A letter without stamp, nor recipient: a bike ride through the extremes of Italy

Between August and September 2021, Stefano Piatti and Matteo Pavana crossed Italy from the northernmost extreme (Testa Gemella Occidentale – Val Aurina) to the southernmost (Punta Pesce Spada – Island of Lampedusa) by bicycle.

The reason? Connect two points.

The real reason? Temporally disconnect from everything. Once they arrived in Lampedusa, Stefano and Matteo wrote and sent postcards to the people they had met during their trip, to say “ciao” to them. And then there is this letter wrote by Matteo. A letter that was written but never sent.

A letter without stamp, nor recipient.

Ciao.


“Ciao” is such a nice word, don’t you think?
It doesn’t matter if we are leaving or if we have just arrived. In Italian we can say “ciao” regardless of which direction we take. There are different types of “ciao”: the warm ones and the lazy ones, those you say while passing by, those you shout or those you whisper. There are some “ciao” who sound sweet, as they were a “see you later” or “ciao” who sound dry, as they were a “leave me alone”. There are even some “ciao” who are in fact a last “ciao”, a goodbye.
Thinking about it, a “ciao” rarely equates to just saying hello to a person. A “ciao” is always much more than just saying a simple “ciao”.

The “ciao” I prefer is the one that honors the beginning of a journey.

I don’t think I ever told you, but for me traveling comes more from a necessity than a desire, the difference lies in the tense. If desire is purely conditional, necessity is present imperative: it cannot be postponed. It’s a visceral thing: it takes you deep in the stomach and grows until it explodes. It is a triggered bomb or, more poetically, a pleasant obligation with colorful shades. Traveling has the scent and sound of the wind. It is striving to the art of nomadism, it is striving to myself.

Unlike the countless “ciao” there are only two types of nomads: travelers and fugitives. If the first ones come and go as they please, the second ones do not have a return ticket, they leave in order to never come back. It could also be true that those who travel are fugitives and vice versa, meaning that there are those who run away by traveling and those who travel by running away, but the heart of the matter is something else: men act without ever really knowing why they do and that’s because they live according to pure, unpredictable and changing instinct.

The meeting point between those who travel and those who run away is instinct, passion, natural disposition. Call it as you want. Visually, it’s that electricity that spreads in all directions, at different intensities, it’s that shock that makes your hair stand on end and your toes arch.

This whole introduction just to tell you that I run away though a cycling trip. Yes, I took my bike and left, without knowing if and when I would be back. Obviously, to do this I had to buy a bicycle. Since someone stole Marco’s some months ago, I couldn’t help but buy a brand new one. I bet you would like it. It was the only one they had left in the shop, due to Covid. Seeing it there, all alone, in the window made me dream. It was precisely the fact that it was the last one there that made me feel like a savior: I would have taken that bike where others would never have been able. And if it was the last, the most unlucky one, it meant it was the right bike at the right time, the perfect bike for me. I’ve named it Lola.

I cycled from Val Aurina to Lampedusa, from the northernmost to the southernmost point of Italy. I didn’t go there alone. Stefano, aka Ste (or King) came with me. You would like Ste. You’ve never met him, because the right occasion never came. He is a good friend: honest, humble, true. The right friend with whom to ride though Italy on the saddle, freewheeling. To tell the truth, it was his idea. We wanted to go on a trip together and he had this dream since he was a child: cycling though Italy on a Graziella bike. None of us had a Graziella though. But I had Lola, while he had Fratello Genio Trova Bionicle. He named his bike like that.
I know, Lola is way better.

We planned our itinerary in 15 minutes sitting at Angolo dei 33, just the time to drink a Mariamata beer. Then it was time to tell mom. I waited until the last minute to talk to her about the trip, because I wanted to save her from sinking into negative thoughts, her worries. You can imagine how she reacted. Probably the same way you would have reacted.

“Weren’t there any closer places to ride a bike?!”

I cannot hide that sometimes I struggle to manage her anxiety, but at the same time I think about Ste, who would be happy to still have a mother who cares about him and who scolds him. He misses his mom so much.

About the road we have taken… We rode down the mountains along the Adriatic coast up to Puglia. We immersed ourselves in Basilicata, visited the ruins of Matera, and crossed Calabria until we reached the Tyrrhenian Sea. I will remember this particular moment forever, because we started screaming like crazy at the sight of what we believed to be Etna, when in reality it was Stromboli. That was funny.

From there we went up and down the Calabrian hills, reached Villa S.Giovanni and crossed the Strait of Messina by ferry. We then cycled though the whole Sicily up to Agrigento, passing through Portopalo di Capo Passero, known to most people as the place where Ulysses landed on his way back from Troy. There we felt a little bit like Ulysses too, I won’t hide it from you. At Porto Empedocle we took the ferry and sailed all night. I could tell you that ours was an epic arrival, but it wasn’t. There was no one waiting for us or asking us where we came from and what we had done. Ste and I high-fived each other and then had breakfast in the most famous pastry shop of the island. It was a perfect moment. I could tell you a thousand more episodes, but I would go too far.

Have you ever faced long bike rides when you were young? Also, what did traveling mean to you?

I’ve finally understood why I love cycling so much.
Have you ever noticed that a bike is nothing more than a pedal orchestra? If you think about it… The keyboard of the gears, the roll of the chain, the whistle of the body though the air, the strumming of the wheels on the ground. With just your legs you’re able to create a harmonic and melodic motion.

In addition, cycling means drawing lines on maps, rolling on the asphalt from one point to another, at the right and symmetrical distance between past and future, between “where you came from” and “where you will go”. If you think about it, it’s like I said at the beginning, it’s like saying “ciao”. Awareness of the present moment becomes more important than cycling itself, than traveling itself. At that moment nothing is more important than giving vent to your own intuition, feelings, pain.

One of my favorite time of the day is sunset, because I realize that cycling sweeps away the light from the skin, that the friction of air triggered by the movement melts the heat.

If you were wondering why we did this trip, I don’t know if I would be able to answer you now. Maybe we needed it. Or maybe it was really instinct, because neither Ste nor I had the faintest idea of what was that same need. Or maybe it’s really true that we humans do things without knowing the reason why. But that’s okay.

Before leaving I really believed that cycling would have given me some answers. How stupid I was. Only now, as I write to you, I realized that the answer was to just cycle. It was the only way to relive yourself.

With a ticket in my pocket, I realize that I have not run away, I’ve only traveled. Because I’m ready to go home.
I am looking at the sea. 
I’m ready to say “ciao” to you for the last time.



So, ciao.