Picture taken by my friend Albert

The way there is fabulous: the lovely fishermen village of Durgerdam is just a stone-throw away from Amsterdam, yet it seems stuck centuries in the past. Then you follow the coastline all the way to the island… as you maybe remember from my previously failed attempt to reach it!

This time around I went there with my friend Bert, we cycled all the way to the eastern tip, where you can see this bad-ass, marvelous lighthouse.

The weather was quite nice, a little on the cold side but the wind was peaceful. We completed the tour of the island, which still boosts a lot of traditional cute wooden houses.

The little harbor is on the western side of the island: this is where ferries loaded with tourists dock while they take coffee & pictures. We agreed that a coffee with appeltaart (apple cake) was the best way to celebrate our insular achievement before heading back to Amsterdam!

…with such an introduction, you’re probably now expecting a super famous thing like the Mona Lisa. Instead, I’ll show you the thing that I remember the most vividly: a casual ceiling. I was walking through the rooms, when I raised my eyes and saw this painting.

This is the ancient Greek story of Icarus, the son of Daedalus, who flew too close to the Sun. Our lovely star melted Icarus’ wax wings, causing him to drown in the sea and that specific sea to be named afer him.

I stared at the piece for 30 minutes, and concluded that it’d be worth alone the visit to the museum. It is SO beautiful. I went home convinced that I had spotted some random, unknown ceiling masterpiece, but then found out that it gets the recognition it deserves: it was painted by Merry-Joseph Blondel in 1819.

Hey all, welcome to the second instalment of the Valparaiso Trilogy! There are a zillion dogs in Valparaiso. They have no official owner, but the adjective “stray” doesn’t fully belong here either, as one entity cares for them: the entire community. People love dogs and take care of their basic needs. Restaurants feed them with their leftovers, private citizens occasionally take them home for a good brush.

For good or bad, the four-legged population of Valparaiso is one of the city’s distinctive traits. They are such an institution that some kind of dog art pops out occasionally along the streets of the hills hoods.

Dogs can be found everywhere, mostly busy in their peaceful sleep; they don’t seem to be a danger for anybody. They don’t pay much attention to the people around and the feeling is definitely mutual.

(IMPORTANT NOTICE: These dogs are not dead, they are only sleeping. NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED DURING THE PRODUCTION OF THIS POST.)

They generally prefer the sun, but they opt for the shadow when the wind stops blowing.

You will even see them around the the last place you’d allow them to be: the food market. But then again, most of them look acceptably clean and healthy.

Their lifestyle seems quite lonesome, but sometimes they play around together.

You might at this point wonder why the city hasn’t taken action against all this. I personally don’t know. I believe that the majority of people like and do care about them, but I have definitely heard strong complaining. Shop owners must be a bit pissed off by these doorstep sunbathers. The streets are covered in poop and suspicious stains are on almost every wall, which heavily affects the town’s general smell. Some of the dogs might be carrier of diseases, and a few of them barks at cars, which is loud and annoying. Plus when walking home at night the dogs look a lot less friendly than during the day. I once happened to find one sleeping on the building’s doorstep and was quite intimidated. Fortuntately he simply woke up and gently walked away.

Around the web you’ll find a lot of other colorful and funny posts!

The next chapter will conclude the Valparaiso trinity! What will be the next and last topic? Try to guess it in the comments and hasta luego!

This picture was taken as I entered Las Vegas on a Greyhound bus on an August night. It was 5pm, I was coming from Flagstaff, Arizona. The bus had briefly stopped in a squallid McDonald around 2am. I had slept very little during the journey, nonetheless I was awake in excitement as we entereed into town. I was going to spend 19 more sleepless hours in Sin City and I knew it. Despite the early hour, the city wasn’t sleeping either.

I left at 8am in the morning, it was still darkish. Soon I was cycling down the Amstel river, the light was dim and the air was crisp.

The first town I reached is Ouderkerk: it was cold but clear and the sun was on the rise. A gorgeous day!

Around 9:15am I reached Nes aan de Amstel, a few kilometers further. It really was a beautiful morning. The following picture is framed and hung in my house.

After Uithoorn, a few wrong choices and some road-blocks took me off the right course. I ended up in Oudewater, a sleepy town preceded by a fantastic windy road along a canal. The wind was quite strong and I got there pretty exhausted. I had a couple of sandwiches so I stopped to devour one, on that little bench in front of a café.

