Headway Systems: Cycling in Italy

Sept 24th, 2003

Radicofani - Mt. Amiata

back to Rome

Day 1

(Click any image for a larger view.)

Day 11 - Our first cloudy day in a long time. We all rode to Radicofani where some stayed to explore the fortress and others rode on the highest point in this area, Mt. Amiata. (Map of area, mileage 120 kilometres.)

Here's the whole group (less Bob) under the huge oak tree
just down the road from our place.

Q. How long can a geologists hang from a tree?
A. We didn't wait to find out.

Q. How many geologists does it take to hug a tree?
A. Who cares!

"Tie a yellow geologist 'round the old oak tree..."

This tree was massive.

On the road again.

Panoramic views of the country side on the way up to Radicofani.

Rocca of Radicofani (783 metres elevation)
The majestically situated Rocca of Radicofani vies with the Rocca d'Orcia for the title of most imposing fortress in southern Tuscany. Clamped to a basalt outcrop, it commands the strategic heights between the Paglia and Orcia valleys. The castle is identified with one Ghino di Tacco, a fourteenth-century bandit who features in the writings of both Dante and Boccaccio - the Decameron tells of Tacco's imprisoning the abbot of Cluny in this fortress, then curing him of indigestion.

Top of page

Street scenes...

Yahoo - it's that time again!
Cappuccino's all around.

Some of the gang stayed and explored the castle in Radicofani. By that time the clouds had lifted for awhile and they got great views.

Top of page

Looking down on the town from the tower.

Bruce, Sandy, Keang, Sherman, Doug, Roy and Carol headed on to Mt. Amiata.

It didn't take long to get to this vantage point as it was pretty much all down hill. Radicofani in the distance.

This is where we are heading to? In hind sight it was a good thing I couldn't see as I didn't know how much elevation we had yet to climb. And that was before we took the wrong turn and added an extra 20 km (hilly of course) onto the already long day.

Top of page

These two are becoming inseparable.

Nice road, too bad it's the wrong direction!
We were so disappointed in having made a wrong turn (twice) there was no thoughts of any pictures. Although it was quite picturesque. We rode to Campiglia d'Orcia before turning around.

What we learned was that you can have all the maps around, but if no one wants to take the time to read them, we're all to blame. Silly buggers.

We finally got onto the right road up to the top of the mountain. It was eight kilometres of grinding away in granny gear up a very windy, damp, dark road. Again no pictures. I was hurting too much. There was great thunder activity and the only nice thing about being in such dense trees is that the rain didn't get us.

We finally made it to the village at the bottom of the ski hill where we ran into Bruce and Sandy. They were lucky enough not to get involved in our indecision on (the lack of) map reading, and had ridden straight to the top. The unfortunate news, for us, was it was still another four or five kilometres to the top. Roy tried to turn the group around a couple of times, but without luck. Having come this far it just didn't seem right to turn around when we were that close. What's a couple more kilometres when you've already done a hundred! It was a stupid ride (says Roy) and he was probably right.

No time to turn back when we'd already come this far. Right?

Bottom of the lift.



Carol's attempts at self-portraits.

Top of page

Even though I was totally freezing I had to get some pictures just to prove that I made it. If you look closely you can see me holding my bike over my head underneath the tower.

Isn't this a great view? You'd ride all the way up this road in the freezing cold for this too, wouldn't you?

We had to stop a few times on the way down to flex our fingers and try and move our joints. Sherman, Roy and Carol made a bee-line for a coffee shop before heading home.


After descending into the valley again the skies started to clear up a bit and we could see Radicofani in the distance. It's visible from almost anywhere.

It was really quite the ride back to Le Checche. It took us about six hours to climb the long route up the mountain. We didn't get there till four or five o'clock. After we warmed up from the chilly mountaintop descent, it took us less than two hours to get home! There was a lot of vertical to keep dropping. We must have climbed over a thousand metres.