Cycle path Padua - Arquà

• Travelling time: 4 hours
• Difficulty: Easy
• Why we love it: For lovers of the genre but not only, we think that there is nothing better than the highways of great Petrarca
• Length: 20 km
• Total Elevation Gain: 10 m
• Way to travel: By bike
• Cost: 0
• Our Advice: Suitable for all types of cyclists and viable preferably during spring and autumn

The itinerary follows the same route that was Francesco Petrarca Padova when he went to his home in the hills. Later the Riviera Euganea be traveled by many writers that rose up to Arquà to visit the grave and the residence of the poet.

Some features are simply spectacular, such as the one that precedes the entrance to Battaglia Terme, where the view is dominated by the Catajo Castle, imposing like a house, but painted internally as a villa.

Battaglia Terme, the coastal settlement and ancient river port, is a true open museum with curious artifacts hydraulic and Venetian bridges. Therefore always be riding on the flat, on the bank of the Battaglia Canal, alongside of this very elegant Villa Selvatico - Sartori watching us with vanity top of the Hill of St. Helena.

We are in the middle of a famous literary landscape: around us Venetian villas, walled cities, hydraulic works, beautiful landscapes. In the Valleys Wild, observe the path that follows the old route of the river that before the reclamation sixteenth connected the Costa channel Battle. Its' along this waterway that Petrarch arrived at Arquà!

The view is never equal to himself and soon reach Monselice, a walled city. We will make a pleasant diversion from the ring path to get to the charming Arquà Petrarca, one of the most beautiful towns in Italy, among the best preserved medieval cities. The settlement has a unique bipolar: two villages, two churches and two squares. Francesco Petrarca, precursor of Humanism not only, but also of the resort, so he wrote to Arquà:

"I flee the city as life imprisonment and I choose to live in a solitary small village, in a nice little house, surrounded by olive trees and a vineyard, where I spend the days fully quiet, far from the tumult, noise, from chores, reading and continuously writing ".

We enter the spiritual landscape and we go to his house, because "you feel here the great spirit alive and present, called also the beautiful landscape, so conforms to the tone of his poetry sweet and melancholy" (Adolfo Callegari).

The return journey takes us close to the estate of the Lispida Castle, historic residence where important wineries. In the cellar the identity of places is dissolved in a glass of wine and the winemaker becomes the protagonist of the story that we lived in a day of sun and breezes.

Author: Carmen Delia Gurinov

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Cover photo: Prato della Valle - Padua, photo by Giorgio Galeotti via Flickr