We got a late start due to morning rain, but after it cleared off we made the Col Agnel (“Lamb Pass”) at 2pm local time, so if you were looking at the webcam at 5am Seattle time, we were both wearing red.

Susana took the lead for the first half of the day, a gradual valley floor following a creek before we passed the last Italian town and the real mashing began.

I insisted on riding the whole thing — with plenty of breaks. Susana walked the steepest parts and I wasn’t going much faster than her on those sections. There were a lot of cyclists, too. Most rode alongside us and then gradually pulled away (of course they didn’t have 60 pounds of gear), but some shot up the mountain like a rocket, which really made your jaw drop. We even passed a few, too, which must have been discouraging for them (with our loads). Some hikers on the road cheered as Susana rounded a corner, then pushed her a ways up the next hill.

The price of the average cyclist’s bike is much higher here too… obviously only dedicated cyclists would be found on this road: Time, Lightspeed, Look, Pinarello, and other nice frames.

It was pretty cold at the pass with some patches of snow. Everyone donned jackets for the descent. No customs check was required as we sped downhill into France; I reached 67 km/hr, but it’s pretty hard to stop a heavy bike on a steep downhill, so I braked more than normal on the curvy road. Overall it was a fun day. One or two percent less would have been more enjoyable though. The current grade was posted on every switchback, along with the distance it was in effect for (11.65% for .9km, for example), the current altitude, and the distance to the pass. Very helpful. And the steepest section posted was 14%.

We rode straight down to the first campground and are now going to bed at 9:30, despite Bastille Day fireworks. We’ll see how the knees and muscles feel tomorrow.

>From Siena we rode along more perfect roads to San Gimignano, finding frescoed churches that were as packed with painted scenes as a biker’s tatooed forearm, and many medieval towers — if you were anyone back then, you had your own tower. Riding on to Florence the streets were empty because it was a Sunday, and emptier because Italy would soon be playing France in the World Cup final.

We found the campground and had a passeggiata before the game, then parked ourslelves near one of the large screens in a hilltop piazza — there was literally nothing else you could do in the city and probably the entire country while Italy played.

When Italy scored to tie the game, the place predictably went ballastic. Even the copy of Michelangelo’s David in the square was waving a flag (as well as the people perched on his shoulders). We watched the second half back at the campground to get a better view of the screen, and found the French fans were holed up there with their chants for the bleu, which only got louder when Zidane got ejected. They finally turned quiet when France lost in the penalty round, and we headed out to the square to the screams and traffic and mayhem all around the city. We finally went to bed at 2:00 when fifty thousand car horns could still be heard.

The rest of our stay in Florence was counter to everything we’ve been experiencing so far on the trip — museums, tasty vegetarian restaurants, a storm of tourists, and long lines everywhere. It’s a drag when we’ve been so independent and self-reliant to follow the rules and timetables that the system mandates.

Florence’s Uffizi Gallery houses so much great art, it was not to be missed despite the 2+ hour wait. Boticelli’s Birth of Venus and Primavera, Da Vinci’s Annunciation, Rembrandts, Rubens, Caravaggios.

But what started with awe as we visited the museums and frescoed churches of Tuscany turned somewhat flat after seeing so much art in a short time. I thought I’d be sick if I saw another variation of Madonna with Child. Still, most suprisingly, what moved me the most at the Uffizi and perhaps all of Tuscany was Michelangelo’s Madonna with Child (so sculptural looking — as if the Virgin had been hitting the gym). Susana’s favorite was the Birth of Venus.

On our last night in Florence we ran into Philip Glass giving a free concert in Piazza della Signoria, and then said goodbye to the crowds and lines and great Tuscan riding by taking the train to Cuneo the following day, to keep up with our schedule. Actually we took five trains which was required in order to take our bikes along.

