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.
241 km from Piadena to Piadena, about 4 h 07 of riding. On the way it passes Mantua and Sabbioneta, Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda, Villa Serego and back through Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda. The line favours views over speed.
Expect company on a summer weekend. Early is better than fast. For about 29 km this is Mille Miglia Historic Route Core, a road with a name of its own and a reason for it.
Four thousand years ago people built a village on stilts at the edge of a marsh here, and the muck preserved it. The Lagazzi del Vho site, near Piadena in the Po plain, was a Bronze Age settlement raised on wooden piles above a wetland, and thousands of its timbers, pots and tools lay waterlogged in the mud until archaeologists recovered them. It is one of the prehistoric pile dwelling sites around the Alps that UNESCO listed in 2011, and Italy has several. You will not see houses, since the evidence lies buried, but you will see a flat green plain that was once water, and a good museum in the town explains the finds.
Read the complete Lagazzi del Vho write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Lagazzi del Vho is where the day begins. Next is Mantua and Sabbioneta.
Approach Mantua from the north across the causeway and you see why it was so hard to conquer: the city rises from water on three sides, encircled by lakes formed from the river Mincio, its domes and towers reflected in the still surface. For nearly four centuries it belonged to the Gonzaga family, who turned a marshy town into one of the most brilliant courts of the Renaissance, and Mantua is listed by UNESCO together with Sabbioneta, the small ideal city that a branch of the same family built some thirty kilometres away.
Read the complete Mantua and Sabbioneta write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Mantua and Sabbioneta comes up about 40 km into the recorded legs. Next is Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda.
Water surrounds Peschiera on every side, and that was the whole idea. The town sits where the River Mincio flows out of the southern end of Lake Garda, and in the sixteenth century the Republic of Venice turned it into a star-shaped fortress with massive pentagonal walls, bastions and moats fed by the lake and the river. Later the Austrians made it one of the four corners of the Quadrilatero, the defensive square of fortresses that guarded their hold on northern Italy in the nineteenth century. In 2017 Peschiera became part of the UNESCO listing of Venetian works of defence between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, alongside Bergamo, Palmanova and fortresses on the Adriatic.
Read the complete Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 95 km into the recorded legs you reach Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda. Next is Villa Serego.
Andrea Palladio built many villas around the Veneto, but the one at Santa Sofia di Pedemonte, in the Valpolicella just north-west of Verona, is the oddball of the family. Commissioned by Marcantonio Serego in the mid-sixteenth century and never finished, it has none of the smooth classical calm of the Rotonda. Instead its courtyard is lined with giant Ionic columns built up from rough, rusticated blocks of local stone, as if the building were half turning back into the hillside. Only part of the planned design was completed, and the effect is wonderfully strange.
Read the complete Villa Serego write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Villa Serego, about halfway. Next is back through Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda sits at 149 km, about halfway. Next is back through Mantua and Sabbioneta.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Mantua and Sabbioneta write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Mantua and Sabbioneta comes up about 202 km into the recorded legs. Next is Lagazzi del Vho.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Lagazzi del Vho write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Lagazzi del Vho closes the day.
Lagazzi del Vho → Mantua and Sabbioneta is 40 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Mantua and Sabbioneta → Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda is 55 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda → Villa Serego is 29 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Villa Serego → back through Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda is 25 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda → back through Mantua and Sabbioneta is 53 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Mantua and Sabbioneta → Lagazzi del Vho is 39 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.