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.
From Siena it runs 286 km to Siena; allow about 5 h 14 of riding. It goes by way of Villa du Poggio Imperiale, Sasso Fratino and back through Villa du Poggio Imperiale. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 800 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available.
Expect company on a summer weekend. Early is better than fast. For about 70 km this is Chiantigiana Wine Road, a road with a name of its own and a reason for it.
Siena sits on three ridges in the heart of Tuscany, a red-brick medieval city that has hardly changed its shape in seven hundred years. At its centre is the Piazza del Campo, a sloping, shell-shaped square paved in brick and divided into nine sections, a reminder of the Council of Nine that governed the city in its golden age. The Palazzo Pubblico, with the slender Torre del Mangia, stands at the bottom of the square, and inside are frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti showing the effects of good and bad government, painted in the fourteenth century.
Read the complete Historic Centre of Siena write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Historic Centre of Siena is where the day begins. Next is Villa du Poggio Imperiale.
Poggio Imperiale announces itself with an avenue, a long, straight, cypress-lined approach running up from Porta Romana in Florence, with statues in niches and the villa waiting at the top like the end of a sentence. It began as a Medici property in the sixteenth century, but its grand form came in the 1620s, when Maria Maddalena of Austria, wife of Cosimo II, enlarged it and gave it the name Imperiale in a nod to her Habsburg origins. The cool neoclassical front you see today was added in the early nineteenth century under Napoleonic rule.
Read the complete Villa du Poggio Imperiale write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Villa du Poggio Imperiale comes up about 70 km into the recorded legs. Next is Sasso Fratino.
Sasso Fratino is a forest you are not allowed to enter, and that is precisely the point. High on the Romagna side of the Apennine ridge, in the national park of the Casentino forests, it was declared Italy's first integral nature reserve in 1959, and since then nature has been left almost entirely to itself. Ancient beech woods cling to steep slopes, with silver fir, maple and ash mixed in, and dead trees are left to rot where they fall, feeding fungi, beetles and birds. In 2017 it became part of the transnational World Heritage listing of ancient beech forests of Europe.
Read the complete Sasso Fratino write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 136 km into the recorded legs you reach Sasso Fratino. Next is back through Villa du Poggio Imperiale.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Villa du Poggio Imperiale write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Villa du Poggio Imperiale, late in the day. Next is Historic Centre of Siena.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Historic Centre of Siena write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Historic Centre of Siena. That is the ride.
Historic Centre of Siena → Villa du Poggio Imperiale is 70 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Villa du Poggio Imperiale → Sasso Fratino is 66 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Sasso Fratino → back through Villa du Poggio Imperiale is 77 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Villa du Poggio Imperiale → Historic Centre of Siena is 73 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.