Fiumicino Airport– Rome: 35 km

It’s pretty funny how the distance of a couple of months of cycling can be covered in just a few hours on a plane. The latter form of transport is in every single sense worse however. At the airport I’m told I might not be able to enter Italy at all because Turkey is on some sort of COVID banned countries list. Anxiously I call the embassy. Their answer is somewhat reassuring but leaves a lot of space for doubt still. Fingers crossed I continue my very delayed journey. The flight in Antalya is leaves hours later due to a storm and I thus miss my connecting flight in Istanbul. The airline puts us in a hotel (where I have the worst food of this trip) far from both the city and the airport and after a broken night I finally arrive in Italy. I assemble my bike and ride into the city.

After the Turkish snow the 15 degrees here feel like a warm blanket. Like summer almost. Rome is a city that drowns in an abundance of beauty. Every corner is lined with sculptures and family shields, every balcony an artwork, every tower a monument and every church a landmark. It’s a big difference with Turkey where everything seems more improvised, less regulated, louder, more alive somehow. More now, less captive to its own history.

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The two days I walk and ride around Rome melancholically. I miss Turkey. More than Turkey I miss the idea of covering Asia by bike. Having said goodbye to that plan feels like losing a friend who’s been with me every single day since the I started this journey about six months ago. Visions of riding through exotic deserts and distant beaches are fading away in my mind. Acceptance is seeping in, I can feel it slowly but surely.

I fell in love here once. Quite honestly I was halfway there already, but here in Rome in came into full florican. Unexpectedly I remember some of the streets and terraces we held hands once, in that new and naïve young stage of love. We hopped around the monuments like teenagers, happy we were in Rome, even happier we were falling for each other. They’re warm memories. It fills me with an affectionate nostalgia whenever they suddenly come back here and there. This time I almost fall in love again. I’ve met Eleonora here and from the moment we meet we spend two full days together. We both know it will only last for now, but we make the most of it. She’s smart and funny, and with her heels, her implacable woolen coat and green leather handbag she’s the definition of I think of as Italian chic. She has this thing for water; loves sailing and diving. She shows me the city, it’s markets and its food. When we’re not walking, she drives me around in her beaten up tiny Peugeot. It feels like living a cliché as we slowly walk around in the beauty of this town, while the sun is setting behind the Vatican and smells of pizza and pasta ooze from the windows of the restaurants and the glasses tinkle from the terraces. But the traveler’s curse is that they’re always either arriving or leaving. And so do I. I set out the next day into the Tuscan hills.