Bicycling and Slow Food in Tuscany

PHOTO: Ciclismo Classico's Slow Food cycling trip is headquartered in the Tuscan hills in Italy. (Photo by David Cogswell)

A couple of years ago, Brendan Vacations launched a series of Slow Food tours in coordination with the Slow Food movement. Then before the series could get off the ground, the company was downsized and the Slow Food tours were jettisoned.

Now Ciclismo Classico, a specialty operator of cycling tours of Italy, has filled the gap with Tuscany Green, a new Slow Food Cycling Tour in Tuscany.

Guiding the trip is Sandro Draghi, who is the owner of Il Molinello, a family-run farm in Tuscany with origins in the 14^th century that doubles as an inn and a school for learning about Slow Food and Tuscan agriculture.

The six-night program is headquartered at Il Molinello, with bike rides around the Tuscan hills and an immersion into the farming culture of Tuscany and the Slow Food philosophy.

According to Ciclismo Classico founder and CEO Lauren Hefferon, “Guests will learn about bio-architecture, renewable energy technology, organic extra virgin olive oil production, and stay in accommodations restored with local and natural materials.”

Slow Food

The Slow Food movement was created to protect the quality of food against the assault of an emerging global food system in which the creation and movement of food  is based only on supply, demand and profit, while quality, health and sustainability are often left out of the equation. Slow Food was formed to counter the drift of the world food supply toward mass-produced, highly processed food products that are unhealthy for human beings and deleterious to the natural environment.

Slow Food International summarizes its mission with three words: buon, polito and justo.

“Buon” means good. “Polito” in this context means sustainable and organic, which is always a relative value. “Justo,” means fair prices for the source producers and everyone in the chain of production and delivery. It is closely related to sustainability, and runs counter to much of how the global economy now works.

Although Slow Food focuses on food, it’s not just about eating and cooking. It’s about food in its most fundamental sense as a staple of human civilization, and about how we will approach the basic problems of survival and human progress going forward in a world that has outgrown its current systems.

The itinerary of the Ciclismo Classico Slow Food tour includes biking in six different parts of the province of Siena, hands-on cooking lessons, a dip in thermal springs at Rapolano Terme; and touring farms and vineyards. Accommodations are in a 13th century mill transformed into an energy-independent Agriturismo.

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