The RiDE Guide to Italy motorcycle routes
Welcome to the RiDE Guide to Italy - our guide is packed with astonishing riding routes in Europe’s most motorcycle-friendly country. Italy is a fantastic place for a motorcycle touring holiday, with spectacular mountains, golden beaches, rolling hills and fascinating towns.
When it comes to sights to see, this is a country loaded with heritage - from the Romans to the Renaissance, history has enriched the landscape of Italy like no other country in Europe. Better still, that landscape - mostly hilly, largely rural - is criss-crossed by some utterly amazing biking roads. True, the surface quality is variable, but that’s where this guide comes in, helping motorcyclists avoid the rough roads and find the best ones - and the best roads in Italy make-up a good case for being the best roads in Europe. The riding there really is that good.
But we don’t need to tell you that: just download our motorcycle routes for your sat-nav and you can see for yourself. Enjoy the RiDE Guide to motorcycle touring in Italy - and enjoy discovering its amazing roads.
Our routes
We have motorcycling routes radiating out from 25 locations - from the very north of Italy to Sicily in the south. As Italy is a fair ride from the UK, we have weighted our coverage to the northern areas, most easily reached from Britain.
Rather than just one circular ride in each location, we’ve planned two, three or sometimes four different day trip routes in most locations. This gives you the option of riding to a base destination and then enjoying a couple of day’s riding cloverleafing out fro your hotel each day, rather than having to keep moving.
However, if you want to see more of the country, we have also planned a series of three-day tours across popular riding areas. Why three-day tours? To allow you you to take a relaxed three days to ride to the start point from Britain, take three days doing the tour, then spend three days returning - so the tours can fit in with just one week off work using both weekends.
Of course, if you have more time you can extend any one of the tours by adding one or two of our day trips, as our tours link together the towns where we’ve based our other routes. We also have two two-week tours of Italy, crammed with brilliant riding.
All our route descriptions include the mileage, a riding time and some suggested stops. The riding time does not, however include time spent at those stops - so if a routes is five hours long, expect to add two hours to that by the time you’ve had lunch, a few coffees, filled up ad stopped for pictures. Our routes are structured to be full days in the saddle and we have provided some long-day options as well as shorter ones, bit if you take long stops that will make even short routes into long days.
Rather than filling these pages with long directions, we’ve created google maps and sat-nav files for all the routes, which can be found at the end of each route description. Click on one of the destinations from the list on the right or visit our Italian routes page to search or browse.
Vipiteno, Dolomites
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Please note: This page contains the route files for The RiDE Guide to motorcycle touring in Italy which came free with RiDE magazine in July 2015. These website page are not regularly updated, so please check all critical information before you travel. All route files are in .gpx format. Garmin and BMW users can download the main file, which contains all the routes and our recommended hotels as separate waypoints. TomTom users can download the individual routes and use the Tyre software to convert them. For many routes we also have Google Map links. However, as Google Maps will not plot routes over seasonally closed high Alpine passes (such as Stelvio) when they’re shut, these may not work for every route all year round.