Think of the word Italy, and you’ll provoke emotions on a broad spectrum. I myself immediately summon images of charming villages draped over rocky slopes, magnificent marble and terra cotta, ricotta pastries, near-orgasmic coffee culture, and extremely mountain ranges to experience it all in. Over the years, I have described my relationship with this country as a sort of love affair—when I’m not there, I yearn to return. But once I’m in it, it’s almost too good to be true. The fact remains that bikepacking trips in Italy, and daily life itself, for that matter, tick almost all the boxes one can think up for an enjoyable stay.

A lot has changed in my life recently. Hence, you could say that winds of change brought me back to Italy again, looking for fulfillment or, at the very least, a strong distraction from what I was feeling. For more than a decade now, I’ve had a trusted friendship in Milano that has given me the possibility to stay in the city for as long as I’d like. Making use of this advantage once more, the mix of marvel and melancholy of late summer afternoons immediately made me feel like I’d made the right choice in returning. It was a dreary November when I first cycled its dark, rainy avenues in 2015. My memory of that moment has almost certainly been clouded by my own romanticizing, yet I remember those first moments as so heartwarming. Headlights in the early morning fog, double-parked Italian madness, steaming cafe terraces, palatial buildings lining broken pavement, and the sheer elasticity of human movement here. And a cherished friendship, giving a home to it all. I’ve loved the city ever since.

Besides observations and finding reasons to feel more at home here, Italy didn’t have to try very hard to get me to stare at a map of its offerings, obsessively checking topographical layers and planning several squiggly lines across the screen of my laptop, relishing in the joy of such preliminary phases. I’ve become accustomed to designing my own routes over the past few years and enjoy the process tremendously. Sometime mid-August, I set out to ride a part of the Ligurian Apennines, as part of a plan for a larger route I was interested in exploring, but it fizzled out after a few hardcore days that involved far too much hike-a-bike. A little bit of recalculating later, from the comforts of my transitory Milano home, though, I was able to recenter my intentions and swiftly boarded a trajectory of trains about halfway down the “boot”. I was headed for familiar territory—a place of wolves and bears, of limestone mountains and pastoral heritage, of earthquakes and reassembly.

Monti Sibillini, as the national park in the region of Marche (“mark-e”) is called, was where I started my tour of Italian delights. The Sibillini bikepacking loop traverses the slopes, forests, and dirt tracks of this region gracefully, roping in unpretentious villages such as Castelluccio, Visso, Fiastra, and Montefortino. Nearly a decade later, these communities continue to rebuild after a devastating terremoto broke down much of their structures. A little surreal, for sure, to be leisurely pedaling through these places in a perfectly peaceful manner all these years later. I started my loop in Ascoli Piceno, where I arrived via a string of regional trains on a warm afternoon. In the central piazza, a fountain called my attention with its peculiar horse sculptures, out of which flowed a steady stream of ice-cold water. Fountains all over Italy, adorned or not, are a backbone of the public domain, and a detail I regard with strong affection, especially on bike trips; they allow for a swift wash of the hands, face, and legs, and more if you’re the adventurous type, besides filling all my bottles. For the villagers, they provide quick refreshment on an afternoon stroll.

It was already late summer, yet the sun shone hard as I ascended out of town, towards the route. I latched on just west of Passo del Gallucio the next morning, rising from the valley shadows after camping out in the garden of an abandoned house and relishing my first Italian breakfast of the tour. Brioche, as they call croissants here, filled with a thick yellow custard, at least three, and an americano. The bartender had enthusiastically told me about her new bicycle, how it too had a belt, but that she wasn’t quite sure where her gears were hidden. People here already turned out to be exceptionally friendly, open to exchanging a few words with silly cycling foreigners like myself. “Good luck-e”, she told me, with a thick, lovable Italian accent, as I turned right and started pushing up the pass. Construction workers in Piedilama and Pretare greeted me from atop the scaffolding that surrounded the wrecked buildings, while smashing big hammers around. I could sense that these villages hadn’t recovered at all, not only from the visual damage, but of how empty they felt. As if they’d been stuck in time since the earthquake hit and all life had bled out.

A huge upside of cycling through the Italian countryside is that finding a place to pitch your tent is usually no issue at all. This may not count in tourist hotspots such as the Dolomites, but down here, in the thick of Monti Sibillini, there was simply no one around to give a cazzo. Exactly as I prefer it and why I came down to these mountains in the first place. It may sound obvious, but the circumstances of a bikepacking trip mostly come down to where you ride, as your surroundings will have a very noticeable impact on the broader riding quality, how you’ll feel, and how easy it is to find a place to sleep under the stars.

In my opinion, cycling by the coast is asking for trouble, whereas at elevation, all sorts of potential annoyances and dangers fade and make way for ease of movement, whether it is during the day or in the darkness of night. It was only early September, but Sibillini felt quiet and at ease, as though the mountains carrying the park had sung a lullaby, putting everything on them in a deep slumber. From the forest, I could hear the squeaks of young wild boar and the occasional owl marking the end of a long sunset, but to me, these are the exact signs of a successful hiding spot.

Daytime passed with a similar smoothness. The loop had a clear rhythm to it with as many climbs as descents, following each other up like piatto principale would an aperitivo. As a first physical exposure after some time off the bike, it was perhaps a little too much of the good stuff, as my lungs struggled to deliver enough oxygen on some of the spicier gradients, while pearls of sweat smudged my sunglasses in the afternoon heat. Surfaces along this track vary from packed dirt singletrack to thoroughly flowy gravel up at height, as well as some rockier parts I didn’t quite enjoy. Twice, the suggested track went a little too hard for my taste, and I attempted to find a shortcut to maintain my sanity.

