Lago di Viverone is a small, warm lake in northern Piedmont, cupped inside one of the most remarkable glacial landforms in Europe. Ice flowing out of the Aosta Valley during the last glaciations dumped a vast ring of moraine here, the Morainic Amphitheatre of Ivrea, and its eastern wall, the Serra, runs for many kilometres as an almost perfectly straight wooded ridge. The lake sits at the foot of it, with the villages of Viverone and Azeglio on its shores and Ivrea around a quarter of an hour's ride to the northwest.
The label refers to the lake's outlet stream and to the prehistoric site nearby. Bronze Age people built pile dwellings in the shallows here, and their remains are part of the UNESCO listing that covers similar sites around the Alps. Underwater surveys have mapped thousands of wooden posts, though there is nothing to walk around on land; the lake is the monument. In summer it is a local swimming and boating spot, ringed by campsites and lidos, and in the evening the light over the water turns soft and gold behind the hills.
The riding around here is better than many realise. The road along the Serra crest and the lanes through the moraine hills twist through vineyards, chestnut woods and small villages with castle towers, and the Erbaluce di Caluso, a crisp local white wine, comes from these slopes. Northwest, the Aosta Valley opens towards the big passes, while to the south the plain flattens out towards the rice fields of Vercelli, where you trade corners for long straights and mosquitoes. Traffic is light outside weekend afternoons, though tractors and cyclists are common.
Ivrea, a town of over twenty thousand, is the obvious place for fuel, food and a break. It is famous for Olivetti, whose modernist factory town is itself a World Heritage site, and for the Battle of the Oranges at carnival, when teams pelt each other with fruit in the squares. Closer by, the small villages around the lake have bars and pizzerias, and fuel stations are spread along the main roads.