Belle Italia
Tuscany’s rolling chalk roads are a slice of cycling heaven, especially when the GFNY Italia comes to town
A sportive on the strade bianche of Tuscany offers a very dusty taste of Italy at its best
Rising from our saddles and struggling for grip on the flagstones, we’re waved into a booming piazza
Italy begins and ends with espresso. It’s why at 8am the L’angolo dei Sapori cafe bar sounds like a stable of tiny caffeinated horses, the light clip-clopping of cyclists’ shoes echoing around a babble of voices.
Staff at L’angolo are like Italian clockwork: each has a very precise role, and they shout a lot. Sometimes at you, but it is good natured, and the espressos and accompanying small glass of water are the national price of €1. This morning, its customers are the 700 riders who have come to the walled town of Montepulciano to race out into the Tuscan hillside. With a 9am start, the GFNY Italia is a civilised affair for a gran fondo and, being part of the worldwide GFNY franchise, it’s all very international and friendly.
GFNY started life as the Gran Fondo New York, the brainchild of one of those desperately fit and desperately lovely cycling couples, Uli and Lidia Fluhme. From there it has grown into dozens of events across the globe, and with it has fostered club-level bonhomie. Chatter is peppered with cheers and hugs as riders recognise each other from events past and compare notes about which events might be good to do after this one.
The weather looks set to be accommodatingly spring-like; the course a 108km promise of rolling roads and Tuscany’s famous strade bianche – the white chalk tracks that have
made this area something of a Shangri-la for cyclists. Everything points to a day geared up to be testing but pleasurable.
Out on the town
The start pen is located a few pedal strokes from the cafe on the sort of avenue Asterix would cheerily skip down when he had occasion to visit the Romans. Cypress trees flank the road like great green obelisks, leading up in unison to a vast stone church. Montepulciano looks down from its defensive perch atop the hillside. This is Tuscany at its bucolic best.
I can’t be entirely sure but I think someone up ahead has just proposed to his girlfriend, as there is an eruption of cheers and a crying woman pulls her man from crooked knee into an embrace. Sadly for both, the race is about to start so the drama is short-lived, but at least it will have been immortalised in strangers’ Instagram feeds from around the world. The gun cracks and the gran fondo is underway, our stripy fluoro pack bound for the countryside.
The first 10km is neutralised, and with so many riders and a gentle slope down from Montepulciano, the riding is effortless, and for an Italian gran fondo – even in its embryonic stage – things are surprisingly calm. As race organiser Uli explained to me yesterday, ‘We do want an element of competition, but it isn’t supposed to be knife-between-the-teeth racing.’
The first leggy encounter is a sharp rise up to Torrita di Siena, a smaller hillside town to Montepulciano’s north. Rising from our saddles and struggling for grip on the ancient flagstones, we’re waved lazily on by a steward into a booming piazza. The contrade – the districts in the town – have been briefed that we are coming and are busy showing off their traditional flag-throwing, clarion-playing, drum-thumping skills.
It’s an impressive sight, and one you’ll find in all these Tuscan hill towns. Like football teams, you’re born into your contrade , and with that you inherit a tribalism that makes the Glasgow Old Firm look like a knitting circle. Spectacles such as these take the form of a dance-off of sorts, only with more medieval velvet than acrylic tracksuits.
We don’t have time to stop and watch, mind. Torrita marks the end of the neutralised zone, and for the lead group, now mere specks up the road, the knives are clearly out and they’re swinging from the rigging. Their race is on.
Chalk it up
Even with the best of intentions it’s hard not to get pulled into racing, whether on your commute or in an event you’ve told yourself you’re going to soak up, not power through. Yet while I’ve long lost sight of the pointy end, I still find myself on the front of a group expending far more effort than I’d planned, spurred by the feeling of a dozen riders sucking up my draft.
Our group stays together for a few flattish kilometres until we hit a sizable climb and, with excruciating inexorability, riders I once led now drift gracefully up the road. Like a parent waving a first child off to school, I am both happy for them but secretly wishing they still needed me.
I fall in with a rider who’s doing the same pace and we eventually crest the hill, where we can see a road that snakes away for miles ahead. But we’re not interested in the black top. Stewards flag a sharp right and we hook onto the first unpaved sector, the ancient tracks we’ve all come here for, all hoping for dry weather so the chalk will release the magical white puffs that make races here so heroic.
