Castiglione Torinese – Colle della Maddalena

Forty-six and a half kilometres and 1,128 metres of climbing on the trail bike, to the highest point of the Turin hill and back, on a hazy day at the end of September.

The first stretch is flat: along the Po on the embankment of the Cimena canal, a hydroelectric channel that has drawn water from the river since the 1930s, through San Mauro and into the Meisino. It is a nature reserve inside the city, where the Stura joins the Po, and on the Isolone Bertolla grey herons have nested in the poplars since 1986, one of the very few heron colonies in a European city.

From the river the road turns up into the hill, through Tetti Bertoglio and Tetti Rocco, more than 300 metres in a few kilometres, and out onto the Via dei Colli, the ridge road towards Pino. Wherever it can, the route leaves the tarmac for the paths beside it: narrow strips of gravel and grass marked by wooden posts, and short cuts into the woods, where the first leaves were already down.

Past Cento Croci the climb goes on to the Eremo, the hermitage that Duke Charles Emmanuel I vowed to build during the plague of 1599 and founded in 1602; Camaldolese monks lived there until the Piedmontese hermitages were suppressed in 1801. Above it is the top of the day, the Colle della Maddalena at about 712 metres. From the meadows under the summit Turin lay flat and grey in the haze, with the green of the hill in front of it.

The way back follows the ridge again, past Pietra del Gallo and along the Via dei Colli, before the long descent off the hill.