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.
332 km from Sirmione to Sirmione, about 5 h 19 of riding. The stops in between: City of Verona, Villa Pisani Ferri, City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas o and Villa Angarano. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 850 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
Expect company on a summer weekend. Early is better than fast. For about 40 km this is Mille Miglia Historic Route Core, a road with a name of its own and a reason for it.
Lake Garda's southern shore is a landscape made by ice. At the end of the last glaciation a huge tongue of ice pushed out of the Alps and left behind a ring of moraine hills, curved like an amphitheatre, with the lake in the middle and the Po plain beyond. The shallow bay near Sirmione, where the lake meets the low land, was settled very early, and Lugana Vecchia is one of the prehistoric pile-dwelling sites around the Alps that UNESCO has grouped together as a World Heritage Site. Villages of timber houses on stilts stood in the shallows or on the shore here in the Bronze Age, and the wet ground preserved wood, textiles and tools that would have rotted elsewhere.
Read the complete Lugana Vecchia write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Lugana Vecchia is where the day begins. Next is City of Verona.
Verona is where the north of Italy starts to feel like the south, and where history piles up in layers so thick that you trip over them. The Roman amphitheatre, the Arena, still dominates Piazza Bra and still hosts opera in summer, with tens of thousands of people sitting on stone steps two thousand years old. The Adige river swings through town in a double bend, crossed by bridges including the Ponte Pietra, part Roman and rebuilt after the Germans blew it up in 1945. And of course there is Juliet's balcony, which was added to a medieval house in the twentieth century to satisfy visitors searching for the Shakespeare story; people queue to rub the breast of her bronze statue for luck.
Read the complete City of Verona write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
City of Verona comes up about 40 km into the recorded legs. Next is Villa Pisani Ferri.
Andrea Palladio was still a young architect, not long out of his training as a stonemason, when the Pisani brothers, members of a powerful Venetian family, asked him to design a country house at Bagnolo, near Lonigo, in the late 1530s or early 1540s. The result, now known as Villa Pisani Ferri, is one of his early villas, a solid, symmetrical house with a grand central hall and a facade facing the river, part of the UNESCO site of the City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto. Visits depend on the owners' arrangements, so check ahead if you hope to go inside.
Read the complete Villa Pisani Ferri write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 88 km into the recorded legs you reach Villa Pisani Ferri. Next is City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas o.
Andrea Palladio was a stonemason from Padua who became the most copied architect in history, and Vicenza is where he did it. Walk the main street, Corso Palladio, and you are moving through his workshop: palace after palace designed for the local nobility in the sixteenth century, with columns, pediments and proportions that ended up on English country houses, American plantation homes and Washington government buildings. The city and the villas scattered across the surrounding countryside were listed together by UNESCO for exactly that reason.
Read the complete City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas o write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas o, about halfway. Next is Villa Angarano.
Bassano del Grappa sits where the river Brenta leaves the mountains and spreads onto the Venetian plain, and its symbol is a covered wooden bridge, the Ponte Vecchio, designed by Palladio in the sixteenth century and rebuilt several times since after floods and wars. On the right bank of the river, just outside the town, stands Villa Angarano, a country house whose two long colonnaded wings were designed by Palladio, while the central residence was built later, in a different style, by the Venetian architect Baldassare Longhena. The villa is still a working wine estate and belongs to the UNESCO site of the City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto.
Read the complete Villa Angarano write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Villa Angarano sits at 156 km, about halfway. Next is back through City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas o.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas o write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas o comes up about 216 km into the recorded legs. Next is back through Villa Pisani Ferri.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Villa Pisani Ferri write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 251 km into the recorded legs you reach back through Villa Pisani Ferri. Next is back through City of Verona.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete City of Verona write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through City of Verona, late in the day. Next is Lugana Vecchia.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Lugana Vecchia write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The route ends here after 332 km.
Lugana Vecchia → City of Verona is 40 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
City of Verona → Villa Pisani Ferri is 48 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Villa Pisani Ferri → City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas o is 34 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas o → Villa Angarano is 46 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Villa Angarano → back through City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas o is 48 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas o → back through Villa Pisani Ferri is 35 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Villa Pisani Ferri → back through City of Verona is 42 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through City of Verona → Lugana Vecchia is 40 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.