Bike tours in Italy

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Biking around Italy, on your own or with a bicycle tour

A trip with Bike Tours Direct gets you to tiny hilltowns big bus tours skip.
A trip with a company like Bike Tours Direct gets you to tiny hilltowns the big bus tours skip.Cycling is the best way to see Italy at your own pace.

D.I.Y. Italy by bike: Transporting and renting bicycles in Italy

You can rent bikes at private agencies in just about any city or town (for examples, here are lists of local rental outfits in Rome and Florence).

Avid cyclists who plan to tour a whole region by bike, however, will probably want to bring their own bicycle. Some airlines charge extra to bring a bike; many count it as one of your pieces of checked luggage. Either way, your bicycle must be properly boxed—remove the pedals and front wheel; buy the box at a bike shop or the airport for around $10.

You can bring your bike onto Italian trains, but you have to buy a special "bici" supplement, which costs €3.50 and is good for 24 hours from the time you stamp it before boarding the train (if you're going on an international train, the price is €12). Oddly, if you carry the bike in its own bag or box, you can take it on board for free.

Neophytes might want to try a short trip at home first to learn the basics and figure out the essential gear. Perhaps the best way to do it the first time is to hook up with a cycling tour:

Bike tour companies and resources

You can find a long list of bike tour companies around the world at www.bikeleague.org, but they merely list them in alphabetical order, so you'll have to click and click to figure out which ones run tours to Italy.

iExplore Italy biking trips 2010
Italy Active—Tuscany (6 days)
Cycle Through Siena & Chianti (8 days)
Dolomites to Venice Ride (8 days)
Tuscany Singletrack (8 days)
Puglia: Cycle The Heel Of Italy (8 days)
Cycling Venice And Veneto (8 days)
iExplore (www.iExplore.com) is the number one–ranked website for adventure and experiential travel—and it provides the adventure tour booking engine for everyone from Expedia to the Travel Channel to Frommer's and Lonely Planet's websites. (Given its excellent catalog, it's also a ReidsItaly.com partner.) The box on the right highlights the Italy biking trips from the 2010 catalog. They also do walking, hiking, snowsport, and more general tours.

RealAdventures tour companies
Bike Tours Direct (all over Italy)
Bike Riders (all over)
Bike Riders Tours (all over)
Radonee (Tuscany)
Moutain Bike (Umbria)
Path (Apulia, Campania, Basilicata)
Apulia by Bike (Apulia)
Freeride Mountain Bike Holidays (Urbino/Apennines)
Ichnusabike (Sardinia)
Adventure aggregator RealAdventures (www.realadventures.com) canvases some of the best bike tour outfits out there (along with other adventurous trips), from major international outfits (like BikeToursDirect and Radonee) to local operators in Apulia, Sardegna, Tuscany, and elsewhere. Again, the box on the right provides direct linsk to each program offered in 2010.

A few other favorites I'll single out are Italy specialist Ciclismo Classico (www.ciclismoclassico.com) and Bike Tours Direct (www.biketoursdirect.com), represented by RealAdventures, above, and a sort of middleman that can hook you up with smaller, local bike tour outfits, which are often much cheaper than the big international agencies and tour companies.

You can also go directly to the bike tours section of InfoHub (www.infohub.com) which lists more than 40 cycle tours all across Italy.

When you want just a day of biking, not a whole tour

Even if you don't want to bike from town to town through the countryside, you may be happy to spend a morning tooling around Bologna the city with an experienced guide, or taking a day-long jaunt in the Tuscan countryside, past a medieval monastery and the Etruscan village of Fiesole before coasting back down into Florence.

You can pick up brochures on bike tours at local tourism offices in Italy. For most bike tours, you must reserve in advance, and rates can range anywhere from $20 to $150 for a day (depending if lunch is invovled).

ReidsItaly.com has partnered with Viator, which provides a variety of bike (and Segway) tours you can sign up for ahead of time (there are direct links to a few in the last paragraph). Here are some of their guided trips in major Italian destinations:

Bike tours