bicyclefreedom.com

This is a chapter from my new book, Tutto Nascosto: A Bike Ride Down the Appian Way. I’ll be posting a chapter at a time, and the full length book will also be available as a downloadable ebook when it’s finished. Leave a comment below, and I’ll make sure you get a copy of the book (Your email will not be published and I will never share it).

Introduction

There’s just something in human nature that won’t let us stare too long at an unclimbed mountain, an uncharted wilderness, or an unanswered challenge. This is why other people climb mountains and jump out of airplanes.

This is why, after almost 7 years of staring down a 2,300 year old highway, I found I could no longer try to run a business or be a teacher or fulfill any of the other roles the world put before me until I rode my bike to the end of the road, just to see where it went.

Other people said it couldn’t be done. That I would be robbed, kidnapped, and mashed to a pulp beneath the wheels of a truck before I reached Terracina. One well-meaning blog reader sent an email to warn me, “You’ll destroy your arse in the first 10 kilometers.” A crotchety old park superintendent muttered “E tutto nascosto.” It’s all hidden.

Everything they told me was true. The Appian Way is fraught with peril, a 500-mile gauntlet of knee-grinding climbs, bone cracking holes, sheer drops in the fog, bad weather, hostile natives, robbers, murderers and things far worse than that.

But there’s a reward for trips like this, something you know intuitively before you begin. A journey like this is going to change you—it must—there are too many lonely miles for it not to happen.

When you venture along the jugular vein of ancient Rome you’re going to encounter a lot of ghosts, that’s a given, but more than that you’re going to find the secrets that are tutto nascosto, hidden away in your own heart.

If you look at a road map of modern Italy, you’ll see that Rome looks like a pizza. I don’t think this is a complete accident, but there’s a practical reason the Italians designed their freeway system like this. A main highway, the Grande Raccordo Annulare, circles the entire city at a far enough distance to avoid plowing through any of the most important and popular archeological sites.

The “exits” off this freeway are mostly straight lines leading straight into the center of Rome, like spokes leading into the hub. They divide the city into pizza wedges, but the really cool part is that almost all of these inward-bound roads were built over a thousand years ago. Or at least built on top of the original road bed, or near it.

The via Appia, or the Appian Way, is one of the oldest and most famous of these roads. It runs diagonally down the southern half of Italy, across the Apennine mountains, and down to the ancient port of Brindisi at Italy’s heel. This was the main highway in ancient times, leading from the capital of the empire to the port that was a gateway to Greece, Egypt, and Africa. This was the door to the farthest reaches of the Roman empire.

If you made a list of famous leaders, warriors, poets, philosophers and artists of ancient Rome and even the centuries beyond, you’d find that nearly every one of them has had a journey, an experience, maybe even a death or a tomb along the Appian Way.

Even today, the land along the via Appia that isn’t controlled by the government is an Italian Beverly Hills dotted with the mansions of celebrities and moguls.

But the road itself is preserved in all her glory. Just a quarter mile past the Colosseum, there’s a casually hidden (nascosto?) entrance to the Park of the Ancient Appian way. If you happen to be in Rome on a good day, you can hike or ride a bike on the original basalt road, and stop to visit some stunning catacombs and ruins along the way.

This is an awesome adventure in itself, and it’s about as far off the beaten path as you can get in Rome.

After 10 miles or so, the way is harder to find. Nobody knows the exact route of via Appia with 100% certainty.

For me, that simply added to the adventure. We know where it starts, where it ends, and a lot of specific points it touches along the way. So seven years after my first visit to the park, I set off on my bike to connect the dots and plot my own course.

This is a chapter from my new book, Tutto Nascosto: A Bike Ride Down the Appian Way. I’ll be posting a chapter at a time, and the full length book will also be available as a downloadable ebook when it’s finished. Leave a comment below, and I’ll make sure you get a copy of the book. (Your email will not be published, and I will never share it.)

