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.
335 km from Sabbioneta to Sabbioneta, about 6 h 04 of riding. The stops in between: Mantua and Sabbioneta, Castellaro Lagusello - Fondo Tacoli, Villa Serego and Villa Pisani Ferri. 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 57 km this is Mille Miglia Historic Route Core, a road with a name of its own and a reason for it.
Sabbioneta is a Renaissance experiment: a whole town built from scratch in the second half of the sixteenth century by Vespasiano Gonzaga, a soldier, scholar and minor prince of the great Mantuan family, who wanted a capital laid out according to the ideals of the age. He got it. Inside its star-shaped walls the streets run in a regular grid, and in a few hundred metres you pass a ducal palace, a long gallery built to show off his collection of ancient sculpture, a summer palace, and one of the earliest purpose-built theatres in Europe, the Teatro all'Antica, designed by Vincenzo Scamozzi. Sabbioneta and Mantua were listed together by UNESCO in 2008 as two contrasting visions of the Renaissance city.
Read the complete Sabbioneta write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Sabbioneta 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 38 km into the recorded legs. Next is Castellaro Lagusello - Fondo Tacoli.
South of Lake Garda, the land rises into a series of low hills, the moraines left behind by the glacier that carved the lake. Among them, in a hollow, lies a small heart-shaped lake, and on a ridge above it stands the walled village of Castellaro Lagusello, one of the most charming in Lombardy. The lake and its marshes are a nature reserve, and on its shore, at Fondo Tacoli, archaeologists found the remains of a Bronze Age pile dwelling settlement, part of the UNESCO group of prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps.
Read the complete Castellaro Lagusello - Fondo Tacoli write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 70 km into the recorded legs you reach Castellaro Lagusello - Fondo Tacoli. 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 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.
Villa Pisani Ferri sits at 164 km, about halfway. Next is back through Villa Serego.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Villa Serego write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Villa Serego comes up about 221 km into the recorded legs. Next is back through Castellaro Lagusello - Fondo Tacoli.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Castellaro Lagusello - Fondo Tacoli write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 266 km into the recorded legs you reach back through Castellaro Lagusello - Fondo Tacoli. 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, late in the day. Next is Sabbioneta.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Sabbioneta write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The route ends here after 335 km.
Sabbioneta → Mantua and Sabbioneta is 38 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Mantua and Sabbioneta → Castellaro Lagusello - Fondo Tacoli is 32 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Castellaro Lagusello - Fondo Tacoli → Villa Serego is 43 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Villa Serego → Villa Pisani Ferri is 57 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Villa Pisani Ferri → back through Villa Serego is 51 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Villa Serego → back through Castellaro Lagusello - Fondo Tacoli is 45 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Castellaro Lagusello - Fondo Tacoli → back through Mantua and Sabbioneta is 33 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Mantua and Sabbioneta → Sabbioneta is 36 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.