What Biking Reveals About A Place

Sara Frenning is the Content Creator on the 2026 Viva Italia Cycling Tour.

“Was that tobacco back there?”

The riders all roll into lunch with the same question. Some were able to identify the plant, and others “aaah” in recognition when they hear the answer. Soon the conversation continues.

“Did you see that plant?, Did you see that bird? What were those flowers with that wonderful smell?”

Small things noticed along the way, all discussed and compared over Balazs’s scrumptious lunch and slices of bread topped with a heavy layer of Nutella.

Tuscany

We are in the Tuscan countryside, completely taking over a gravel parking lot as TDA does, when the clock strikes lunch. Today we have shared the road with motorcyclists whose speed tilts their knees dangerously close to the road. They certainly enjoyed the views and the wind in their hair just like we do, but as they swoosh by, I can’t help but wonder if they spotted the tobacco, or if they smelled the flowers?

That’s the thing with traveling by bicycle speed. You notice things. Places you travel to by bicycle stick to your senses in a different way. More than a postcard, it becomes a sensory memory that captures smell, feeling and taste.

Diane heading to Rome…the long way.

You notice and encounter people more slowly. Cathy and Dianne, the smiling Australian sisters on this year’s Viva Italia, shared an encounter from the day over our pasta dinner. They stopped at a cafe for a coke stop, where the person behind the counter was far beyond retirement age. “Nonna looked like she had trouble walking between the cash and the counter,” Kate says, and we all laugh. But coffee by coffee, Coca-Cola by Coca-Cola, all the riders get served by the 80+-year-old Nonna who must have wondered what biking tornado had hit her otherwise sleepy little village that day. “When we left, we gathered the dishes and handed them to her at the counter, and her whole face lit up in a wonderful smile,” Dianne says, her own smile as big as the one she described.

Traveling by bike reveals the heart and stories of places in a way that speeding by in a car or motorcycle doesn’t allow.

In simple acts, such as when dirty dishes are passed from sweaty biking hands to old, trembling barkeeper hands, something is exchanged. A story is told and simultaneously created. The sisters now know that in Italy, Nonnas hold onto their bartending jobs to stay part of, and continue serving, their community, and that keeping your older population involved matters more than getting your coffee served quickly. And Nonna now knows that a cyclist from Australia cares enough to gather dishes to make her day a little bit easier. They will probably have different stories to tell of each other from that day, but their stories are nonetheless intertwined.

Perhaps in a way, that would not have been possible without the bicycle.

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