Ioannina wraps itself around a lake, and the lake is the first thing to understand about it. Lake Pamvotida lies flat and grey-green beside the city, with a small wooded island in the middle that holds a cluster of monasteries and a village, reached by a short boat from the waterfront. Behind the city rise the limestone ranges of Epirus, the Pindus mountains, which isolated this part of north-west Greece for centuries and gave it a character quite unlike the islands and the south.
The history is thick here. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Ioannina was the capital of Ali Pasha, an Ottoman governor who ran his own near-independent state from the fortress of Its Kale, a walled citadel on a peninsula above the water. The mosque of Aslan Pasha and the Fethiye mosque still stand inside the walls, and silversmiths still work in the narrow lanes. Byron visited Ali Pasha in 1809 and wrote admiringly of him. The old town also had a long-established Jewish community, the Romaniotes, whose synagogue survives, a reminder of the many lives that crossed the place.
For a rider, Ioannina is a good base. To the north the Zagori villages, with their stone bridges and slate roofs, sit below the Vikos Gorge, one of the deepest in the world for its width, and the lanes that climb to them are narrow, steep and magnificent. To the east the road climbs over the Pindus toward Metsovo, high on the Katara pass, then down to the plains of Thessaly and the strange rock pillars of Meteora. The modern Egnatia motorway has made the journey faster, but the old road still has more character, with long bends, forests of oak and beech and small villages. Surfaces are generally good, though rockfall and frost damage appear in the mountains, and in winter snow can close the heights.
Ioannina has plenty of fuel stations, shops and places to eat, from tavernas serving grilled meat to pastry shops that sell the local milk pies and syrupy sweets. Summers are hot, so start early, and spring and autumn are best for the mountain loops. A walk around the citadel at sunset, with the lake turning gold below, is a fine way to end a day.