A small selection of flowers wild and cultivated
New Photos
Cracking ride yesterday with RuotaLibera, the Rome chapter of FIAB that I belong to. It was billed as a Christmassy ride around the parks of the south of Rome, and it was a blast. The guides had mapped out a great route that had a few exciting moments — roundabouts where you’re never quite certain that some power-crazed car driver won’t try to split the group in order to not waste a second getting to their exit — and some lovely calm rides through a lot of parks, general greenery and beside agricultural fields. When you are on a bike it is remarkable how green Rome is, with fingers of real countryside poking deep into the urban fabric. The map gives a reasonable idea.
We didn’t stop very often, so I don’t have too many photos, especially not of the green bits. It would be wrong, however, to imply that it is all lovely. There is an awful lot of hideous recent architecture on what were once those green fingers.
Perhaps the strangest bit of infrastructure was a sunken roundabout decorated entirely with comic-book characters, rendered in painted tiles. Piazza Andrea Pazienza, dedicated to the artist of that name, is hardly a piazza in the ordinary sense of the word, being a narrow pavement around the outside of the roundabout, but it is quite the attraction for some people, including, as it happens, our little group.
Almost all the car drivers were amazingly polite throughout the ride, including several who stopped on the comic roundabout to give us a clear shot.
A fine ride, ending up at a local community bicycle space with a delicious pasta lunch.
Webmentions
Webmentions allow conversations across the web, based on a web standard. They are a powerful building block for the decentralized social web.
If you write something on your own site that links to this post, you can send me a Webmention by putting your post's URL in here:
Comments
I very much regret that Russian spammers have made my comment system unusable. If you want to email me a comment, it is easy enough to find the address and I will be happy to do the needful behind the scenes. Webmentions remain available (for now).