Even if you just have a few hours free, you can jump on your bike and have an adventure. There’s a small residential road that I had never explored, but on the maps it looked like it continued on for a while.

I had a free afternoon with just about three hours until sundown, so I took a bike ride down the mystery road to see where it would go. It turns out this particular section of Olive street intersects with El Camino Real, the Royal Highway of “New Spain.”

I ended up in the historical center of San Gabriel. The road went almost in a straight line to one of the early California missions. People from the San Gabriel Mission went on to found the city of Los Angeles, so this bike ride took me to some of the roots of LA’s history.

I even got to see one of the first and oldest grape vines in southern California, and later on I tasted some California wine to celebrate.

If your a biking newbie, this just reinforces the point: It doesn’t matter how far you want to ride or how much time you have. Just get on your bike and explore. You’ll run into something interesting you’ve never seen before, or discover a new bike route to places you’ve already been.

Terracina roughly translates into “little piece of land” but it’s hard to understand where they got this title from. Everything here seems big, towering, rocky to the extreme.  The craggy top of the place once housed a fortress called Anxur, and the temple to Jupiter/Zeus/Jove is called the temple of Jove in Anxur.

The top of the city is a sheer delight for an amateur history buff like me. The original Appian Way is clear and obviously marked in the main piazza of the town, running right between the venerable duomo and an excellent bar where the espresso will do wonders for an exhausted bike tourist.

The walls of the duomo are made of building materials filched from other, far older structures. So you see all kinds of tiles with latin inscriptions, chunks of marble, bits of bas-relief and artwork. These 3-dimensional collages are actually fairly common all over Italy, and they’re one of my favorite things to look at.

But when you reach the Piazza dei Paladini and the Temple of Jove in Anxur, you’re in for a sight. The fortress town of Terracina is dwarfed by the mountainous cliffs, the rolling countryside far below, and the shimmering Mediterranean rippling off into the distance.

Most of all, you see the via Appia clearly marked in both directions. The original road has been preserved as a park going out of Rome, and when this gives way to Strada Statale 7 (SS7) it still runs through the Pontine Marshes in a straight line, flanked by umbrella pines. From Jove’s lofty perch you have a dark green line showing you the way.

In fact, the umbrella pines are almost always a reliable marker. Throughout my trip, whenever I was unsure of the way, I would get somewhere high up and look for the pines. Even in the most dry and dusty sections of Puglia and Basilicata, it wasn’t that unusual to pass a lonely umbrella pine marking the remnants of Rome’s most famous road.

As you leave Terracina heading south, you’ll see the famous cut through the rock that eliminated the need to take the steep slope over the mountain and saved hasty Romans an entire day of travel.

The road leaving Terracina takes you along some of my favorite parts of the journey. As you weave up the switchbacks towards Fundi and Itri, you’ll come across some well-preserved ruins of the Appian Way.

On my last tour a farmer was selling olives from a wooden cart on the side of the road. I munched on these as I walked along the old via Appia, and wondered where I would find myself next.

The first time I tried to bike the entire via Appia, I wanted to be as faithful as humanly possible to the original roadbed, even though local archaeologists and history buffs insisted this could not be done. They were only partly right.

I’m getting ready for a new bike tour next week, roughly following El Cammino Real, the Royal Highway, which is (or was) California’s Appian Way. But when I did my research, I learned something interesting that maybe should have been obvious.

There never was a single road.

Max Kurillo and Erline Tuttle wrote a book about this route, the efforts of historians to preserve it, and the bells that mark the way. They also made an important point that El Cammino Real is more of a corridor than an actual road.

There’s a general swathe along the California coast where people traveled consistently along footpaths, trails, riverbeds, and (much much later) primitive roads.  It changed its course like a river in a broad valley, and one voyager’s footprints could easily be overgrown or swept away at high tide.  The route was never marked except by the convenience of each individual traveler.

