I arrived first.
Of course. I was the one who had chosen the route for our Royal Enfield motorcycle rally, booked the restaurant, sent the messages, counted the sign-ups all the way up to fifty-four. I was the one who had slept with one eye open thinking about the rain that might come and instead hadn’t come. I arrived first at the Motormania parking lot, switched off the bike, and waited.
Then the others arrived.
First one, then three together, then a group of six, then more. The parking lot filled with sounds — engines shutting off, side stands opening and touching the asphalt, helmets dangling from mirrors. Voices calling each other by name, hands shaking hands, laughter overlapping. Fifty-four people who’d come for a Royal Enfield motorcycle rally, who would never have ended up in the same place without a bike beneath their feet.
When we set off, I was at the front.
I hadn’t planned it as a gesture. It came naturally — I’m the ride leader, I know the route, I go in front. But the moment I took the first road and heard the noise multiplying behind me, I understood that position carried a different weight than I’d thought. Not the weight of responsibility. Something lighter. Like holding the end of a string with many good things tied to the other end.
I kept a slow pace. Not just out of caution, though that too, but mostly because I wanted them to last — the curves, the woods, the lake. I wanted us to reach Ranco with everything still ahead of us.
Bar Il Molo sits set back about twenty meters from the shore, in a small green park a few meters above the water, along the lakefront, facing the pier where the ferries leave. Lake Maggiore that morning was still and glossy, and the motorcycles parked along the road looked as if they’d always been there. Coffee, a few jokes, time to watch the water without saying anything in particular. Then we set off again.
After Ranco the road follows the lake for a few more kilometers. Every curve is a picture — water that opens, closes, comes back. Views that change before you have time to take them in.
The stretch toward Roggiano isn’t in the navigator of anyone looking for the fastest route.
It climbs through the woods in a sequence of tight curves that never seem to end, where branches close in overhead and the light comes in flashes as if the sun were deciding whether to take part or not. On that stretch you have no choice but to ride single file. There’s no room for anything else. And in single file, one behind the other, with the road setting the pace and the woods stripping away distractions, something strange happens.
You stop being fifty-four people.
You become one thing in motion. A slow snake with an orange head and a body that follows, curve after curve, without accelerating without braking, in the rhythm of that climb that seems designed to do exactly this — strip away everything else and leave only the movement.
We reached Fornaci di Cunardo with hunger on us and the sound of motorcycles in the darkness of our eyes.
La Vecchia Cunardo had set the table for fifty-four. Long tables, wine already poured, the sound of chairs being pulled out and people sitting wherever they happened to land, beside whoever they happened to land beside. That’s when I looked, for the first time, at the whole table with calm.
There was a doctor seated next to a delivery driver. There was a university student laughing with a retiree. There was a teacher explaining something to a factory worker and the factory worker listening as if it were the most natural thing in the world. No one had asked anyone what they did for a living. No one had taken stock of who was more or less of anything.
The motorcycle had already done its work before we even sat down.
Watching them, all with the same look of someone who’s just done something good and knows it, I felt something it took me a while to name correctly. It wasn’t pride for the ride I’d organized. It wasn’t satisfaction for the logistics that had worked, for the right restaurant, for a route without hiccups.
It was something else.
It was the joy of having given away something I hadn’t made. I’d only made the frame — the route, the booking, the date of the Royal Enfield motorcycle rally. The content they had made themselves, all of them, simply by getting on their bikes. The happiness on those faces around the table wasn’t mine. It was theirs, and it was mine at the same moment, and it was no one’s in particular, and it was everyone’s together.
That’s the thing right there, that feeling impossible to explain any other way, that the motorcycle knows how to do and almost nothing else knows how to do.
In the afternoon we descended toward Lake Lugano. Lavena Ponte Tresa, Brusimpiano, Porto Ceresio — three names that sound like a nursery rhyme and are instead three pieces of a shoreline that walks beside you without asking anything in return. Then Brinzio, the green, the end of a Royal Enfield motorcycle rally that always comes too soon when the ride has been the right one.
I rode back to Buguggiate with the others, said goodbye to everyone, waited for the parking lot to empty out slowly the same way it had filled up.
I was the last to leave.
Of course.
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