Italy fans can rejoice. The tour portal bicitalia.org provides a solid basis for planning cycle tours through Italy. Insufficient maps and a patchy cycle route network have made planning in this popular holiday destination difficult up to now. You had to painstakingly search for individual cycle routes on small tourism websites. The tour portal bicitalia.org provides an overview here. An interactive Open Street Map shows all the cycle routes across the boot. You can click directly on the routes and the exact name with kilometre information is displayed. For example, the long-distance cycle route Ciclopista del Sole BI-1, which runs from the Brenner Pass via Verona and Bologna to just before Naples. All tours can be downloaded as kml files. Unfortunately only in individual sections, which then have to be assembled into a track on the computer. In the portal, however, the track can be followed to the metre by zooming in.
The range of tours is divided into national sections of the Eurovelo routes, shorter regional routes and themed routes such as "In the footsteps of Dante Alighieri from Florence to Ravenna" and railway cycle routes.
1000 cyclist-friendly accommodations round off the portal's service. Simply enter a location and the nearby hostels are displayed on a map.
One small drawback: the website is currently only available in Italian.
www.bicitalia.org
Barbara Merz-Weigandt
Editor-in-Chief