Following the route line from the southernmost section had done me well, though, as I quickly scaled the two highest peaks and longest climbs in the first day and a half, acting as a mediator for the rest of the itinerary. These were the kind of elements any route could have, and that are very workable—an impossibility for my only gripe of the ride. A small, yet frustrating part of the day’s arc between sunrise and sunset was that another being woke up with me, hitchhiked in my draft, and made sure I’d have some company by the time I’d set up camp. I’m talking about the extremely persistent flies, seemingly prime residents of the region. They were everywhere. Buzzing about in infinite numbers, on a mission to stick with me wherever I rode. Horseflies occasionally checked into the classroom, desperately trying to avoid my attention and somehow always timing their arrival exactly on the hardest climbs. To say I wish I’d carried some chemical annihilation spray would be an understatement!

Completing the loop, I didn’t give myself much time to reflect on what had passed, as the visual memories were fresh as afternoon rain. Sibillini had practiced a way of wrapping me around its finger, pressing me ever so gently with its allure, as I immediately felt a connection to the route through the way it had spoiled me. Some excellent wild camping spots, relative tranquility besides the flies, pleasing vistas, the charming Italian bars along the way, and an overall adventurous theme that embellished this route, owed to the magnificence of its mountainous scenery. Was this to be repeated a little further south, on the wonderful Wolf’s Lair I was about to ride for the third time? Time would tell, and out here it moved slow and pleasantly, like crystallized honey.

It’s a fact that Italians aren’t in a hurry if they’re not driving. My improvised, entirely paved crossing between the two routes was, therefore, ever so slightly life-threatening, but nothing to write home about. I dried my tent from the last of Sibillini’s moist morning air on the hot asphalt and listened to a few podcasts before gliding into the city of L’Aquila. Its central piazza had clearly baked in the sun all summer long, its bleached tiles radiating heatwaves under the clear blue sky. A maze of one-way streets led me out of the city and onto the slopes of what I call “the bathtub” structure that the Wolf’s Lair sits on. You see, the valley of L’Aquila and Sulmona is surrounded by mountains on all sides, and the route traverses their spine in a circular, clockwise direction, always elevated, with only a few exceptions to that rule by means of valley passages.

Like Monti Sibillini, the Wolf’s Lair route tackles high passes and flows at a similar pace, yet it includes more paved sections and contains far more forgiving gradients overall. It owes its name to small packs of wolves and a treasured, highly endangered group of endemic bears, neither of which you’ll likely ever encounter. It crosses high plateaus, dense oak forests, gorgeous historical towns and landmarks, and large swaths of pastoral farmland, over a delightful variety of tracks. The loop is simply a stunner. I rode it twice before, both times during the fall, when its colorful spectrum made me deeply fall in love with its entire concept.

Made by two L’Aquila locals, it holds everything you may be looking for in a wholesome bikepacking route, and may contain the very essence of what Italian delights mean to me: it’s in the simple things. A bar in a tiny town, seemingly dilapidating under the weight of its age, serving a better cup of coffee than many a fancy cafe in some of Italy’s most prominent cities. That pastel-green Fiat Panda at the end of the street, neatly parked underneath an explosion of flower decor draping over a terrace built a century ago. The clattering and clanging of church bells at each hour of the day, just as audible as the indecipherable cursing of an old Italian grandma in an alleyway somewhere. A deep, pungent smell of wood burning in chimneys, cow manure in the fields, and greasy goat cheese served on freshly baked bread, the oily stains of which live on your clothes for days on end. That seemingly everlasting dance between Roman ways of old, traditional pastoral culture, and contemporary high-society sprouting from international nuclei such as Milano, Venice, Roma, Napoli, and Siracusa.

In Abruzzo, lavish ski resorts contrast starkly with unfortunately neglected villages slightly off the main routes, and commoners’ bars wrestle with the prospect of raising prices against keeping their most loyal local clients’ wallets at bay. Google Maps reviews of high summertime decide the fate of entire businesses year-round, while some shops are entirely offline, proudly selling basic goods at inflated prices for being off the beaten path. Some towns compete for tourism, others shrug their shoulders and move on with their errands.

The Wolf’s Lair ropes through this fragile balance and does so only in a way a bikepacking route can mediate between sides, dependent on both for success. I relished in the fact that I could be up at height, completely secluded in a strictly natural space at night, a million stars above my head thanks to zero light pollution, yet sat down in a bar savoring breakfast as early as eight o’clock the next morning. To me, it felt as if the east side of the loop was far better equipped for both locals and tourists, whereas the west side felt much more dispersed, even endangering my cherished strategy of camping near a town and enjoying its merits the following morning, for the bars on the west side were mostly hard to find or entirely closed.

Nevertheless, the loop proved once again to be so preciously in proportion. I did not come to Italy for it, nor did I initially plan to latch onto its marvelous tracks again, but here I was. With cream-topped ice cream in my belly and a thousand postcards in my brain, I descended the slopes of Campo Felice with the rooftops of L’Aquila shimmering in the valley below and dark clouds rising from the north. A sunny weather window was closing, leaving me no choice but to depart back to the safety of my interim Milano homestead, doing so comfortably on yet another string of precious regional trains. I passed by the base of Passo San Leonardo on my way out of the bathtub and wondered when I’d come back here for a fourth go at spotting a wolf somewhere. As soon as I hit the transfer in Pescara, the allure of the fresh mountain air faded, making way for a warm, damp coastal current and views over the Adriatic Sea from my window seat. Perhaps my Dutch heritage simply wired me to be enchanted by mountains rather than flats, I thought.

And with Italy containing plenty, I’m starting to believe that wherever my bicycle may bring me next in this country of great contrasts, its delights will be high and plentiful.

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