Residences of the Royal House of Savoy and Sacro Monte della Beata Vergine
Plan this ride
Recorded distance
227 km
Riding-time estimate
4 h 20
Journey
Recorded itinerary
Distance and timing basis
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.
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Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
227 km from Turin to Turin, about 4 h 20 of riding. On the way it passes Castello di Agliè, VI.1-Emissario, Sacro Monte della Beata Vergine and back through VI.1-Emissario. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 1,750 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available.
Waypoint introductions and full write-ups
1. Residences of the Royal House of Savoy
Turin was the capital of a duchy, then a kingdom, and finally, from 1861 until 1865, of the new Italy, and the Savoy family left a ring of palaces and hunting lodges around it that UNESCO lists together. The Royal Palace in the centre, the Palazzo Madama, the vast Reggia di Venaria on the northern edge, the Stupinigi hunting lodge to the south-west and the Superga basilica on its hill are the best known.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Planning note
Residences of the Royal House of Savoy is where the day begins. Next is Castello di Agliè.
2. Castello di Agliè
Agliè is a small town in the Canavese, the hilly district north of Turin that spreads between the Po plain and the mouths of the Alpine valleys, and its castle is far grander than the town around it. Begun as a medieval fortress by the San Martino counts, it was transformed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into a baroque residence and later bought by the House of Savoy, who turned it into a summer palace with richly decorated rooms, a chapel, a theatre and a large park with fountains and a lake. It is part of the UNESCO listing of the Residences of the Royal House of Savoy, a ring of palaces around Turin, and Italian television viewers may recognise it from a popular costume drama filmed there.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Planning note
Castello di Agliè comes up about 40 km into the recorded legs. Next is VI.1-Emissario, 35 km on.
3. VI.1-Emissario
Lago di Viverone is a small, warm lake in northern Piedmont, cupped inside one of the most remarkable glacial landforms in Europe. Ice flowing out of the Aosta Valley during the last glaciations dumped a vast ring of moraine here, the Morainic Amphitheatre of Ivrea, and its eastern wall, the Serra, runs for many kilometres as an almost perfectly straight wooded ridge. The lake sits at the foot of it, with the villages of Viverone and Azeglio on its shores and Ivrea around a quarter of an hour's ride to the northwest.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Planning note
about 77 km into the recorded legs you reach VI.1-Emissario. Next is Sacro Monte della Beata Vergine.
4. Sacro Monte della Beata Vergine
Oropa is a sanctuary on a scale that surprises everyone who comes up the valley from Biella for the first time. At almost twelve hundred metres, in a bowl of mountains, a vast complex of churches, courtyards, porticoes and pilgrim lodgings rises in terraces, built over several centuries around an ancient chapel that holds a Black Madonna, a wooden statue of the Virgin that legend attributes to St Luke. Above the main buildings, a Sacro Monte of chapels with life-size statues illustrates the life of Mary along a wooded path. It is one of the nine Sacri Monti of Piedmont and Lombardy listed by UNESCO in 2003, and one of the most important Marian shrines in the Alps.