A ride to Trentinara

We've had a couple of particularly glorious rides this week. Monday we headed north to Trentinara, which is a skinny village perched on the very edge of a cliff. When we glimpsed it from afar as smudge of terra-cotta roofs, we knew we had to get up there if only for what had to be a spectacular view. Round trip from "home": 47 miles, 6K' of climbing.

Trentinara is almost impossible to pick out in this photo, at the top of that ridge (the village of Giungano runs across the middle of this photo, at the bottom of the cliff), but this gives you a sense of the setting.



Harlan routed us through a network of our favorite kind of one-lane roads:



Which featured plenty of the steep stuff we are beginning to love:



This next was so steep I did have to bail--the bottom was cobbles and once it got back to pavement it was still a long haul. I think that white dog is laughing at me



We started at 6:30 in the morning but by 7:00 we already had some concern about the heat, so we were grateful when clouds moved in. The cost of that, of course, was to the view.





Even clouded over, Trentinara rewards a visit, with an old center of twisted, stone lanes, and we found a spotless little bar for pastries and coffee. Giungano, at the bottom of the cliff, was also well worth a look, with a few streets so narrow we had to give way to local traffic:





A day later, the clouds had cleared out, so we drove right back up to Trentinara for what proved to be one of the best meals we've ever had--more on that to come.

Rome

As I write, it's absolutely quiet around us. Half an hour ago we heard somewhat alarming yells next door and horns honked and dogs barked all over the valley. It occurred to me there might be football (soccer) on, and sure enough Italy had just scored a goal over Spain. And as I think about it, the nightly trio of fireworks at the castle, regularly at 6:30pm, went off ten minutes early. I wouldn't be surprised if that chore had to be taken care before the game started or in during a handy timeout. The quiet tells me that the game is still tense.

While we wait for the next goal, I'll take a look back at our first couple days in Italy. We landed early in the morning at the Rome airport and had two days there to recover from jet lag and get our feet on the ground, which worked out beautifully. We dropped our bags at a B&B in Trastevere (Il Boom, we liked it, go there) before a room could be ready and started walking.

Trastevere is a good neighborhood for a few days in Rome, close enough to get to the core of the city but out of the fray. We shared the rooftop terrace at breakfast with cats, parrots, even a few small tortoises lurking around the edges.





Wandering in Trastevere kept us well entertained and well fed, but we also made it over the river to some of the main sights.





And as you can see, fray there was aplenty. Getting into the Pantheon involved a shoulder-to-shoulder crush. Here's as close as we got to the Trevi Fountain.



A neat surprise was coming across this pair of hip guys making direct positive photographs on a street lined with others doing portraits in pencil and crayon. Harlan and they had much to discuss, of course. These guys had made the camera and the box for developing the prints.









They were so happy with the result they snapped a photo of it for their own files (with their phone of course).

Agropoli

We are on the coast south of Naples, south of the Amalfi Coast, in Agropoli, in the province of Salerno, in the region of Campania. The town has some lovely parts, a castle, small port, beaches, clear clear water, but it's not a particularly famous tourist destination, or not yet.





We've rented a house ten minutes up the hill where we are surrounded by olives, figs, grapes, goats, loose horses, wandering cows with bells, cats lurking at dinnertime, all just like the southern Italy you read about in the storybooks. The last few kilometers of the road up here look something like this:



And we arrive at "our" house, nearly the last on the road:



The house opens up wonderfully to terraces and air, with a view north over the Tyrrhenian Sea towards that Amalfi Coast and out to Capri. It's a bit cooler than down on the beach, but plenty warm enough for swimming (me and our friend Laura here):



We found out on arrival that the house comes with a caretaker (maybe attached by family to the landlord?) who lives next door on a little farm and comes in the mornings to sweep and water and she has surprised us a couple times with treats from her farm and kitchen, ricotta from her own goats and a pair of arancini, spectacularly good.

 




There are plenty of dogs around and I can get a small dose of one next door:



We've had thunder and lightening storms to watch several nights, and when it's clear you can watch a bat head out for the evening and an owl that drops off our roof hunt in the field across the road from us.

We are finding it awfully easy to relax.

Roads to ride

As I formulate this post I realize the photos may all look pretty much the same, and while they can try to capture the essence of how pretty it is here, they can't convey the intensity of the riding. It's sort of an espresso of great rides, all winding, up, down, up, down, virtually nothing flat and no more than a few minutes of a straight line. Harlan has found us the narrow roads, mostly less than two lanes, and very quiet. But also a lot of steep stuff: 10% is a civilized grade, and you rest on the 7% slopes because there are long stretches of 14-19% with pitches up from that. We descended (thank gawd) a couple kilometers that were so steep that we think the breaking force contributed to H's tube tearing at the valve stem a few minutes later.







It's a good thing you can rely on espresso being available every few kilometers, because you have to be alert. The pavement can be gorgeous, smooth, and fast, with a deep pothole to surprise you when you're trying to look around at the view or the olive grove or the goats. Or it can go from new to gravel to decomposing and back to perfect in no predictable order that we can see.



The stats are consistently on the order of 1,500 feet of climbing for every 10 miles, which supports some happy consumption of pizza, pasta, and gelato. These last few days we've given our legs a little rest before ramping up to longer loops in the next week.