After lunch I went in and sat for a coffee. I didn’t know that it would turn out to be the funniest bit of the journey. I ordered a cappuccino; the aged lady promptly brought me an espresso and a creamer cup. “That’s how we do it here”, she explained with a big smile.
It was as early as noon, but a couple of old friends were already drinking beer and laughing their Sunday away. Next to them, and old farmer with impressive gnarled hands. They started to chat to me in Dutch and to awake in growing interest as I answered through: “You cycled from Amsterdam?? You are Italian?? You come from Rome?? What does AS in front of ‘AS Roma’ means??”

(They really asked the last one.)

At some point, I looked outside through the window and I almost got a heart attack: my bike was gone. Oh my God!!
No panic: the bar lady had seen the rain starting to fall and she’d gone outside to pick my bike and take it inside.

Sometimes the most unexpected places hold the most unexpected surprises.
After asking some final directions I took on my bike again, destination Gouda. I’ve already blogged so much about Gouda.

As I cycled, it started snowing, making my last 13 kilometers long and cold, but still warm from the little entr’acte of earlier. A few hours later I was eating home-made hamburgers at my friends’ place. At night, another friend took me and my bike back to Rotterdam in his car. As history wants it, such a great ride couldn’t be anything but a good omen for the coming cycling year!

I came to the conclusion that this blog has to be about what I like and what passionates me about writing and sharing. There would be a lot of other reasons for blogging, here’s a few. If you read this linked post, it ultimately comes down to the fact that blogging is a lot of work, especially if you want it to be financially successful. Beside writing, you need to be active on all social media, connect and expand your network. This all can be quite tedious and dreadfully “routinish”, which ultimately compromises the fun one has with the blog.
I believe many bloggers come to this struggle at some stage, especially the successful ones. I decided to write when & about what I feel like. Shall pocket money come from it, then all the better.

So well, last year a visited quite a few impressive museums. The older I grow, the more I appreciate them, the more I am touched by incredible art and its stories, the more I regret having had shit art teachers throughout my education. I felt like posting about some of the highlights I found, so here we go.

This next one is “Armored Train in Action”, by the Italian futurist Gino Severini, painted in 1915.

In August 1914, as World War I broke out, the Futurists planned public demonstrations in support of Italian participation. Severini was based in Paris (France and Italy were allied at the beginning of the war [1]), and included symbols that evoke the trappings of modern warfare, such as cannons, flags and smokestacks. The Futurists were eager to break attachments to the past, and war, they felt, was an opportunity for an historical “tabula rasa”, a chance to create a new world order.

We all know how wrong they were. War doesn’t work like this–let alone modern warfare. What we can admire here is not its dreadful message but how it was conveyed, and what a powerful insight this is about their ideas. The next painting is “Virtual Synthesis of the Idea – War”, painted in 1914 by the same artist. Both paintings are exposed at the MoMA in New York.

[1] Note: my mum specifies that Italy and France were allied also at the END of the First World War. Thanks Mom!

Some time ago, I was cycling back home in Amsterdam, and I decided to take a slight detour to pass somewhere else for a change. As I approached the tunnel below the railroad, I saw a lot of unusual activity there. It turns out that the people from the nearby squat Op de Valreep had organized a day to decorate the tunnel mentioned above.
After painting the wall in a light-blue, neutral color, each street-artist got a section of it and began his work. Colors, beer and orange juice the most important tools.

The place wasn’t the best for pictures as the light was highly variable in a tunnel, yet some came out quite nicely. Here below is a health-aware street artist wearing a gas mask as he sprays. Breathing in the tunnel was indeed quite hampered.

I left after a while and rode into town to enjoy the sun with my sister and two visiting cousins. Upon coming back at night, I headed back to the tunnel to see how things were going. Everybody had left and the graffiti were complete, some of them still drying.

I felt lucky as I could enjoy this new art at its shiniest point, before it’d share much of its brightness with the unforginving Time. Here are some of the works. More will follow one day.

For some interesting pictures around the squat, give a look to this Flickr gallery.

