CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A proper escape from Milan with roads worth waking up for. A 409 km loop that starts and ends near Milan, about 5 h 07 of riding. It goes by way of Monticelli Brusati and Marco. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 1,250 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
This is where a day makes up time without anyone trying. Third and fourth, and very little else. 16 km that neither climbs nor drops much. The road settles into the ground rather than fighting it.
Check the pass is open before you commit to it.
Milan does not try to charm you, and that is part of its charm. It is Italy's business capital, a city of fashion, finance and design that works hard and dresses well. At the centre stands the Duomo, a Gothic cathedral begun in 1386 and not finished for about five centuries, a forest of white marble spires and statues, and you can climb onto the roof among them. Beside it, the glass-roofed Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II is a nineteenth-century shopping arcade, and beyond it La Scala opera house.
Franciacorta is Italy's answer to Champagne, and Monticelli Brusati sits in the middle of it. Sparkling wine made by the classic method, second fermentation in the bottle, has been the business of these low hills between Brescia and Lake Iseo since the 1960s, and the result is a landscape of tidy vineyards, cypress-lined drives and cellar doors, with old stone villages tucked into the folds of the land.
Dante may have ridden past here. In the twelfth canto of the Inferno he compares a steep, broken descent in hell to a great landslide on the Adige south of Trento, and most scholars believe he meant the Lavini di Marco, the chaos of boulders and bare rock above this village. The slope has another secret: in the 1990s, scientists found hundreds of dinosaur footprints preserved in its limestone slabs, and a path now leads up to them.
Return visit. Read the place description above.