Riding the Tour de France — in Italy

The old boy limps determinedly towards us, intent etched across his weathered face. “Here we go,” we think, struggling to finish our mouthfuls of cheese and bresaola rolls and sticky jam crostata. Had we parked our support vehicle in a restricted spot? Perhaps strayed on to the wrong cycle path on our approach?

As he arrives, his face softens. His bald head is creosoted by the sun, and he bears the distinctive tan lines around elbows and neck of the career cyclist. Ninety-three years young, he wants to talk bikes — surveying our super-light, carbon-fibre numbers like he might an old friend who’s had a facelift. His daughter keeps pestering him to sell his own aluminium racer, he tells us, but he’s resisting. “I like to go out to the garage in the evening and just stare at it,” he explains. “It makes me happy.”

Our nostalgic Florentine friend is in for quite some treat later this month. For not only is cycling’s biggest race starting in his nation for the first time in its 121-year history, it’s practically passing his front door. Le Grand Départ, the nomadic, gospel-spreading Tour de France curtain-raiser, will feature three Italian stages, the tastiest of which is the opener, Florence to Rimini: 206km from the cradle of the Renaissance to the Romagna Riviera via the unforgiving slopes of the Apennines. And we’ve come to ride it.

A half-hour earlier we’d set off from beneath the crenellated walls of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence’s tourist-thronged Piazza della Signoria, as the Tour riders will do on June 29, and threaded our way across the Ponte Vecchio — dodging the selfie-snapping pedestrians who’ll be safely stowed away come race day. Then, through the haze of a late-spring Tuscan afternoon, we’d glided along the south bank of the Arno to the suburb of Bagno a Ripoli, our nominated fuelling spot and the place where, for the professionals, the opening procession will give way to the proper racing.

I’m riding with Jaron, an old friend with a strong cycling pedigree and an even stronger cycling wardrobe. He looks every inch the Tour pro; I look like a rugby player with a driving ban. But our appreciation for this dangerously compulsive pastime runs equally deep, as it does for the third member of our makeshift team: Alessandro Piazzi. The 62-year-old is on support duty, driving a high-spec Elnagh camper van packed to its retractable roof with tempting victuals. A veteran employee of bike tour specialist Via Panoramica, Alessandro has the quiet self-assurance of someone who could incinerate you on a climb and be two cappuccinos deep by the time you reach the summit café.

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The opening 30km or so flies by, the Tuscan capital reduced to a distant smudge and the dense green Apennines massing around us like waves in a gathering storm. This, as we’re well aware, is just the loosener. As we head off to bed in the rustic retreat of Poggio Marino, set in the serene foothills above the town of Dicomano, Alessandro has some calmly ominous words. “I always say, it’s not a ride without a climb,” he tells us. “In the morning, you climb.”

And so it proves. Ten minutes in, we’re sweating heavily and I’m regretting that second breakfast brioche. Up and up we go, our pace matching that of life in the hamlets through which we intermittently pass. An ironmonger taps away lethargically in his roadside workshop. A farmer on a noisily underpowered tractor does battle with a steeply undulating field. Florence feels a long way off.

As I climb I think about the giants of Italian cycling in whose tyre tracks we’re following: Ottavio Bottecchia, who returned from a Great War spent pedalling his military-issue foldable Bianchi bike deep behind enemy lines with a machine gun strapped to his back, to become the first Italian winner of the Tour de France. Gino Bartali, to which this opening stage is dedicated: a ferocious climber who won two Tours, bookending the second world war, and whose clandestine work for the Italian Resistance under the pretext of training rides was said to have saved the lives of as many as 800 Jews.

In their eras, Grand Tours such as the Tour de France were even more sadistic affairs, with daily stages of up to 480km. What they would have given for an Alessandro waiting, as we find him, at the top of the 930-metre Col de Valico Tre Faggi, with awning extended and little fold-out table laid with cubes of crumbly Parmigiano Reggiano (“good protein”), fruit juices, dates, figs and custard treccia (braided bread).

Tuscany may be the more celebrated region, but it’s Emilia-Romagna, into which we pass shortly afterwards, that is to provide the scenic high points of the trip. The Parco Nazionale delle Foreste Casentinesi, a dense swath of beech, silver fir and ash trees from which the timber for the Duomo in Florence was drawn. The canyon-edge town of Premilcuore, as thickly enveloped by nature as a Mayan citadel. The rolling, poppy-strewn hills around San Leo, a fortified medieval hamlet that glows from its huge sandstone-spur perch like an ancient Acropolis.

Fuelled by frequent café stops for thick, tarry ristretti (an espresso without all that surplus liquid), we make good progress and by midday on the third day just one climb remains: eight kilometres of switchbacks to the very top of the microstate of San Marino.

On a clear day, you can see the Istrian peninsula across the Adriatic from the ramparts of the 11th-century castle that crowns its lofty capital. The weather is in indecisive mood as we reach the top: the peaks we’ve conquered to the west bathed in sunshine; to the east, an impenetrable blanket of cloud which cowers at the threshold of the summit as if constrained by a giant pane of glass. I look down into the soupy morass, feeling a wave of vertigo. Somewhere, 700 metres below, lie the plains of Romagna and — 25km or so away — our destination, Rimini.

Truth be told I’ve been braced for an anticlimactic finish. Dipping our toes in the Adriatic, toasting our accomplishment and then departing. Because, as everyone knows, Rimini has had its day: an overrun beach resort, a victim of its own excess. Las Vegas on sea.

It takes scant minutes on arrival to recognise my misjudgment. We swing on to Lungomare Giuseppe di Vittorio, the revitalised beachfront stretch where the Tour riders will summon whatever reserves they have left to sprint for the first yellow jersey of the race, and pedal on towards the glistening new marina.