The cycling season 2013 has officially begun! Yesterday I went for the first long ride of the year, and what a ride it has been! Here below the map from bikemap.net — it’s quite funny to follow the kilometers via the altitude graph. Shouldn’t it be visible on email / feed reader, the post is online here.

Around 9am I took the train from Amsterdam to Woerden, a town close to Utrecht, where I spent an hour with a friend before starting the actual ride. My destination was Rotterdam, to attend the birthday party of another friend that same night. I was quite well dressed: 5 layers on top (including a plastic bag between my t-shirt and the first fleece), long johns below my cycling pants, three pairs of gloves and 2 socks. No rain was in sight, so my only enemies were the -2 degrees. Here’s how I looked like when I reached Oudewater.

Cycling fast warms you up, and I felt good, except for one detail: my feet were freezing. I almost lost sensitivity there! I stopped for lunch in Schoonhoven, roughly halfway, where I contently realized that I still had feet. While there I also found out another dramatically leaning chuch, like the one in Delft! Such findings are the tastiest bit of my rides, but obviously Dutch architects haven’t played enough Lego when they were kids.

The town was my point of contact with the companion I was looking for: the river Rhine. Or better, one of his final branches before meeting the North Sea. I followed it all the way to Rotterdam. Majestic, powerful yet calm, slow yet unstoppable. The 35 kilometers that I cycled next to it felt somehow a lot warmer than the previous ones.

Just as it happened with Paris, the entrance in Rotterdam was not the nicest one. The industrial areas around it are quite grey and sad. I even cycled next to a building where I did two job interviews some time back. I silently thanked God for having declined both offers and cycled ahead.
And then finally I entered the Rotterdam I love and enjoyed its “waterline”, impressive bridges and artificial islands. Before going to the party and enjoying my friend’s hot rain shower, I had to salute what remains to me the most special spot in town. If the first ride of the year was this beautiful, I can’t wait for the rest!

This is the route we followed. A total of about 750 km, spread over ten days of cycling.

1. THE NETHERLANDS

The beginning is always exciting. I rode alone from Amsterdam to Delft, where I met my touring parner, Claudio. He’d flown to Rotterdam on the same day, and the next day we headed south through the Zealand region. Yep, the one that New Zealand was named after. The most exciting part was indeed to cross the immense dykes that reclaimed land from the sea.

Great fun was also to board our bikes on a few ferries here and there, notably the one from Vlissingen to the last part of the Netherlands. It took us about 4 fantastic days to reach the border with Belgium, while crossing lovely villages and overlooking the vast, wind-ridden Southern Dutch shores.

2. BELGIUM

We spent our first night and a rest day in the fabulous Ghent and then we followed the river Schelde all the way down to France, which is actually one of the stretches we enjoyed the most. We didn’t like Belgian roads very much, often composed by huge concrete blocks planted next to each other, and their cycling infrastructure is very pale compared to the Dutch one.

3. FRANCE

The first towns that welcomed us in France were Roubaix and Lille, where I used to live back in 2004! Entering Lille again triggered an avalanche of memories and the compulsive need of checking back in some of my most important spots at the time. One of the first thing I needed was a picture with the mighty Leon Trulin. We never really learned about him but we tipsily hugged him many, many times.

Weather-wise, France was slightly nicer than the previous two countries, but we also had the absolute worst day. Admittedly I look more like a samurai than a holiday biker, but well, shit happens and rain too.

Despite the excess water, cycling through France has been the best part of it all. The bicycle infrastructure is almost non-existant, but we found it to be better like this than the poorly implemented Belgian one. Here we strolled happily along fantastic countryside roads with zero traffic on it, which was like having a huge bike lane all for us. The gentle hills and tiny villages made for an unbeatable setting and a more varied cycling pattern than the pancake flat Netherlands. We’re almost there.

The entrance into Paris was not as you’d expect. For how much we love the image of pedalling through the Champs-Élysées at the end of the Tour de France, Paris issue is the surrounding areas. Before reaching the eternal city centre, you need to cut through 40 kilometers of suburbs. We rode through a rather horrible industrial zone: nasty roads, traffic and noise. But once inside Paris… wow, what a breathtaking city! Claudio and I parted ways, and I enjoyed one week in the ville lumière, which was amazing. After two days though, I already wanted to get lost in countryside again with my bike.

This post was made possible by the generosity of Flighthub: cheap flights to Paris