Bike Ride Across Italy FAQ

It is Day 2 of my bike-packing ride across Italy, so I am here to share my entire 2 days of expertise! This post will endeavor to address all of your questions.

I set off on May 1 from Rome with Carlo, Giulia, and our bikes, to ride a train to Terni and start our ride.

How were you feeling at the start?

I was feeling so excited and nervous. And late. I was a few minutes late getting to the Garbatella subway station for our rendezvous, and as a result we had to get a later train to Terni. This has something to do with ants and a very old dog, but I will spare you those details. I was late. And I was also feeling very guilty that I’d made us late. Later in the day, with our day’s ride most of the way done, I assuaged this guilt by buying everyone lunch, applying the theory that pasta and fried things are the ideal instruments for restoring all emotional equanimity (mine, at any rate), at a very nice restaurant we stopped at along the way called Mulino Nera, located in the very beautiful Valnerina, the Nera River Valley, outside of Ferentillo, our first stop.

Hang on, you stayed over in Ferentillo, the Famous Home of the Mummy Museum located in a spooky crypt?

Why, yes, the very same Ferentillo. It’s a little village with parks, surrounded by the soaring mountains of Umbria, and it has one of the creepiest, darkest, strangest crypt museums full of glass cases with actual mummies.

Apparently the soil and weather of Ferentillo naturally preserves bodies. This became clear when the town was ordered in 1806 to observe an edict to exhume bodies from under buildings and move them to cemeteries outside of towns, and the good citizens of Ferentillo found themselves with an intriguing idea for a somewhat novel tourist stop.

Which of course we went to. Even though it was, as it had been for the latter part of the day, chilly and raining.

We wrapped ourselves in every waterproof thing we had and strode out into a downpour. Puddles everywhere.

And Ferentillo is snail country. Picture, if you can, a joyous brigade of snails gliding giddily across the sopping sidewalks and streets in search of flowers to munch in people’s gardens.

We tried hard to embody the Jain approach and sidestep each goopy creature with its fragile shell. To no avail. Snails crunched loudly underfoot as we made our way to the Mummy Museum.

Do you recommend a visit to the world-famous Mummy Museum of Ferentillo?

The Mummy Museum is tops, if your bucket list of “Items I Must Do” includes paying 4 euros to scuttle in a dank, dark cave peering into glass cases of misshapen but eternally preserved representatives of humanity.

I leave my readers to each make this highly personal decision.

What was the bike ride like on Day 1?

It was splendid! If you are bicycly-inclined, it is so thrilling to be on a bicycle, heading off on a voyage, in Italy! I cannot emphasize the thrillingness enough! We disembarked at Terni Station and rode off into the countryside.

Where shortly thereafter we saw this:

The Cascata delle Marmore, or Marmore Falls, the largest human-made waterfall in the world. The water cascades down tiers from a height of 541 feet (165 meters). It was made by the Romans in 271 BCE, a time when the Romans were building walls and fighting wars, and somehow required a giant waterfall.

You can buy a ticket and get closer to the roar and the spray, but the entire thing is visible from the road. It’s loud and thrilling and dramatic. Those are internet pictures, as I did not take any. But that’s about what you would see from the road on your bicycle.

This is a bike-centric question here. How is your bike?

Bike questions are always welcome!

My bike is good. It is solid, and very comfortable for me on extended rides. The panniers are packed with the stuff I believe I will need for 23 days (5 days of riding across Italy, 2 weeks at the writers’ retreat near San Severino, and then another 4 days of biking across Italy, before taking a train back to Rome). The luggage makes the bike somewhat heavy, but I have gotten used to this, and now I know to take measures to keep it upright.

I did have some interesting encounters with the physics of balance while going up escalators in the metro and train stations on our way out of Rome, with this rear-heavy bike that seemed determined to skid rapidly back down the moving steps each time.

Neither Carlo nor Giulia observed any of this, as they were already wandering merrily and completely upright among the crowds of May Day holiday travelers looking for some breakfast, while I scrabbled desperately to keep my bike and me from cascading down the escalator into the hordes below. I uttered every version of an apology I know in Italian to the people on the steps around me. I did in the end manage to stay upright and hang onto the bike, and the only thing dented was my dignity.

Yeah, yeah, everyone knows to hang onto the bike on the escalator. But real mummies in rural Italy?

Yes. They are real mummies. They are 100% mummified. Some have preserved clothes, skin, beards, and teeth.

It seems that the crypt in Ferentillo is a perfect environment for the chemical preservation that produces mummies. It’s like some amazing mummy-producing factory.

This knowledge is actually thanks to my friend, Carlo, who was part of the research team that formed the hypothesis and subsequent investigations that showed that due to the unique minerals and ventilation of the crypt, bodies were perfectly preserved. This information contributed significantly to the global scientific understanding of mummification, and is the reason why we ventured out to the Mummy Museum on a rainy night…

Oh wait, that was the noted scholar Carlo Maggiorani and his colleagues in 1887 at L’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincèi, one of the oldest scientific institutions in the world. They did the significant mummy research.

My friend Carlo just thought a Mummy Museum sounded cool.

So what does the rest of Ferentillo look like?

It looks like this.

Whoa! That is a picturesque Umbrian town, right there.

Yes. It is. With the Nera River running through it, and houses set all the way up into the mountain. And a Mummy Museum.

So where did you go on Day 2?

Day 2 was a longer bike ride to Norcia. The route was a long, straight climb comprising highway, gravel bike path, modern highway tunnels, and some unlit ex-railway tunnels on the rail-to-trail bike path.

The tunnels are long enough that the middles are in complete darkness. Kinda like a mummy- and skull-filled crypt of a Mummy Museum, only much darker. This is why it is a very good idea to have bike lights.

Some of the rest of the ride looked like this:

Some bike path, some road, some more bike path. The route was scenic, green, full of wildflowers and some farm animals.

I am a total bike-head and I need to see stats for this ride, stat!

You are in luck. I can stat-isfy this request.

If anyone has any idea what these numbers mean, by all means let me know. But we did ride for some 3+ hours, some of it in the rain.

The ride did not feel like this much UP, but apparently we did keep going up, pretty much the entire time.

Were there any other incredibly ancient things to see along the route?

Yes! The bike path passes right by an incredibly ancient walkway carved into a mountain by pre-Romans. Carved with what, I have no idea. But they did a very nice job. Their walkway allowed them to tread along a stream otherwise set against a sheer wall of rock.

It sounds like you had some help putting this bike adventure together. Do you have anyone to thank?

Yes, I should thank Carlo, for his photographic contributions to this excursion. At one point I rode in the front of our peloton, and now I have him to thank for this remarkably unflattering picture of me powering like a pink tank along the road.

Don’t forget to tune in for Day 3. Because Day 3 has a mountain.