Bici, Amici and Italy

​We were offered a nice Italian breakfast with a homemade cake in our prison accommodation.  You can see how beautifully they renovated -keeping the antique look with the modern amenities.  Our host checked in to see if everything was to our liking and gave us a warm farewell.  He wanted to get some pictures of us with our bikes before we left.  We learned that he had been the mayor of Sora in the past and had been to Toronto Canada as Sora and Toronto are sister cities.   Then on the road again. Although not terribly hot, the humidity was high.  It wasn’t too long before we had to go up this road.  Lincoln Gap, Vermont has nothing on Italy - just saying.  So that was my first bike push of at least a dozen today.  Thus the suffering referenced in the title.  Jim accidentally turned off his strava and lost at least a thousand feet but probably more like 2000 feet of climbing but it still registered 4000 feet of climbing.    Howe...

​Today was a challenging ride but one that passed through a variety of magnificent sites.  We started with a long downhill from picturesque Fumone.  Once again a lot of delightful rural landscapes.  As we approached the city of Alatri we passed a prisoner of war camp.  It was mostly ruins of buildings with a couple of memorials.  Every day of our journey we are reminded of how these wars affected every part of Italy as every town has its memorials to “ai caduti” the fallen.  Then we enter Alatri and it’s historic center.  We immediately realize that we are in a new definition of old.  There is old and then there is really old!   The main piazza was a stunner with a sense of ancient times with an ancient church with peeling frescoes, it’s sundial and gorgeous fountain.  Then we continued riding up to the acropolis on top.  We learned that this is the second largest acropolis after Athens but for some reason it isn’t visited by a lot ...

​To celebrate Doug and Shawn’s anniversary, we decide to go for a bike ride. Ha. After breakfast we headed out knowing that today was not going to have a lot of killer hills so we hoped to arrive at our final destination before the afternoon thunderstorms hit.  The past two days we have arrived at our lodging wet.  The ride took us through very rural landscapes.  Lots of small farms and gardens, sheep, cows and other livestock.  We pass through several small towns and the stately Piglio below  From Piglio onto a very nice paved rail trail.  It went for miles staying up rather high so there were magnificent views of the sweeping valley below.   We hit a very sleepy town called Porciano which had many interesting murals painted on buildings. After a picnic in a park, we get back on the bike path and continue on.  We arrive at our lodging, Il Falco Nero ( the black falcon) as the thunderheads just start building.   A successful day lands us at o...

​The morning began with a breakfast in the Hotel Belvedere where we spent the previous night.  We felt like royalty dining in this aged but still resplendent dining room.    We packed up our bikes and headed out into the land of the Benedictine monks along the Way of Saint Benedict.    The first site which regretfully I took no photo of was the ruins of Nero’s villa. You know, the guy who supposedly fiddled while Rome burned.   I cut and pasted the following from an on line  encyclopedia.   According to his biographer  Suetonius , the Roman emperor  Nero  "practiced every sort of obscenity,” ranging from incest to cruelty to animals to homicide. Nero was such a bad guy, in fact, that he may very well have been the first  Antichrist  in the Christian tradition. But did Nero actually fiddle while Rome burned?  In strictest terms, no. In slightly less strict terms, probably not. In very loose terms, perhaps so. Then onwa...