Why I Built Tour De Pasta
I have been cycling in the mountains of Italy for years now. If you follow cycling even casually, you will know that Italy is not short of spectacular terrain: the Dolomiti alone could keep you busy for a lifetime. But somewhere along the way, I realised that the rides I cared about most were getting lost in a sea of GPS files and social media posts.
Tour De Pasta started from a simple desire: I wanted a proper place to document my cycling adventures, with context, with stories, and with the kind of detail that makes a ride memorable long after the legs have recovered.
The Alpi and Dolomiti are the heart of this project. Climbs like the Gavia, the Stelvio and the Fedaia are the rides that got me hooked. There is something almost meditative about grinding up a 2000-metre pass at dawn, with the valley fog still settled below you.
But Tour De Pasta is not exclusively an alpine project. Some of my favourite rides have been in my native region of Piacenza and its Appennini, or in the mediterranean island of Crete which offers rugged and beautiful mountain climbs as well as pristine seaside locations.
The site is built to showcase all of my cycling adventures: the mountains are where I push hardest, but the flatlands are where I get "in the zone" and recharge my batteries after a long day of work.
I have structured the site around collections: think of them as curated ride journals rather than raw data dumps. A collection groups rides that share a theme: one of my summer vacations, long distance rides, or simply a set of routes I would recommend to anyone visiting a particular region.
Each ride has its own page with:
- Route details: distance, elevation, and key statistics
- A description that goes beyond the numbers: what the road was like, what I noticed, what surprised me
- Links to Strava so you can check more directly what route I took and maybe try it yourself!
- YouTube videos where I have captured footage from the ride.
There is also a climbs section that organises my mountain ascents by category: because if you are planning a trip to the Dolomites, you probably want to know which climbs I would prioritise and which ones I would skip. The data is provided by Climbfinder, and you can follow the links to that awesome site to get all the statistics you need.
I should mention that Tour De Pasta is also a technical project. The site is built with Next.js and runs on Cloudflare Workers, a stack I work with professionally and enjoy using. The admin interface lets me manage rides, collections, and blog posts without touching code, which means I am far more likely to actually keep the content updated rather than letting it stagnate.
Tour De Pasta is, obviously, a play on Tour de France. I wanted something that was unmistakably Italian, a bit playful, and easy to remember. Cycling in Italy has always been as much about the food as the riding, a proper rifugio lunch at the top of a climb is half the motivation for the ascent itself, although I usually keep my refueling sessions once I have completed my route and I am back at home.
This is the first post, so I will keep it short. My plan is to use this blog to share ride reports, route recommendations, and the occasional reflection on what cycling means to me. I am not trying to be a cycling influencer or build the next big platform. This is a personal project more than anything else.
I would love to hear from you if you cycle in Italy, or if you are planning a trip and want route suggestions. The mountains are big enough for all of us, and the pasta is better when it is shared.
Thanks for reading.