A grey sky is not a problem
I leave Bodio Lomnago just after ten. The sky is closed, heavy — that thick grey that in March doesn’t quite promise anything good but doesn’t really threaten either. The mountains across the lake are covered in snow halfway up. The air is cool and clean, with that smell of wet earth you never get in the city.
People who only ride in good weather miss half the best things.
A grey sky isn’t an obstacle — it’s a different kind of light. It softens hard contrasts, mutes the colours, turns the lake into something more serious and true. That day, Lake Maggiore looked like it was thinking about something important. And so was I.
The road that follows the lake
Past Ispra, the road starts talking. It’s not a fast ribbon, not a main road you burn through in fourth gear with your eyes fixed on the destination. It’s a narrow road that weaves in and out of villages, that sometimes loses sight of the lake only to give it back to you unexpectedly, more beautiful than before — like certain friends you haven’t seen in weeks, and when you do it’s as if no time has passed at all.
I ride through hamlets I don’t know by name but recognise by feel. Low houses, stone walls, a bar with the chairs still inside. March knows how to be quiet in a way that summer forgets. I slow down. Not because I have to — because I want to. Because this road asks you to, politely, and it would be rude not to listen.
The Royal Enfield is at home on this asphalt. Every rhythm, every vibration of the single cylinder, matches the slow pace of the villages I pass through. It’s not a bike that pushes — it’s a bike that accompanies. There’s a difference.
Caldè
Then there’s Caldè.
Caldè is small. So small that if you’re going too fast you won’t even see it. It’s a hamlet on the lake — a handful of houses, worn stone paving, two twisted trees leaning over the water as if they’re watching something the rest of us can’t see.
I always stop there. Every time.
I can’t quite explain what happens when I arrive at Caldè — I can only say that something loosens. Not physically. Inside. It’s as if the background noise you carry with you every day, the one you don’t even know you have, suddenly turns down. The lake in front, the snowy Alps beyond, the silence of a Sunday morning in March in a place that tourism hasn’t ruined yet.
I stop. I turn off the engine. I look.
Some places make you feel like you’re in the right place at the right moment. Caldè does that every time. It gives me views and feelings I’d carry anywhere — even on the days when the road isn’t there. Here I feel happy. Not a loud happiness — the quiet, full kind that doesn’t need to be photographed to exist.
Even if I photograph it anyway. 😊
Luino
From Caldè it’s on to Luino. And Luino is something else — it’s not a place I look at from the outside, it’s a place I carry inside.
I studied in Luino. I did my surveying diploma there — years that feel distant now but that in certain moments, a smell, a bend, the light on that lake, come back precise as if they were yesterday. I lived things there that you don’t forget. I met Marco.
Marco is from Luino. He’s one of those rare friends — you have one or two in a lifetime, if you’re lucky — that you’d call a brother without hesitation. I think about him every time I pass through here. I think about him with a smile, with that quiet gratitude you feel for the people who helped make you who you are.
Riding through Luino is a strange and beautiful thing. You’re present and distant at the same time. The lake is the same, the streets are the same, but you’re different — or maybe you’re more yourself than you were back then. I don’t know. I know that every time I like to stop for a moment, even if only with my eyes.
The Valcuvia and the way back
After Luino the road climbs. The Valcuvia is a sharp change of scene — you leave the lake, you enter a more sheltered, more domestic landscape. Cuvio, Orino, then the descent toward Lake Varese and back to Bodio Lomnago.
Eighty-eight kilometres in total.
Eighty-eight kilometres that don’t feel like too few but above all don’t feel like enough. I know this loop by heart and yet it surprises me every time. It changes with the light, with the seasons, with the mood you start with. Today it began grey and damp and dissolved into something calm, almost luminous — not outside, but inside
What stays
I have 88 kilometres in the wheels and I don’t want to go home, as always.
But it’s not melancholy — it’s the opposite. These rides make me love who I am. They make me understand what I want from a Sunday, from an afternoon, from a life. They remind me that slowness isn’t the absence of direction — it’s the most honest direction I know.
The bike isn’t the point. The bike is the tool that lets me be with myself without distractions, without notifications, without anyone’s voice telling me where I should be. Just me, the road, the lake, and that low hum of the engine that after a while you stop hearing because it’s become your own breathing.
You don’t always have to go far.
Sometimes eighty-eight kilometres is enough. A grey lake, a small hamlet you know by heart, and the thought of a friend who’s still there.
That’s more than enough.
