Butterfield & Robinson’s Tuscany bike tour offers pleasure and pain
Experience the pleasure — and just a little pain — of a luxury bike ride through Tuscany.
The path to paradise begins in hell, said Dante in his Divine Comedy. Something to keep in mind when you’re punching your way up Italian roads on a bike with five more days of the same to come, and you realise you haven’t trained anything like hard enough for this.
It can be easy to underestimate the Tuscan hills, with their dun-coloured fields, elegant lines of cypress trees and terracotta towns set aglow in the slanting afternoon sunlight. How could anything this pretty hurt you? Yet on the first day of Butterfield & Robinson’s six-day Tuscany Biking itinerary, the ability of this landscape to inflict pain is apparent.
Not that it’s anyone else’s fault. Since meeting up in Florence this morning to bus out to our starting point in Trequanda, southeast of Siena, our group of 12 has been given the utmost attention by our guides Alex and Rafa. When we arrive at the elegant Belsedere estate, our smart Bianchi steeds have been lined up on the gravel forecourt, an assortment of e-bikes, road bikes and hybrids, all with handlebar-mounted carry boxes for the basics — sunblock, wallet, phone, an extra layer — plus a tablet bungeed to the top with GPS for navigation. There’s a table with energy bars, electrolyte powders and travel tissues. I make a last-minute grab for a gel seat cover, a decision for which my backside will continually thank me over the next few days.
Buzzing about, Alex and Rafa take turns briefing us, reminding us to cycle on the right, use clear hand signals and to use the gears and sat nav. Each day, one of them will bike with us while the other drives the support van. Each day, there will be the opportunity to be a “century rider”, covering closer to 100km rather than the standard 40-60km daily averages. Each day, I will fail in this goal.
Butterfield & Robinson, whose slogan is “slow down to see the world” (yep, no problem there), is a Canada-based luxury operator specialising in active breaks all over the globe, with a focus on walking and cycling holidays. The company prides itself on the personal attention it gives guests. Before we even start, Alex has come over to swap my brake system around, anticipating that my bike at home would have the front brake on the right (standard in Australia) as opposed to the left, as in Italy. The idea is to prevent me hitting it hard on the wrong side and pitching headfirst over the handlebars.
I’m grateful for not having to do the extra thinking, especially on the first ride out as we launch straight into rollercoaster hills. The scent of wild fennel from ragged road edges helps soften the blow to my quads. I note that while my travelling companions, made up of couples from the US and Canada, are mostly of a certain age, they generally sport tightly muscled calves and a certain leanness where it counts. Some have been on B&R bike trips before and all are easy to like — relaxed, generous, interested in everyone else.
We break the ice over our first lunch at La Romita, a charming family-owned restaurant and agriturismo in Montisi run by Alberto and Giovanna Bindi. Arriving incrementally, in assorted states of flush and breathlessness, hair matted and dark patches of sweat on our backs, we take our seats at a long table on a patio edged in moss and pots of tumbling herbs. I like this already: we’re a group, but there’s no issue with people cycling solo and at their own pace; the guides have been checking on our progress as we’ve gone along, but the sat nav means it’s virtually impossible to get lost.
We shoot the breeze as the Bindis circumnavigate the table, delivering wafer-thin slices of eggplant with basil, garlic and homegrown olive oil, and plates of green pici — the fat spaghetti peculiar to Siena — admonishing anyone not lifting their forks to eat: pasta is no good cold.
We find out that Alex moved with his mother from West Berlin in 1985 (“she was sick of the Wall”), taking them to nearby Cortona a decade before Frances Mayes made the town famous in Under the Tuscan Sun. He has an easy smile that starts around his eyes but an exacting disposition that gives away his German roots. Rafa, from Castilla y Leon, has a piratical look and a humour that flips between arch and utterly deadpan. Together, over the next few days, they will work like affable genies, slipping away unnoticed every lunch and coffee stop to replenish water bottles, check tyres and tablets, and reorientate our bikes ready for the off.
So it is as we head out, working off our lunch legs towards Locanda dell’Amorosa, home base for the next two days. Once a self-contained hamlet but now a four-star hotel, it’s a place not of high glamour but of timeless beauty, set at the top of a long, sweeping, tree-lined drive. Accommodation is set around a central courtyard with an old well at its centre and overlooked by a little church, with pomegranate trees, rosemary bushes, olives and grapevines dotted around. My room is of quiet country elegance, with simple wooden furniture, plain cotton quilts and starchy sheets, and framed portraits of stern medieval types hanging on a wall painted in pale sage and white stripes.
