Tolyatti is a city that exists because of a car and a dam, and neither of them is old. When the Volga was blocked at Zhigulevsk in the 1950s to make the vast Kuibyshev Reservoir, the old merchant town of Stavropol disappeared under the water, and a new settlement was built on higher ground. In 1964 it was renamed after Palmiro Togliatti, the Italian Communist leader, and a few years later the Soviet government signed a deal with Fiat to build a factory here. The first Zhiguli rolled off the line in 1970, a lightly adapted Fiat 124, and for decades the city's wide avenues, tidy apartment blocks and crowds of workers revolved around the plant that made the Lada, the car that put a generation of Soviet families on the road.
Today Tolyatti has seven hundred thousand people, and the factory is still its biggest employer, though not as dominant as it was. The streets are a grid of long, straight avenues, with plenty of trees and a slightly sleepy feeling in the residential districts. There is a technical museum devoted to the cars, which is better than it sounds if you like industrial history, and the shore of the reservoir has beaches and promenades.
What makes the place worth knowing for a rider is its position. The city sits on the southern edge of the Zhiguli Hills, a low, forested range that forces the Volga into its great loop, the Samarskaya Luka. The hills are protected as a national park, with steep wooded slopes, limestone outcrops, caves and small villages, and the roads around them climb and twist in a way that is rare on the plains. If you want gentle curves, forest and views of the river, this is the place to find them on a day out.
Practicalities are easy. The city has fuel stations on every main road, plenty of cafés and hotels, and mechanics who know a lot about Russian cars, though perhaps less about modern bikes. Traffic can be heavy on the main bridges across the reservoir, especially at weekends in summer, when half of Samara region heads for the water. Keep an eye out for speed cameras, which are common here.
The weather is continental, with hot summers and cold winters, and the best months for riding are May to September. In July, the reservoir is warm enough for a swim, and the hills smell of pine and hot stone. Walk along the embankment in the evening, and watch the long barges slide past.