I would add that the most accurate reconstruction we know of today essentially follows the 101 Freeway, and choosing this as your bike route would just give you a miserable bike tour without a chance to experience the real California.

Ditto for via Appia, as I quickly learned. In some places the route is better known (if only because the ancient Romans were more anal than the colonial Spaniards) but it’s not always the best way to travel. The key, even thousands of years ago, was to follow the general area.

In Rome, I did as the Romans do. I was true to the Appian Way most of the time, visited all the ancient cities and ruins and Roman temples. But I also detoured when it was a choice between a park and a freeway. I stayed at agriturismi, which are more like the lodging a traveler would have found along the via Appia in ancient Roman times. I talked to people, took hikes, ate at mom-and-pop restaurants and drank with the locals at their favorite bars.

Tracing the Royal Highway next week, I’ll stay in the corridor, but I won’t worry too much about whether or not I’m bicycling over Portola’s footprints. I’ll visit the missions, taste a lot of wine, swim and camp at many beaches, talk to farmers and ranchers, and prove that what’s just off the 101 is far more interesting than what used to be on it.

My original intent was to tour the missions. But after I started reading a few books about the missions and their history, I saw that there are far more interesting things to see and do on a bike tour. I’m looking forward to this, and I hope I’ll have something worthwhile to tell.

Somewhere between Terracina and Formia, you’ll find it. There’s a stark pillar along the side of a winding mountain road. I assume it’s either a milestone or the remains of one of the many monuments that line the Appian 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.

***********************************************************************************************

“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.”

************************************************************************************************

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 had an extra long lunch break today, and took a quick ride in a part of LA that I pass through a lot. But I never saw this before!

I was out for maybe a hour, and didn’t ride more than a couple of miles, but I took all the side streets and discovered a new park, a bunch of old mansions,  and some gingerbread houses. I was stalked by a giant Ewok in a Porsche (Halloween is near), and I even found a narrow twisty road that smelled like a redwood forest. In L.A.!

If you’re not using your bike to explore the places you think you already know, you’re in for a treat. I bet every city has quirky houses and yards, not to mention those random freak encounters with weird (ahem, interesting) people.

You’ll come away from these discovery rides with a new sense of wonder at the world, quite possibly enhanced by the extra load of oxygen and endorphins.

This is at least as entertaining as any movie you’ll see all year, and it’s free. Not to mention the exercise.

Bike across Italy next year, if you dare to.

A lot of the people I’ve been talking to are into the idea. My High School reunion last week put me over the edge.

I’ll be putting up a lot of information on the Bike tour of southern Italy FAQs page, including the long answers to all of your questions.

In the meantime, here are the short answers to most of the things people are asking me:

How much will this bike tour cost?

Less than you think.

How long will the journey last?

Between 7 and 10 days each way (but you don’t have to ride your bike both ways), with some optional site seeing days at each end.

Where are we going?

[tag-tec]Southern Italy[/tag-tec], far off the beaten path for most tourists.

When is this epic bicycle voyage going to take place?

May, 2008

If you want to know more about the trip, check out the Bike tour of Southern Italy FAQs (click here).

I shopped the idea around at my High School reunion this past weekend, and was surprised at how many people were into the idea of [tag-tec]touring Italy by bicycle[/tag-tec]. (Thanks to all of you who trust me to guide you through a foreign land, when the last time you saw me I couldn’t even get a license to drive my date to the prom.)

I’ve done this route before, as well as several other [tag-tec]bike trips[/tag-tec] all over [tag-tec]Italy[/tag-tec], and I speak Italian fluently, so there shouldn’t be any serious logistical/navigational problems. My goal is to organize and write about these tours for a living within a few years, so I’m doing whatever it takes to make sure everyone is comfortable and happy.

That said, this is Italy, so you can expect a few mishaps and surprises, just enough to make a good story when you get back home.

There are more details posted on the FAQs page, or you can leave a comment if you have any questions.