Cuneo sits at the base of the Alps in Piedmont, where we plan to ride up and over into France, at the Col Agnel, 2,744m (9,002ft), along a route featured in this year’s Giro d’ Italia. It didn’t phase me when various people gasped that we’d be doing this by bike, until talking with a bike shop mechanic in Busca who raised an eyebrow at that prospect and warned us of the 13-15% grades. But we continued on and are now in Sampeyre for the night (978m), just before the real climbing begins.

We’ve noticed that in this part of Italy people are more curious and likely to ask about our trip, as the woman at the grocery store did just a moment ago, then told nearly everyone in the store “these two have ridden around Croatia, Greece, Italy and are now in magical Sampeyre!” A stream of people wished us a good trip as we continued shopping for our dinner.

Since we’re in the mountains where more people are hiking and biking, we’re finally able to find all kinds of energy drinks and power bars that are handy while riding, and even a goo-like milk concentrate that you can ooze into your mouth. Mmm, it looked too good to resist that I’ll have to report about it in France.

After getting out of the Rome mess that extended for 100km out of the city, the scenery got dramatically better. So many unmarked intersections and maze-like country roads had us constantly lost and headed towards Rome, as every road sign told us (if only I could find an appropriate cliché).

Riding into Northern Lazio and Southern Tuscany was like stumbling onto a vein of gold that will eventually lead us to the mother lode: Florence. We’re currently situated in its medieval rival, Siena, that has more archways, bell towers, and churches than, say, Seattle. This is postcard Italy, and until reaching Siena, we’ve been enjoying small villages untouched by the crowds. We’re even a little surprised we have these medieval villages to ourselves, with open piazzas, pedestrian walkways (free even of motorscooters), fountains, and I even saw a car getting a parking ticket, something that didn’t seem to exist in the chaos south of here. There are many more public parks and public benches in these small towns and along country roads. Such a simple thing: a place to sit when you don’t want to buy something, and enjoy the scenery. Their absence for the better part of our trip has been driving me crazy.

One of the towns we spent some time (sitting for free) was Viterbo, where the Popes resided for a short time during the middle ages. We got a private tour of the papal quarters where a conclave took place for three years. The cardinals ate, drank and be’d merry and sponged off Viterbo until the locals finally sent them and the papacy back to Rome.

The Romans claimed that the demi-god Hercules lived in Viterbo, but the Romans copied everything from the Greeks — art, architecture, religion — evidently changing the stories of the latter to fit their needs.

Another unpretentious village was Capodimonte, built on the shore of Lake Bolsegna, a lake in the crater of a long-extinct volcano. We went swimming on its volcanic-black beaches before riding around the rim of the crater the next day, with views of wheat fields, vineyards and pines.

As popular as Tuscany is in the minds of tourists, the roads we’ve found are empty of cars and have fabulous riding, as good as anywhere on our trip. While some days have as much climbing as the Peloponnese (1500m or more), the grades aren’t as fierce and the descents are like roller coasters, with just enough momentum to get you over the next hill if you’re brave enough not to apply the brakes. Pitigliano was one great looking village built on a big rock that popped out around a corner at the end of a long descent. And there are hill towns like Monalcino that were built long after Pax Romano ended, and the villages moved from valleys to hilltops for better protection.

The heatwave that we experienced the first 10 days in Italy has also disappeared and we’ve had a few days of thunderstorms with passing showers which have dropped the temperature from 35-38 to 30C (95-100 to 80F). While I had convinced myself that I’d adapted perfectly to riding in the heat, I suddenly found a lot more energy when the temperature became bearable.

Susana is holding up well as our account supervisor, dealing with tourist offices, campground officials, asks for directions 12 times per day and demands the correct change from vendors when we’re about to be ripped off.

And the bikes haven’t complained at all, just needing some oil on the chain and air in the tires every few days. The tires have passed 2000 kilometers without a flat despite much abuse. Even when riding through dog poop and then immediately over a cactus, they kept me from a stinky flat repair. We’d like our good luck to continue.

With Portugal out of the running on questionable terms, we’re left rooting for our hosts, the Italians, against those undeserving French in the World Cup final. Until we reach France.