The afternoon light is a dream, and later there’s time to meditate on the views across the valley to Sinalunga, a medieval town with Etruscan origins. The surrounding countryside is also home to huge white Chianina cattle, one of the oldest bovine breeds in the world and used for that Tuscan favourite, bistecca alla fiorentina, a T-bone cooked over embers and sprinkled liberally with sea salt and olive oil.
On the second day, the terrain is flatter but still feels intense, as the kilometres click up and I harden my tailbone over small, cracked roads, weaving between farmhouses and agricultural yards. Scenes flick past: a rough sign for pici fatto a mano; a nonna leaning over the wooden veranda of her home to handfeed grapes to a Shetland-sized horse; a cluster of grapes dropped in the middle of the road as the sangiovese harvest gets under way. “Salve!” seems to be standard greeting to touring cyclists as we bounce from village to village, sometimes bunched together, at others strung out for kilometres.
Moments stand out over the next few days: a chilly swim in the hotel’s ice-blue pool that breathes life into road-weary limbs; lunch in the garden of the Lungarella family, who regularly open their home to B&R guests, and where Sara Lungarella tests my Italian by insisting I scribble down her tiramisu recipe as her daughter Selene sings to us in a sweet, playful voice.
At Ferretto, straddling the border between Umbria and Tuscany, a pit stop at a regular bar turns up a typically Italian surprise, when a waitress called Monia presses a doppio espresso into my hand before leading me through a back door and into a glorious, soaring church, San Giovanni Battista, with a vaulted, midnight-blue ceiling.
One of the culinary highlights is dinner at 18th-century manor house Relais La Leopoldina in the village of Bertollo, where Walter Redaelli runs his eponymous restaurant. We feast on gnocchi with truffle sauce, suckling pig with fennel flowers, and custard gelato with orange and lemon sauce, putting the world to rights on this night, as on all the other nights, in companionable chat that covers everything from politics to places we’ve travelled. It’s the people, three different guests tell me on three different occasions, that draws them to the Butterfield brand.
The third day is a struggle, as I labour upwards into the Crete Senesi, a region of pale grey clay hills. Formed of ancient marine sediments, it’s otherworldly, almost lunar and profoundly beautiful. Shortly afterwards, there’s Siena on the horizon, a heart-clenching moment.
Siena can be a circus, but it’s a beautiful circus. Yes, there are tourist throngs, generic brands such as Sephora and Geox, and shops selling boot-cut jeans and spangled socks. But with its zebra-striped 12th-century Duomo and Piazza del Campo, home to the Palio, it takes a cynic not to be entranced. We arrive by bus — the cobblestone streets and crowds would be too hard to negotiate by bike — and are deposited in the lap of luxury at the centrally located Grand Hotel Continental. I settle into an antique-stuffed, brocaded room tucked into the eaves, with views across to the Basilica di San Domenico.
Just steps away is the Campo, created out of nine herringbone-paved sections, each divided by a line of travertine. It’s a perfect place to plonk yourself in the early morning and watch the Sienese bustle towards their offices while you inhale a coffee and perhaps a chunk of pan co’santi, the local bread spiked with walnuts and raisins that’s baked through autumn in anticipation of All Saints’ Day, November 1.
Our last days are spent climbing up and over Chianti Classico country, where the wine’s emblem, a rooster with a lot of attitude, is everywhere; on vineyard signage and daubed splashily on boulders. We’ve fetched up at Hotel Le Fontanelle, a restored farmhouse complex dating back to the 13th century and an unpretentious five-star haven with views over the surrounding vineyards, cosy living rooms and an excellent restaurant.
Towards the end of the trip, we cycle to Castello di Brolio, once home to Baron Bettino Ricasoli, second prime minister of unified Italy and an apparently humourless 19th-century character but who we have to thank for creating the original blend for Chianti Classico. The climb is relentless but my legs feel strong. Push, drag, pull … like my spin instructor intones in a bike class. I could do this all day, I think.
Drunk on the sensation of strength and clear autumn air, or maybe too much Brunello the night before, I hit the top of that hill in a minor state of nirvana. Tuscany’s most famous son was right: this path has taken me to exactly where I want to be.
Emma Ventura was a guest of Butterfield & Robinson.
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IN THE KNOW
Butterfield & Robinson operates small-group and private active holidays worldwide. The next six-day, five-night Tuscany Biking itinerary departs Florence on May 3, 2020, $7500 to $8250 a person; single supplement $1505; excluding air travel.
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