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Home > Bicycle Touring in Tuscany
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Bicycle Touring in Tuscany
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By David Cleveland
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 (4 Reviews)
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List Price: $21.95
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Our Price: $18.76 Eligible for FREE shipping. Details
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Availability:
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Publisher:
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Chainring Press
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Date:
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February 10, 2005 |
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Binding:
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Paperback
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Pages:
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327
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Bicycle Touring in Tuscany is a backroads guide to cycling in Italy. It provides everything you need to plan a tour of Tuscany, Umbria and the Marches: What to bring, where to go, how to transport your bike, how to ride away from the airport. It describes eight multi-day tours with detailed maps of every route. This is your guide to some of the most spectacular riding in the world.
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Customers' Reviews:
Add Your Own Review |
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Very Useful, September 10, 2009
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The first part of the book has some good advice on choosing a bike. Ultimately, I must agree with the author on avoiding rental bikes for long trips. I rented a very nice road bike in Rome and took the train North to Tuscany. Everything went smoothly until a pedal ripped off that was not properly installed. This guidebook (along with a pocket Italian-English dictionary) help me find a hotel in rural Italy. While the author does not list Hotels by name, he recommends which villages you can bother to look for them, which saved me some confusion. Also, the book is very thick for traveling and I photocopied the pages relevant to my trip before I left home.
All and all, this book has a lot of useful information but you will also need a good map (Michelin or better) and conversational Italian goes a long way.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
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Used this book for a month long tour in 2007, November 25, 2008
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A friend and I used this book and linked together several of the tours and covered much of Tuscany and well as a bit of Umbria and the Marches. We took a month and covered about 900 miles. We spent a lot of time off the bikes in Pisa, Florence, Anghiarri, Assisi and Siena. Overall the book was the core of our guidance. The routes were absolutely great. They kept us to less traveled roads as much as possible and provided a great mix of moderate to very difficult riding. It did seem though that the author had sat down at the end of each day to try and recall the previous ride. The detail and accuracy varied significantly from day to day, (perhaps related to how much wine he drank with dinner?). We also carried a Lonely Planet guide and Michelin maps. Our only major problem was the route from San Gimignano to Volterra. We missed a turn and wound up on the "shorter but much more difficult" route. No matter, we were in pretty good shape by then but it was still an exhausting ride. Yes, an update would be useful and the graphics could be better, but as a planning guide this works quite well. The Italian drivers are very aware of bikes and patient. Lodging was simplified by going to internet cafes and searching for rooms two or three days ahead. You need to be flexible, but that's bike touring anyway. We enjoyed an epic adventure and this book was instrumental in guiding us.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
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 very helpful book, June 22, 2006
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Just got back from a week long ride (#5) outlined in this book and was very happy with it (copied relevant pages only and took that with us vs. lugging the whole thing along, and color didn't matter as we were seeing it in real life). Really appreciated lots of little helpful hints, tips and directions - we knew if we'd gone too far or missed a turn etc, very detailed descriptions. We took our own map which is the best way to go. Lots of great hints on places to see - while we followed much of the route, we went off on some variations also - mainly to head to campgrounds (that are quite rare in the region!). Found ourselves reading into the hill rating/descriptions a bit much - we were gauging our expectations on what book said - and sometimes there was a difference in opinion here (some of his "bad" hills were fine to us, and vice versa) - just keep riding and enjoy!
Definitely worth the purchase - as long as you are prepared to cycle tour (ie. know what to expect) then biking in Tuscany is a fantastic vacation!
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
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 Tucany for whimps, June 20, 2006
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This book is a good starting point for who need the full treatment on how to bike tour in Europe - specifically Tuscany. It has a clever rating system using the movie system parallel, but seemed a bit generous since most of those easy G/PG rides became closer to the R/X ratings as the climbs continued up and up. The route profile and highlight table are great route planning guides.
An improvement would be to include better maps than the photocopied TCI 2002 version used. The map was a key feature to understanding the route, but generally lacked adequate clarity or detail. The Chianti wine consortium provides a cheap, detailed version of the wine producing areas which is great to use while in the Chianti region. Good maps are critical.
The book also needs a little color and more pictures. Even though it would require some rearrangement, putting the route profile on the same page as the route and providing closer relationship would help. Also, a section on how to read Italian route signs with a tie in to the map would be nice. The descriptions seemed a little dated - there are Bike & Bed signs on some of the hotels indicating that some sort of biker friendly lodging system in Italy exists.
I only used two of the routes described in the book. It was moderately helpful.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful
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