Today the stars have aligned. The air is still and crisp, and there are enough riders ahead to have kicked up a good level of dust, which hangs in clouds ready to billow and eddy around the next rider barrelling through. It’s dreamlike, if your dreams are spent holding on to a hammer drill in a talcum powder factory. Because for all its bicycling romance, the strade bianche surface can be a technically challenging one.
Certain flatter, well-used sections are OK, the chalk and stones crushed by vehicles into navigable hard-pack, but on these less welltrodden and steeper tracks, loose gravelly chunks pool in disguised crevices and gather in corners. It’s hard on the hands and forearms and even harder on the concentration.
It’s dreamlike, if your dreams are spent holding on to a hammer drill in a talcum powder factory
I have to bunny hop several bigger potholes, each time hoping the landing won’t end in a worse fate than simply riding through them. Tyres drift, the rear end fishtails. It’s certainly more exciting than riding on the road.
The exit back onto tarmac feels like stepping off a boat onto dry land, and for a while legs turn to jelly. Riders lift up their gaze, finally able to take stock of their surroundings. Jovial chats begin in earnest – the first voices heard in some time, save for yelps and swear words.
We bowl onwards, sweeping through freshtilled fields of sprouting green patchworks, silvery thick olive groves and rows of grape vines. The guidebooks about Tuscany will repeatedly refer to its hill towns as ‘Renaissance’ towns, but seldom is the same term applied to their countryside. Yet that is exactly how the
Tuscan landscape now appears, like an Old Masters’ painting, smoothed by time and the fading of oils.
Such pseudo-poetic waxings don’t last long, because as well as being like a painting Tuscany is also quite like Devon, only with better wine. And if you’ve ever ridden there, you’ll know how deceptively lumpy it is. At the start of this ride Tuscany appeared quite flat to my eye, but now in amongst it the hills are like bubble-wrap, an infinite series of bulges and relentless undulation.
Still, conquering each mini-col is a blissful experience – so absorbing, in fact, that a man on a red Trek nearly wipes out the food station we’ve just passed. There are likely some pastry casualties, but all ultimately seems fine, even if his cheeks are now the colour of his Madone.
The hunt
The second sector of strade bianche is technically 10km, but with just a few kilometres of tarmac break between it and the final 7.5km stretch, the
The exit back onto tarmac feels like stepping off a boat onto dry land, and for a while legs turn to jelly
effect is an exhilarating 20km blend of fast hardpack winding through trees followed by a steep and loose chalky struggle.
This latter section seems familiar, and then it dawns on me that it is. The race has long since looped round and we’re back on roads from whence we came, riding sector one, earlier thrillingly downhill, in reverse – now decidedly up. The succession of short risers might be in the lower percentiles in gradient, but on gravelly roads they feel twice as steep, and require me to constantly adjust my weight – enough over the rear wheel for grip but enough over the front to avoid becoming a unicycle.
I’m pleased to pass a few riders I recognise from much earlier, floaty climbers far less suited to punching up bumpy ground than my heavier frame, and surmise that my steady approach has left me in good shape. In no danger of troubling the rankings too much but keen to put in a good showing, I resolve to give it all I have for the remaining 15km back to Montepulciano.
Head down I’m all but solo, momentarily joining up with a group to recoup legs before attempting to bridge to the next. The course heads back through Torrita di Siena, the piazza still alive with locals. Then, somewhere just after the foot of the descent out of town, I spot Uli, who is clearly enjoying things himself.
Ahead we can just make out the sandy shape of Montepulciano, and between us and it a string of dots beetling up the hill.
‘These are our victims,’ says Uli with only a slight trace of humour. He sets off on the hunt, and once again I find I can no longer hold the wheel. He stalks through the pack like a shark, leaving me to consider how to tackle the last and most difficult part of the race alone.
Steeped in history
Medieval Italians built Montepulciano’s roads like this for a reason: narrow, steep and mazelike to make invasion as difficult as possible.
The medieval Italians did not consider cyclists.
These archaic roads, channels worn deep in the stone by a millennium of footsteps, are so steep that handrails run down their sides. It’s the perfect stadium for watching riders exert every sinew of muscle in near slow motion, bikes penduluming wildly and wheels slipping. I would dearly love to be an onlooker now.
A final dogleg at well over 20% rears up, accompanied by a familiar drumming that’s ricocheting around Montepulciano’s walls and cheers the volume you’d expect in a pro race. With these sounds and the crowd’s expectations bolstering my own, I find just about enough energy to elevate bike and body across the finish line. I feel a tickle of skin as someone puts a medal around my neck. I could really do with a coffee and a sit down.
James Spender is features editor at Cyclist and runs almost exclusively on caffeine