prisoners, slaves, poets and bandits have followed the route of the Appian Way from Rome to Brindisi or vice versa. They’ve been doing it for 1,300 years, on foot, in litters, by wagon, buggy, horse, pony, mule, and more recently in cars, motorcycles and trucks.

Surely one enthusiastic biker could make the journey.

Dr. Grello is, as far as I can tell, the chief archeologist for the Parco Reggionnale dell’Appia Antica on the outskirts of Rome. If you try to sneak out of Rome behind the Coloseum, through the ancient walls at the Port of St. Sebastian, you’re at the start of the Appian Way, and you’ll soon see these park headquarters on your right.

Even if you’re not planning to ride the via Appia by bicycle, if you’re in Rome this park is well worth stomping around a bit. They close the road to motor vehicles on Sunday, and you can usually find someone offering bikes for rent near the Colosseum.

I went to the park headquarters and asked in uncertain Italian if I could talk to the leader. A young woman barely set down her lipstick-stained cigarette as she directed me to Dr. Grello.

When I explained that I wanted to bike the entire length of the Appian Way, and he finished assuring me that it could not be done, he asked why I would ever want to do such a thing.

This is the hardest question to answer, even in English. I did my best to explain my fascination with the Mediterranean, ancient history, and the desperate need we have (I think) in the USA, to rediscover some common roots. Archeologists will never finish scraping the ancient world out of the soil and gluing it back together, but there’s always still an energy you can feel when you’re alone in these ancient places.

I want to see marble columns rising out of misty fields in the dawn, and remember what the Romans forgot when they became too powerful as a civilization and too weak as individuals, the power the barbarians came to understand when the Romans had forgotten and the Greeks were just a memory.

When you travel by bicycle you don’t just “see” things behind the glass of a museum display or a windshield. You feel the air and the moisture and the contours of the land. You’re exposed to the people and the energy of the place. You drink in the nectar of the world, and anything is possible.

Halfway through my rant, Dr. Grello understood. You could see it in his face. And here’s a secret to communicating with Italians. Even if you don’t know the right words, if you speak with passion and move your hands around in big circles most Italians can read your mind and they’ll usually produce whatever you want on the spot.

My new archeologist savior was already pulling out topo maps, old photos and drawings, and giving me a stream of directions and names and numbers in rapid Italian. He told me that a lot of the Appian Way was on private property, covered over by new roads, even freeways. He mentioned floods and swamps and mountains. Also many places where people simply don’t know where the via Appia ran.

I frantically scribbled as much as I could understand in my notebook. I wasn’t looking for perfection, just adventure and fun and new learning and experience. If I couldn’t retrace all of the Appian Way, I would still see most of it, do the best I could.

Dr. Grello assured me once again that I was attempting something impossible. The he shook his head, shook my hand, and solemnly wished me good luck.

If you’d like to receive free email tips on traveling by bicycle, send a request to Jacob@BicycleFreedom.com.

This content is copyright 2008 by Jacob Bear.