When I was a lad, I used to hate the texture of melted cheese. I also couldn’t stand Latin American music, and I didn’t see myself ever enjoying a beach holiday. Fast forward a bunch of decades and I’d eat baked camembert any day ending with -y, I often listen to Colombian Cumbias – I’m listening to Carmelo Torres & Los Toscos as I type this very post – and, as this blog testifies, I’ve grown partial to a swim in the warm waters of the Japanese tropics.

Life is all about change and the most important source of it is, I believe, your own self. One of the most precious pearls of wisdom I’ve ever received is that I shouldn’t spend all my life set in my ways. Trying something new - or checking if a long-held belief still holds true - always pays off.

I was born in that corner of North-West Italy where the flatlands of the Po valley crash into the Alps. It’s a clear-cut dichotomy: now you’re somewhere as flat as a ruler, corn fields and rice paddies, and the next everything is at an angle of 30 degrees. Sometimes sharper. My hometown, Biella, lies at the juncture of that geographical divide. It might not be one for the guidebooks, Biella, but if it’s got one thing going for it that’s the mountains: a giant arc of granite, cool in the summer and majestic after a snowfall.

Compared with the Alps, the flatlands are a lot less interesting. La Bassa, as we call it, has always been for me a terra nullius. A land blighted by horrible climate – foggy in winter, mosquitoes in the summer, mud inbetween – and not much else. Passing through the villages of la Bassa, the thought that would cross my mind more often would be “Thank God I wasn’t born here”. That land had no redeeming features, I always thought.

Today, however, I decided to put that belief to the test.

The winter night was passing the baton to a day of clear, yet bitterly cold, brilliance. The sky to the East was glowing with the ambers of the new day but the thermometer of a pharmacy flashed -4C. I accelerated my cadence in the hope of generating more heat. The first moments of a bike ride in winter are always the hardest.

I’d brought my bicycle along during a visit and, in a break with the past, I opted to head south, towards la Bassa, rather than climbing higher and higher into the mountains: my reconsideration of the lowlands was to be carried out by pedalling.

The linear ridge of a moraine called La Serra rose up to close the perspective to the West. La Serra was all that remained of an enormous glacier that covered these lands during the last Ice Age; as the climate warmed, the snows receded and revealed a long hill, soon to be covered by thick woods, bordered by a torrent, which my forefathers came to call Elvo. I hadn’t returned to these lands, to these dirt tracks, since middle school. Back then my classmates and I would be dragged here to look at the traces left by Roman gold prospectors who scoured the alluvial plains for gold. No one seemingly ever found anything, which was pretty much on par with what we, bored stiff, thought of the place.

Today, though, things were different. I was pedalling on a beautiful dirt track; a track that, I could swear, seemed to have been designed precisely to be ridden fast. A perfect series of quick bends, a smattering of ups and downs, and a grand finale with a long straight smoothened to perfection. Cherry on top, three deer jumped out of the ferns and, in a moment, disappeared in an oak grove.  

Soon my itinerary left the woods and led me back onto tarmac, on that orderly grid of roads descending from the hills to the vast expanse of the lowlands: Cavaglià, Santhià, Carisio, San Germano Vercellese. Grey, drab villages of houses huddled together like tiny islands in a sea of rice paddies; exactly the kind of place I dreaded.

Time hadn’t made much improvement to any of those hamlets, but what lay behind them was pure, unaltered, weapons-grade fun. Dozens of gravel roads criss-crossed the countryside, connecting field to field, providing maintenance access to the motorway, high-speed train line, solar farms and so on. Sometimes the surface was hardpack, still frozen by the cold night, and I’d cruise along with the least amount of effort. Then I’d tackle a 90-degree bend and the road would’ve been churned into a quagmire by a tractor. My 45mm-wide tires would lose traction in the wet clay and I – still clipped in – would slo-mo fall into the mud to the choir of derisive howls from the guard dogs that, inevitably, appeared exactly in that moment.

I waved at farmers on their tractors, maintenance workers and the occasional trail runner, and they all waved back. A pilgrim walking on the ancient Via Francigena smiled as we crossed paths. A lady gave me her spot at a supermarket check-out on account of me having only a couple of bananas and a pizza slice. A chicken farmer apologised for the state of his road, and a lady took ample care of ensuring that her dogs remained indoors as I passed. All the stereotypes I had of this land and of its inhabitants lay shattered in ruins as I started the return leg of the journey.

It wouldn’t be a gravel ride without some, as they call it, ‘type-two fun’ and some misadventures. First came the realisation of being on the wrong side of an irrigation ditch, then the fording of said ditch (think of climbing in and out of a trench, carrying a bike, in cycling shoes). Finally, I couldn’t go without a close encounter with Johnny Law.

La Baraggia is a corner of savannah in northern Italy. Red earth, tall grass, distant trees: wild, untamed, totally unlike anything around it. Growing up, it was our playground: this is where we went riding bikes or, once we got our licences, rallying with my friend’s 1996 Citroën AX. Sadly, the same reasons why la Baraggia is popular with us made it appealing to the army too.

Half of it is reserved for military uses, with the understanding that, when the boys in camouflage aren’t around, us civilians can access the area. And so I did: I rolled through the main access point, found it totally open and devoid of any sign of military activity, and started riding on the sweet, beautiful gravel… until a soldier jumped out of a bush and, with the friendliness that is typical of Italian officials, announced that I was trespassing on military grounds and that the Carabinieri would be summoned.

Suitably mollified by my apologies, he relented and shooed me back whence I’d come from. As I left, I heard something about exercises, and live fire. I shrugged – here’s another little man with a clipboard, I muttered under my breath, and circumnavigated the obstacle.

The red flags were the first sign that, perhaps, something was afoot. Then sentries blocking all the trails that people who didn’t want to break into a military base would normally use. Then the cacophony of live rounds being fired, and lots of it. The crackling of machine guns and the thumping of something a lot heavier. Had that soldier not stopped me, I’d have offered a Lycra-clad moving target for his colleagues. That’s why, I guess, women tend to live longer than men:  they aren’t as stupid.

By then it was getting late, but I was on the home stretch. Back on tarmac for the last time, I followed a long, straight road that led up, towards the mountains. At some point I realised that the railway tracks were just to my right; back in the day, this was my way back home from university. Sat by the window, I’d be looking ahead, towards the mountain, glad to be leaving the nothingness of the flats behind. Today, though, I knew there was beauty, fun and kindness to be found in those lands.  

So much so that, once I’d washed all the mud off my bike, I messaged a friend to see if he wanted to tag along for another go that coming weekend. I’d heard the military exercises would be over by then.