Leave Milan to the south and within twenty minutes the city gives way to rice. The Parco Agricolo Sud Milano protects a wide belt of farmland around the city, and between Binasco, Zibido San Giacomo and Noviglio the fields are flooded each spring, turning the plain into a vast mirror of sky, laced with canals and lines of poplars. The locals call it the chequered sea.
Binasco is a small town on the Naviglio Pavese, the canal that runs from Milan to Pavia. It has a castle built by the Visconti, and it was there, in 1418, that Beatrice di Tenda, wife of Filippo Maria Visconti, was beheaded on a charge of adultery, a story later turned into an opera by Bellini. South of Binasco, the Certosa di Pavia, a huge Carthusian monastery with a marble facade, is one of the great monuments of Lombardy.
Starting or finishing here gives you a gentle introduction to the plain. The roads are flat and straight, running along canals and between fields, with old farmhouses, cascine, scattered across the landscape. In spring, the flooded rice fields are full of herons, egrets and frogs, and the evenings are loud with croaking. In summer, mosquitoes are a nuisance.
The ride south towards the Trebbia valley crosses the Po and climbs into the Apennines, where the roads become twisty and the scenery more dramatic. The return to Binasco brings you back into the flat calm of the plain, a pleasant way to wind down.
Practicalities are simple in Binasco: pumps on the main road, bars by the canal, trattorias that cook the rice grown in the fields you just rode past. Risotto here is not a menu choice so much as a local obligation.