Outside of Naples, in the town of Castellemmare di Stabia, we attended the wedding reception of our friends Loredana and Steve. Beyond the seven courses of food to feed these hungry cyclists, seeing friends for a few days off the bikes helped replenish our spirits for the next part of our trip.

We joined Steve and Jane, other Seattlites in town for the event, to visit Pompei, the site of sites for Roman history — an entire city preserved in ash after Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. Some of the buildings were so entact that you could see 2000-year old grafiti on the walls. In other buildings, bodies were cast in plaster, exactly as the archeologists found them during excavation. Most striking, the bodies were so small — you only had to be 5-feet tall in order to be a Roman soldier.

Naples is a gritty city and we spent one day there, most of it in the Archeological Museum, and that felt like enough. But Naples is also the center of pizza, and we discovered that the best pizza has provola cheese (smoked mozzarella) and arugula. The cuisine of Italy is perhaps the best suited of any for endurance sports, with all of those delicious carbs — bread, pasta, risotto. The only problem during the course of a day’s ride is planning ahead for siesta since supermarkets (and most other businesses) are closed from 1-5.

After our stay in Castellemmare, we decided the best way to bike out of the area was to take a vacation from our vacation and ride down the Amalfi Coast, to the southwest of the city. The coastal road is famous for being attached to the sheer cliffs, and it made for some of the best riding of our trip. Sorrento, Positano, and Amalfi are all overpriced tourist locales, but the road itself was the draw. Despite warnings, traffic was light and not very high speed with the constant turns of the road around and through the rock.

The ride had a touch of a James Bond chase scene — whizzing over cobbles as well-dressed couples stepped out of a limousine in front of a 5-star hotel, through a piazza in a flock of scooters, around a tile-domed church and suddenly back out on the edge of the cliff, looking down at some ridiculous megayacht.

The coast is also known for its lemons, and we saw some that were larger than cantelope. I’m not referring to the megayacht owners.

In Amalfi we took the ferry to Pozzuolli, a suburb east of Naples, as our strategy for bypassing a lot of the Neapolitan traffic. In addition to Vesivius, the region has a lot of thermal features and we rode to a campground located in the caldera of a low-lying volcano. I understood that this volcano, La Sulfatara, which means “rotten eggs” in Italian, was inactive, but still had bubbling mud pits and steam spewing forth, much like you see in Yellowstone.

Something very unusual happened next, and that was the flatness of the roads we encountered. We rode 130km the next day to celebrate, our longest day. We also encountered bits and pieces of Via Appia (the Appian Way), the old Roman roadway. When the Romans weren’t having orgies or throwing victims to wild beasts for amusement, they were building great roads. Via Appia is known for being completely straight and flat, even cambered for drainage purposes, and the 260m “pass” that we climbed was evenly graded.

The sections we rode were asphalted, but we could often see the old cobbles on the edges of the road. Evidently much of it closer to Rome has been excavated and preserved.

Via Appia gets busier, and without a good alternative and after much discussion we have decided to bypass Rome. Major cities are not the friend of the bike tourist, and it boils down to the idea that these trips are designed to visit the places you don’t see by plane, train, and car.

So instead we’re making our way up the coast, through not-very-pretty coastal development built for Roman holiday seekers, but at least we have the sea. We stayed in the largest campground imaginable that had all the amenities you’d find on a cruise ship — hair dressers, Latin dance classes: a bit surreal.

And what’s also happening everywhere you turn is the World Cup. The three times Italy has played (and won) since we’ve been here, we’ve had the temptation of riding on the deserted traffic-free streets, but the draw of watching the local team with the locals is stronger. And we’d need to be promptly off the streets by the end of the games anyway to avoid the swarms of scooters adorned with Italian flags and the storm of horns and chaos, with each Italian victory.

But we care more about Portugal, who along with Italy, Germany and France have advanced to the semi-finals. The 80km of riding yesterday was nothing compared to the stress of watching Portugal squeak by England last night.

Soon we’ll be in Tuscany.