Castiglione – Pavarolo – Cordova – Baldissero – Rivodora – San Martino

Thirty kilometres and more than 1,300 metres of climbing, with hardly a flat stretch in between. The hills here never get high, so the climbing comes in short, steep pieces: up a spur, along its crest, down the other side, and up the next one.

October had already started on the woods. The oaks were dropping their leaves on the ridge paths, and in places the trail was only a faint line through them, which turned every root and stone underneath into a guess. Lower down the black locust was still green, and the bracken had gone the colour of rust.

Where the path cuts into the hillside, a bank shows what the hills are made of: rounded pebbles packed in sand, gravel laid down by water long before any of this was a hill. Further on, a narrow path runs beside a fence under tall conifers, soft with needles after all the stones.

From the last ridge the trees opened for a moment onto haze over the plain. Then back under the leaves, and down.