Casalmaggiore

May 25, 2023

We open the door of our apartment building this morning and can barely get out with the bikes because the street is clogged with vendor stands and shoppers. It’s market day! We have to push our bikes through the first six blocks on our way out of town until we finally escape the pedestrian zone because the crowds are too dense to bike through.

Piazza della Erbe has a different character this morning.

It’s another brilliantly sunny day today, something we haven’t quite mentally adjusted to. We’re still in the frame of mind of expecting to have to dodge the rain, but in fact the weather has been fair and warm ever since we arrived in Verona five days ago. There’s still plenty of water in the system though, as a pair of bikers warn us on our way out of town, alerting us to the large puddle flooding the trail just ahead.

Not bad, as long as we’re careful not to slip down the slope into the lake.

Our destination today is Casalmaggiore, a riverside town on the north bank of the Po that splits the distance between Mantua and Cremona. We’re not particularly interested in seeing Casalmaggiore itself, but even a flat 65 miles is more than we want to tackle in one bite any more. The previous time we biked from Mantua to Cremona we split the distance at Brescello (Don Camillo’s town) but picked Casalmaggiore this time for the sake of variety.

The ride is flat nearly the entire way, which doesn’t mean it’s without interest or surprises. Perhaps the biggest surprise is how much more time we’re spending on unpaved surfaces than RideWithGPS warned us of. It slows us down and for better or worse adds interest to what might otherwise have been a pretty monotonous ride. One big plus for me was to finally see a purple heron, a bird I’ve had my eye out for ever since I learned that they were a thing - I’ve probably seen them in the past and just assumed they were a darker grey heron. For Rachael, a highlight was the nutria that suddenly surfaced in a narrow channel right next to her and kept her company while she was pushing her way through some pea gravel.

And there was the cat. It’s always nice when one seeks you out for attention, in this case walking up when we were stopped for some reason to sniff out first my pannier and then my shin. Rachael tried unsuccessfully to coax it her way, but it apparently prefers guys.

The typical look of the day. It’s striking how fast the grains are shooting up, and how abruptly it feels like we’ve moved into a different season.

We’re in the broad, long Po basin now. We won’t be seeing any hills for the next few days.

There’s still plenty of variety in the ride though.

The low point of the day comes when we cross the Oglio and pass through the small riverside town of Gazzuolo, which we’ve been very slowly dropping to for the first fifteen miles. From here it’s mostly an uphill grind the rest of the way, climbing all of 30 feet in the next fifteen miles.

Saint Rocco Oratory, the architectural highlight of this small town.

Without this information we wouldn’t have known what we were looking at. It’s not listed on the map.

We couldn’t get inside to view the wooden furniture inside, but the door was attractive and interesting.

There’s more of this than we were hoping to see today. How long will it go on like this, she’d like to know?

It will get worse before it gets better though, with about a quarter mile of pea gravel too squirrely to bike through.

#160: Purple heron! I saw this dark bird in the field up ahead too late for a shot of it, but was pleased when it circled back close enough to give me a second look.

Video sound track: Sembra Impossibile, by Fabrizio Moro

Casalmaggiore is a small place and no tourist destination, but it serves well enough for us. There’s a fine B&B here, and just enough of interest - more than we expected to find here, really - to fill some time for the short walk we take before dinner at a quite good pizzeria. The only other guests at our B&B tonight also arrived on bicycle, and as Rachael noted it’s likely that most of the town’s tourism activity comes from others biking the Po like ourselves.