Over the subsequent 24 hours we’ll stroll broad, elegant avenues, shaded by poplars and lime trees, and hang out on Rimini’s gargantuan beach — forested by parasols and segmented into private beach clubs, sure, but also wondrously clean and efficient. We’ll treat ourselves to an indulgent breakfast at the Grand Hotel — beloved of the city’s most famous son, auteur Federico Fellini — and spend an evening amid the buzzing enoteche and osterie of Borgo San Giuliano. This mural-adorned former fishing neighbourhood is connected to the city’s old town by the Tiberius Bridge — 13 centuries more venerable than Florence’s Ponte Vecchio.

But first we must bid farewell to Alessandro, and — to our quads’ almost audible relief — hand back our bikes. He drops us and our bags at our digs, a stylish houseboat hotel on a secluded arm of the marina. Only once we’ve peeled off our Lycra and showered do we realise how far out of town we actually are. It’s a good half-kilometre walk just to get back to the marina entrance, another couple to the centre.

I call the office/reception. “What’s the best way for guests to get around?” I ask.

“Ah, yes,” says the lady, excitedly. “Now, if you look outside your houseboat . . . over to the left. Can you see them?”

Yes. Yes, I can. Bloody bikes.

Great Tour moments — and how to recreate them

Pantani tames Alpe d’Huez: The greatest climber of his generation — some would argue in the history of cycling — was at his pomp in the 1997 Tour. And Stage 13, a 203km slog from Saint-Étienne up into the Grandes Rousses Massif of south-eastern France, culminating in the Tour’s most iconic ascent, was when he truly unleashed. Clutching his drop handlebars like a sprinter, in trademark fashion, Marco Pantani obliterated the field over the 21 hairpin bends of Alpe d’Huez, riding the 14.5km climb in an astonishing 37 minutes and 35 seconds — a record that still stands. Today, the peak is one of the most sought-after scalps in recreational cycling, and you won’t be alone as you tackle its famous switchbacks. The Grandes Rousses Hotel & Spa, at the summit, makes for a suitably plush carrot (doubles from £110; hotelgrandesrousses.com). Or join Saddle Skedaddle’s eight-day Mont Ventoux to Alpe d’Huez itinerary, a guided group trip that takes in classic Tour climbs every day, and multiple scenes of Pantani’s gravity-taunting exploits (next departure on June 8, from £2,295; skedaddle.com).

Froome’s lakeside time trial: On July 14 2013, Chris Froome showed guile and grit to win a stage on the “Giant of Provence”, 1,910m Mont Ventoux. But it was three days later, on the picturesque banks of Lac de Serre-Ponçon, in the Hautes-Alpes department of south-eastern France, that the Kenyan-born prodigy showed his true class, triumphing in a 32km time trial between Embrun and Chorges billed as the toughest in Tour history, with two Category 2 climbs and some clavicle-imperilling descents. Just a few days later, he had the first of his four Tour de France victories in the bag. Cycle this enchanting region from Château de Picomtal, a family-run medieval retreat at the eastern end of the lake (doubles from £128, picomtal.fr). Alternatively, join one of Undiscovered Mountains’ seven-night “Legendary Alpine Routes on Reserved Roads” self-guided trips, and you can combine the time-trial stretch with a host of emblematic Tour climbs, including Col d’Izoard and Col du Noyer. The “Reserved” part refers to the periodic closure (to non-cyclists) of classic routes in the southern French Alps to which Undiscovered Mountains aligns its Tour de France-themed trips (departures until October, from £1,577, undiscoveredmountains.com).

Christophe wields his welding: Suffer a mechanical problem during the Tour these days and a support team can have you back in the saddle in seconds. It wasn’t always thus. In the 1913 race, Eugène Christophe was leading after the Col du Tourmalet — one of the highest passes in the Pyrenees — when his forks broke. With riders not permitted to receive assistance, the Frenchman traipsed 10 miles to the mountain village of Ste-Marie-de-Campan with his bike on his shoulder. There he found a blacksmith who talked him through how to weld it back together — though a small boy operating the bellows as he did so was to cost him a further 10-minute penalty. There’s no welding on GPM10’s six-day “Trans Pyrenees Tour”, but it’s got just about everything else, including ascents of the Tourmalet, Peyresourde and Aubisque, on a ride from Biarritz to Collioure (October 4, £5,200, gpm10.com). Prefer to go it alone? Set up camp in Pau, a couple of hours’ ride north of the central Pyrenees peaks, and pick off your targets in a series of day rides. Boutique, central, Hôtel Bristol makes an excellent base (doubles from £105, hotelbristol-pau.com).

LeMond’s Paris comeback: The elm-lined, seatpost-straight Champs-Élysées in the French capital has provided a fittingly grand setting for the final stage of the Tour since 1975. Tradition usually dictates that the denouement is a bubbly-sipping procession in which the Yellow Jersey remains uncontested. But not in 1989, when a 24.5km time trial lay in wait on the last day. Race leader Laurent Fignon was said to have approached rival Greg LeMond the day before and congratulated him on his second-place finish. Infuriated, the American rode like a man possessed to overturn a 50-second deficit and win the three-week race by a mere eight seconds. It’s entirely possible to cycle the full 2km stretch between Place de la Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe, but with cars, fumes and traffic lights, it can be a joyless affair. So, instead, how about joining the man himself — now 62 and very much at his raconteurial, if not quite athletic, peak — for a weekend “joyriding” around the nearby Champagne region? The three-day LeBlanq trip features menus curated by a Michelin-star chef and accommodation in a five-star retreat overlooking Épernay (departs June 20, from £2,950, leblanq.com). 

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