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 Alberobello it runs 286 km to Alberobello; allow about 5 h 23 of riding. It goes by way of The Sassi and the Park of the Rupestrian C, Castel del Monte and back through The Sassi and the Park of the Rupestrian C. The line favours views over speed.
A museum in a trullo sounds like a joke, but the Museo Storico in this part of Apulia belongs to a landscape where almost everything is a stone cone, and it makes sense to treat it as the doorway to the countryside rather than a single building. The ride this point belongs to leads north-west to Castel del Monte, the strange octagonal castle that the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II raised on a hill in the thirteenth century, with eight towers and no moat, no drawbridge and no obvious military purpose.
Read the complete Museo Storico write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Museo Storico is where the day begins. Next is The Sassi and the Park of the Rupestrian C.
Matera is one of those places where the first view genuinely changes the mood of a day. You walk to the edge of the modern town, look down, and there are the Sassi: two hollows in the limestone filled with houses stacked on top of each other, their roofs serving as streets for the houses above, churches cut into the rock, staircases and alleys tumbling down to the edge of a deep ravine, the Gravina. Across the gorge, the Murgia plateau is riddled with caves and rock churches, some with Byzantine frescoes, used by monks and shepherds for over a thousand years. People have lived in these caves since prehistoric times, which makes Matera one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the world.
Read the complete The Sassi and the Park of the Rupestrian C write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The Sassi and the Park of the Rupestrian C comes up about 69 km into the recorded legs. Next is Castel del Monte.
You see it long before you reach it: a pale stone crown sitting alone on a hilltop above the Murge plateau, visible for miles across the olive groves and wheat fields of northern Puglia. Castel del Monte was built in the 1240s for Emperor Frederick II, the brilliant and restless Hohenstaufen ruler whom contemporaries called the wonder of the world. It is perfectly octagonal, with eight octagonal towers at the corners and an octagonal courtyard in the middle, and nobody really knows what it was for. It has no moat, no stables, no obvious defensive purpose, which has fed centuries of theories about astronomy, geometry and mysticism. UNESCO listed it in 1996, and Italians carry it in their pockets: it is on the back of the one-cent euro coin.
Read the complete Castel del Monte write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 143 km into the recorded legs you reach Castel del Monte. Next is back through The Sassi and the Park of the Rupestrian C.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete The Sassi and the Park of the Rupestrian C write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through The Sassi and the Park of the Rupestrian C, late in the day. Next is Museo Storico.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Museo Storico write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Museo Storico. That is the ride.
Museo Storico → The Sassi and the Park of the Rupestrian C is 69 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
The Sassi and the Park of the Rupestrian C → Castel del Monte is 74 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Castel del Monte → back through The Sassi and the Park of the Rupestrian C is 74 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through The Sassi and the Park of the Rupestrian C → Museo Storico is 69 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.