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 221 km round trip from Varallo - roughly 4 h 36 in the saddle. It goes by way of Sacro Monte di San Francesco d’Orta San Gi, Mercurago, Isolino Virginia-Camilla-Isola di San Biag and The castrum with the Torba Tower and the c. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 1,600 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available.
Varallo is a small town at the point where the Valsesia stops being a wide valley and starts becoming a mountain one, and above it, on a rocky spur reached by a winding road or a short cable car, is the oldest and most ambitious of the Sacri Monti. In 1491 a Franciscan friar called Bernardino Caimi, back from the Holy Land, set out to recreate Jerusalem here for pilgrims who could never make the journey. The result is a hilltop village of more than forty chapels filled with life-size painted terracotta and wooden figures, hundreds of them, telling the life of Christ like a frozen theatre. Gaudenzio Ferrari, the great Renaissance painter of this valley, worked on many of them.
Read the complete Sacro Monte o “Nuova Gerusalemme” di Varal write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Sacro Monte o “Nuova Gerusalemme” di Varal is where the day begins. Next is Sacro Monte di San Francesco d’Orta San Gi.
Lake Orta is the quiet sister of Lake Maggiore, smaller, calmer and more mysterious, and on a wooded hill above its prettiest town stands a holy mountain dedicated to Saint Francis of Assisi. The Sacro Monte di Orta is a path through a park of beech and chestnut trees, linking twenty chapels built from the end of the sixteenth century onward, each containing life-size terracotta statues and frescoes depicting scenes from the life of the saint. It is one of the nine holy mountains of Piedmont and Lombardy listed together by UNESCO in 2003, created during the Counter-Reformation as places of pilgrimage and devotion.
Read the complete Sacro Monte di San Francesco d’Orta San Gi write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Sacro Monte di San Francesco d’Orta San Gi comes up about 39 km into the recorded legs. Next is Mercurago.
Just south of Arona, at the southern tip of Lago Maggiore, a small regional park protects a landscape of woods, meadows and peat bogs called the Lagoni di Mercurago. The lagoni are small ponds and wetlands formed after the retreat of the glaciers, and in the nineteenth century, while peat was being dug, the remains of a Bronze Age pile dwelling settlement were found here, including a wooden wheel. Mercurago is part of the UNESCO site of prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps.
Read the complete Mercurago write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 62 km into the recorded legs you reach Mercurago. Next is Isolino Virginia-Camilla-Isola di San Biag.
Lago di Varese is the quiet one. The big lakes, Maggiore and Lugano, grab the postcards and the coach tours, while this shallow, reedy sheet of water just west of Varese gets on with being pretty in a modest way. Off its western shore, a few hundred metres out from Biandronno, floats a tiny wooded island called Isolino Virginia, and that speck of land is one of the most important prehistoric sites in the Alpine world.
Read the complete Isolino Virginia-Camilla-Isola di San Biag write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Isolino Virginia-Camilla-Isola di San Biag, about halfway. Next is The castrum with the Torba Tower and the c.
The Lombards get a bad press in most history books, which tend to treat them as the barbarians who arrived in Italy in 568 and broke what was left of Roman order. Castelseprio tells a subtler story. On a wooded spur above the Olona valley, north-west of Milan, stand the ruins of a late Roman and Lombard castrum, a fortified town that controlled the road between the plain and the Alpine lakes, and just outside its walls is the little church of Santa Maria foris portas, whose frescoes are among the most mysterious and beautiful paintings of early medieval Europe. Down by the river, the stout stone Torba tower, later part of a Benedictine nunnery, completes the group. Together they form one of the sites in the UNESCO listing of the Lombards in Italy.
Read the complete The castrum with the Torba Tower and the c write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The castrum with the Torba Tower and the c sits at 75 km, about halfway. Next is back through Isolino Virginia-Camilla-Isola di San Biag.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Isolino Virginia-Camilla-Isola di San Biag write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Isolino Virginia-Camilla-Isola di San Biag comes up about 134 km into the recorded legs. Next is back through Mercurago.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Mercurago write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 160 km into the recorded legs you reach back through Mercurago. Next is back through Sacro Monte di San Francesco d’Orta San Gi.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Sacro Monte di San Francesco d’Orta San Gi write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Sacro Monte di San Francesco d’Orta San Gi, late in the day. Next is Sacro Monte o “Nuova Gerusalemme” di Varal.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Sacro Monte o “Nuova Gerusalemme” di Varal write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The route ends here after 221 km.
Sacro Monte o “Nuova Gerusalemme” di Varal → Sacro Monte di San Francesco d’Orta San Gi is 39 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Sacro Monte di San Francesco d’Orta San Gi → Mercurago is 23 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Mercurago → Isolino Virginia-Camilla-Isola di San Biag is 22 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Isolino Virginia-Camilla-Isola di San Biag → The castrum with the Torba Tower and the c is 25 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
The castrum with the Torba Tower and the c → back through Isolino Virginia-Camilla-Isola di San Biag is 25 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Isolino Virginia-Camilla-Isola di San Biag → back through Mercurago is 26 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Mercurago → back through Sacro Monte di San Francesco d’Orta San Gi is 23 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Sacro Monte di San Francesco d’Orta San Gi → Sacro Monte o “Nuova Gerusalemme” di Varal is 38 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.