My Highlights Of The Viva Italia Cycling Tour

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

My parents live in a very small village in the Swedish countryside. It’s the kind of place where, in winter, rain falls horizontally, and the cold seems to sink straight into your bones. In summer, it does get warmer, but never enough to forget where your jacket is or to fully trust a sunny day. It’s about as far from Italy as you could come in terms of both weather and culture. Yet in my parents’ house, on a wall in the kitchen sits a sign reading “Ici on sert L’Aperol” (Aperol is served here). They brought it back from a train trip to southern Italy, along with the habit of having a glass of Aperol basically any chance they get.

It looks completely out of place against Sweden’s lemon-less fauna, but it serves an important purpose. It lets my parents transport themselves back to warm summer evenings in Italy with a specific bright orange beverage, if only just for a moment.

It’s the same kind of sign I’ve biked past multiple times in souvenir shops all over Italy. Shops filled to the brim with trinkets people can bring home to remember the brief time they spent soaking up the Italian sun and the Italian culture. More than just a trinket, or a sign marking the presence of Aperol, I think what people are trying to bring back home is a feeling, a lifestyle, or perhaps even a personality. The ease of life, the flexible relationship with time, late dinners, and the love of siestas is perhaps Italy’s biggest imaginary export. Everyone wants to live life like Italians, even if it’s just having an Aperol Spritz in Sweden’s afternoon sun.

After biking along much of Italy’s coastline, I get it. There is something special in the air that I can’t help but be inspired by, and whatever *that* is, it seems, for me, to be nestled into Italian people.

Sunset in Cefalu

It’s in the way Mario, a local farmer, stopped me on my bike to hand me two bags of figs and grapes after he saw me reaching on my tiptoes to pick some from a tree. It’s the way the local market man asks me endless questions in Italian and doesn’t let the fact that we don’t speak the same language stop him from conversing, or the way the roadside fruit vendor quickly hires me as his personal photographer (I was paid in grapes) and asks me to take his photo again and again. It’s also in the way the shopkeeper refuses to keep his shop open even just a minute longer if it encroaches on his siesta time. It’s in the way people see you and respond to you, even when it’s in the form of an angry “mano a bolsa.” I also want to take that feeling home with me, and I wonder if I should get a trinket to remind me how life feels the Italian way.

When I think about the highlight of my Viva Italia tour, I keep coming back to the people and the Italian way of life. Although the places we visited and the views we saw were incredible, it’s not them I will try to resurrect by pouring a generous amount of olive oil on my food, or taking a siesta once I’m back home in Kathmandu. I will do so in the hope that, in its own tiny way, it will let me live a little more like an Italian. And perhaps that is the best kind of souvenir. (But if I’m forced to pick one specific highlight, it would be Sardinia, and the whole Tyrrhenian Sea. I had some of the best swims of my life there)

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