From Ostiglia to Ferrara
30 June 2019
From Ostiglia to Ferrara, where I met a few people, a few stories, and even a poem
The start
Today I set off a little earlier and without a headwind, but I still did 80 km, the last of which were ugly — I could maybe have avoided them (but I didn’t figure it out).
By 8 I was already on the Revere bridge over the Po (dizziness, dizziness…) after which I headed onto the Destra Po cycle path. The route is pleasant — it’s very nice to look at the Po on the left and the micro embankment villages on the right (in the ugly backlit photo below, Bonizzo).
A day of encounters, and a poem
After a short time I cross paths with a cyclist a bit older than me, on a road/race bike. I overtake him because I’m keeping a faster pace, but he catches up and pulls alongside. He feels like a chat.
We tell each other a few things — he tells me he’s been living in Lugano for years but comes back here with his family to keep his roots. I tell him the reason for my trip; we talk about children. I say goodbye when we pass alongside one of these wonderful reclamation buildings that I stop to photograph. We wish each other well. A nice pleasant chat that we let go in the wind.
A few meters later I come across three more local cyclists, also a bit further on in years than me. I ask for directions about a detour; they launch into a thousand questions and a few good kilometers fly by. At a certain point we come across a long text written longitudinally along the road: they tell me it’s a very long poem written “by a drunk” (maybe it’s actually the most important contemporary poet). I photograph it on the fly but I don’t stop, because I like the company. The poem is long, very long.
The friendly cyclists leave me shortly after and stop for a coffee. I say goodbye and think about the beauty of meeting people you wouldn’t even look at while standing in line at the post office or on the street, and instead there, under the damned sun, on the Po embankment, dressed like idiots, we recognize a shared trait and we talk with that lightness which, yes, thank you, but really, because in this country tormented by alternating-day hardliners and supremely cunning exploiters of others’ pain, it seems there’s no more room for a smile, a hug, a hello, a good wish.
In the meantime I’ve reached Felonica, which presents itself as the town of onions, where in the bakery there’s always Tiròt (the local onion focaccia). I’m tempted, but to go down into town you have to make a little loop and then climb back up, and I wonder whether they bake Tiròt on Sundays too. Maybe yes, but I push on because Ferrara is far away.
Right. The three friends had pointed out to me a route starting from Bondeno to reach Ferrara in the shade and in less time than the classic cycle path. Let’s hope so — I continue on to Bondeno where, however, I decide to stop to catch my breath, have some water and a moment’s rest. And I find an evidently historic bar (Bar Olimpia Sport) where the situation is the following: outside, 4 old men are talking politics in an impossible-to-understand dialect. Inside, ten elderly men are tearing into each other at cards, shouting and drinking. Placid at the cash register, the Chinese owner running the bar. It’s an embittered but beautiful country (and never a smile from me, eh).
The path that wasn’t there
I get back on the road and start looking for this mythical shaded path that was supposed to take me to Ferrara on a bed of roses. It isn’t there. I don’t know who to ask — in the end I trust the track I have, thinking that if such a route exists, surely whoever prepared the track would have taken it into account. Fact is, either the route doesn’t exist or they didn’t take it into account. And I do the last 24 km to Ferrara under the beating sun and with NOTHING around me.
Icantdoit. No, icantdoit. Impossible, icantdoit. In the end, idoit — I don’t know with what strength of spirit, because my shoulders and legs were starting to give way.
I arrive at the gates of Ferrara, but to reach the center it took another 10 km. Finally I reach the Castle, and as I expected I get a hard slap: the memory of the splendid evening spent at the Teatro Comunale with Milena to see the wonderful Sufjan Stevens concert, the last time we had been in Ferrara. I am very tired and it’s hard.
But this is what the trip is for.