Villa Pojana and Certosa

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Villa Pojana

   Andrea Palladio could make a farmhouse look like a temple, and at Villa Pojana he did it with remarkable restraint. Built in the mid-sixteenth century for Bonifacio Pojana, a nobleman with military ambitions, the villa stands in the village of Poiana Maggiore in the flat country south of Vicenza. Its facade is almost bare: a great arched entrance framed by a Serlian motif with round windows, a pediment above, smooth plaster walls. The interior has frescoes by artists of the time. Like other Palladian villas of the Veneto, it counts as one component of UNESCO's inscription of the city of Vicenza and the villas around it.

   Read the complete Villa Pojana write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Villa Pojana is where the day begins. Next is Ferrara.

2. 2. Ferrara

   Ferrara is a city built for walking and cycling, with flat streets, a ring of Renaissance walls nine kilometres long, and so many bicycles that it is called the city of bicycles. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, under the Este family, it was one of the great courts of Renaissance Italy, and the Estense castle, with its moat and drawbridges, still dominates the centre. The city's Renaissance planning, especially the Herculean Addition, a new quarter laid out in the late fifteenth century, led historians to call it the first modern city in Europe, and UNESCO has inscribed Ferrara and the Po Delta as a World Heritage Site.

   Read the complete Ferrara write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Ferrara comes up about 77 km into the recorded legs. Next is Certosa.

3. 3. Certosa

   Bologna has a way of making even its dead look sociable. The Certosa, the monumental cemetery just north-west of the old walls, began life as a Carthusian monastery and was turned into a public burial ground at the start of the nineteenth century, when Napoleonic rules said the dead should lie outside the city. The monks' cloisters and chapels were simply adapted, and over the next two centuries families commissioned sculpture on a scale that makes the place feel like an open-air museum. Marble weeping women, family portraits in stone, scenes from daily life, and a lot of whiskered gentlemen in frock coats line long arcades.

   Read the complete Certosa write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 128 km into the recorded legs you reach Certosa. Next is back through Ferrara.

4. 4. back through Ferrara

   Return visit. Read the place description above.

   Read the complete Ferrara write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   back through Ferrara, late in the day. Next is Villa Pojana.

5. 5. Villa Pojana

   Return visit. Read the place description above.

   Read the complete Villa Pojana write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Back at Villa Pojana. That is the ride.