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 257 km round trip from Padova - roughly 4 h 25 in the saddle. The stops in between: Villa Barbaro, Palù di Livenza - Santissima and back through Villa Barbaro. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 950 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. The line favours views over speed.
Giotto's chapel in Padua is smaller than most people expect, a plain brick hall tucked behind the Arena gardens, and the first surprise is that you are rationed. Visits are timed and short, and groups wait in a climate-controlled room first so that the breath and humidity of too many people do not harm the paint. Then the doors open and the walls turn blue. Around 1305 the banker Enrico Scrovegni commissioned Giotto to cover the whole interior with the lives of Mary and Christ, and what he painted, people with weight, faces with feeling, a sky that behaves like a sky, changed the course of European painting.
Read the complete Padua’s fourteenth-century fresco cycles write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Padua’s fourteenth-century fresco cycles is where the day begins. Next is Villa Barbaro.
At the foot of the Asolo hills, near the village of Maser, a long, golden villa looks out over the plain with the mountains behind it. Villa Barbaro was designed by Andrea Palladio in the 1550s for the brothers Daniele and Marcantonio Barbaro, cultivated Venetian patricians, and it is one of his most perfect works, combining a central house like a temple with long arcaded wings for farm buildings. Inside, the rooms are covered with frescoes by Paolo Veronese, among the finest of the Venetian Renaissance: painted landscapes, mythological figures and trompe l'oeil doors with servants peeping through, a game of illusion that still surprises visitors. Behind the villa, a nymphaeum with statues and a pool sits against the hillside, and nearby stands the Tempietto, a small round church also designed by Palladio. The villa is part of the UNESCO site of the City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto, and it remains a working estate producing wine.
Read the complete Villa Barbaro write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Villa Barbaro comes up about 55 km into the recorded legs. Next is Palù di Livenza - Santissima.
At the foot of the Cansiglio plateau, where the Friulian mountains meet the plain, the river Livenza is born from springs of cold, clear water that rise from the limestone, and a little sanctuary, the Santissima, stands right by the source, surrounded by water. Not far away, in a marshy basin called the Palù di Livenza, archaeologists found the remains of a prehistoric pile dwelling settlement, with wooden posts, tools and pottery preserved in the wet ground for thousands of years. It is one of the Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps listed by UNESCO, a series of more than a hundred sites in six countries that tell the story of farming communities living on the edges of lakes and marshes from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age.
Read the complete Palù di Livenza - Santissima write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 130 km into the recorded legs you reach Palù di Livenza - Santissima. Next is back through Villa Barbaro.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Villa Barbaro write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Villa Barbaro, late in the day. Next is Padua’s fourteenth-century fresco cycles.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Padua’s fourteenth-century fresco cycles write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Padua’s fourteenth-century fresco cycles. That is the ride.
Padua’s fourteenth-century fresco cycles → Villa Barbaro is 55 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Villa Barbaro → Palù di Livenza - Santissima is 75 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Palù di Livenza - Santissima → back through Villa Barbaro is 73 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Villa Barbaro → Padua’s fourteenth-century fresco cycles is 54 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.