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.