bikepacking across THE italian
NORTH APENNINES

Strade Montane (Mountain Roads in Italian) is a cycling project which aim to discover the Apennine area through the paths, gravel and secondary roads that run through the Italian mountains between the two regions of Emilia and Tuscany.

Strade montane
vol. iI

Trails from the second volume of Strade Montane. Three gravel routes and one exclusively for mtb on the early Bolognese Apennines, going up the war front of the Gothic Line.

Routes

146km with a positive elevation gain of no less than 3,960 meters are the numbers of Encore, a mountain bike loop trail that runs through the most significant sites of the Gothic Line in the Bolognese Apennines. Here we will cross the major…

Read more

“Liver and onions” sounds strange, but here it is a household name. Not so much because of a supposedly typical local dish, but because in October ’44 Livergnano must have sounded like an all-too-complicated name to the American battalions, who had to resort…

Read more

The Jump Off is a 90km route that starts in Bologna and climbs the ridges drawn by three streams: Samoggia, Lavino and the smaller Venola. The Jump Off is primarily about the military operation in this sector of the Gothic Line, which took…

Read more

IMG_0740
Lost Roads

CAVARZANO PASS

All along the ridge from the top of Cavarzano Pass onward is a fabulous dirt road, with only a few gently sloping sections and surrounded by the surrounding wooded heights. We are still on one of the many routes used in the past to connect two regions if not quite two states a handful of centuries ago.