The Legendary “Via Emilia"

To really know the Romagna is necessary to leave the highway A14 and take the Via Emilia ... the mother of all routes of Romagna! The road built by Lepidus in 187 BC ...

Its path divides the plain from the hill side of the area, developing right from Imola to Rimini and crossing Faenza, Forlì, Forlimpopoli, Cesena, Savignano and Santarcangelo.
From it start all the roads leading towards the sea or, on the contrary to the hills, including the four Wine and Dine Routs of Romagna, four Roads that have given rise to aggregation operation of the four circuits wine under the name of "Romagna - Land of Sangiovese" located at the Casa Artusi Forlimpopoli.
To quote Tito Balestra the Via Emilia is "A sign on the atlas, / a line that runs from the sea to the river Po, the Emilia / road of peasants."
Today even more true then in the past, the Via Emilia is the road of the citizens of Romagna, while tourists whizzing along the highway throwing a fleeting glance over the fields and the houses.  But that is Romagna. A land to discoveria through the wide spaces left by factories and homes, a rural landscape that is reminds to the words of Giovanni Pascoli: "Always a village, always a countryside ... ".
The Via Emilia is full of charm and history along its traced passed Julius Caesar with his legions; Pope Julius II with his retinue; Duke Valentino with Leonardo; Giuseppe Garibaldi ahead of his volunteers and millions of other people and things remembered by Alfredo Oriani in a story dedicated just to the Via Emilia: "Crowds of acrobats and gladiators, wagons filled with statues and lions, processions of saints and prisoners, labari and flags, eagles and gonfalons, relics of saints, and of governments, war and industry machines, amphorae and cannons, shawls and armor, all varieties of men and things sweet and disgusting, vile and sublime, everything has gone to this road that was for centuries the busiestroute in the world”.
Even Oriani, in the summer of 1897, faced this route for a long trip with his bike: "The way wide, straight and powdery white, with the sun blinding down, not a breath of wind: silence in the fields all covered by the sun because the shadows huddled under the trees " .
For Sergio Zavoli the passion people of Romagna for the bike just comes down from the Via Emilia: "A vein that occasionally widens, giving rise to a country, and then returns its size. Much of the city has grown in Romagna these sudden expansion; then it is placed more and more dense along the consular. The trip, intrigued by the succession of cities, towns and villages, took a quiet pace, equal to that of the train that travels next to the road and lingers in a sowing of stations. Reduced to unite country to country, the big street has sow grown the number of bikes ".
But there's more. If the bicycle is in Romagna the necessary form of transport, the friend of sentimental trips and excursions sportive both for men and women; if it has been sung and told by writers like Olindo Guerrini, Alfredo Oriani, Renato Serra, Alfredo Panzini it is due to its ability to give life with time and space, tickling the sense of freedom so dear to the Romagna. "The pleasure of a bike - he wrote Oriani – is the same of freedom, perhaps better than a liberation. Go anywhere, at any time, stopping at the first ambition of a whim, with no worries, like a horse, without servitude as in a train. The bike we are still us that we win the space and time "
 
 
The luck of the bicycle is also favored by the conformation of the territory, which combines plains, hills and mountains. And the assertion of Champions as Mario Vicini, Aldo Ronconi and Arnaldo Pambianco, Vito Ortelli, Joseph Minardi, Diego Ronchini , Ercole Baldini and Marco Pantani
For the same reason people of Romagna love”e 'mutor”, the motorcycle even if the engine have it the car, the plane and also the boat. Paolo Is not by chance that some of the best drivers will be of Romagna: from Loris Capirossi and Marco Melandri up to Valentino Rossi, who was born on the border between Romagna and Marche. They are the heirs of samples as Loris Reggiani, Paolo Bianchi, Fausto Gresini, Renzo Pasolini, Luigi Arcangeli, called "the lion of Romagna" or Aristide Gaddoni running with one aluminum leg tied to the motor bike!