A Gran Day Out, Part One

Amateur racing, Italian style, in the picture-perfect Tuscan landscape

The USA Cycling Women’s National Racing Calendar has a longish break from the end of March to the beginning of May, with just two days of racing in between. Lucky for me, an amazing invitation came at just that time. My husband and I were invited by Marco (a friend of his at the bike shop where he works) to go to Tuscany and race in the Max Lelli Gran Fondo on April fifteenth. Marco’s a friend of Max Lelli, a former pro rider who’s now retired and running this huge amateur bike race (among other business ventures) and tending a budding political career.

The fact that neither my husband nor I had ever been to Italy clinched what was essentially the easiest decision I ever made—to escape from gloomy, forty degree Fahrenheit temperatures in late-winter New Jersey, and go to Tuscany in the springtime. We would ride our bikes, drink great wine, and eat the famously delicious food of Italy’s most romantic and raved-about region. No problem. Count us in. Pronto!

That’s how we found ourselves disembarking at Rome’s Fuimicino airport at eight a.m., a little faded from airplane air and lack of sleep, but otherwise brighter-eyed and bushier-tailed from excitement than I would have thought possible after a Transatlantic red-eye flight. As soon as we had joined the line for customs, we witnessed a scene so stereotypically Italian that I wondered half-seriously if it had been staged for the tourists’ entertainment. A customs agent with dark hair and a mustache was arguing with a passenger (presumably Italian). They shouted at each other, gesticulating in that quintessentially Italian way. It crossed my mind that if someone shouted with even a fraction of that degree of passion and volume at a U.S. customs agent, handcuffs and more scary hardware might soon appear. However, at the Roman airport, the argument went on for ten minutes, unabated, as the other agents stamped passports in a bored way and the foreign passengers waiting in line looked on with a mix of amusement and anxiety. Although I’d spent the plane ride studying Italian phrases, I couldn’t understand a word of what was going on, which made it seem even funnier.