The strade bianche are pale gravel roads cutting across the hills between Siena, Montalcino and the Val d’Orcia. They became famous thanks to the Eroica, the vintage ride that has started from Gaiole in Chianti since 1997, and today they bring thousands of cyclists here every year — on vintage steel, on gravel bikes, on mountain bikes.
If you ride and you’re considering this area, here is what to actually expect: what the surface is like, when it’s worth coming, and the problem nobody mentions — eating halfway round.
Not all white roads are the same. Some are compact and fast, almost tarmac; others have loose, coarse gravel, especially on descents and after farm machinery has passed. The Crete Senesi add clay to the mix: dry, it grips well; wet, it turns into a paste that packs into your brakes and drivetrain.
Tyres make the difference. Arriving on 25 mm road tyres means suffering. A 32–40 mm gravel tyre at low pressure changes the whole day.
The elevation deceives. There are no mountain passes, but there isn’t a flat kilometre either: it’s a constant sequence of short, steep ramps, and the day’s total is far higher than the map suggested.
There is no shade. These hills are bare. From June to August, in the middle of the day, you ride under full sun with the clay throwing the heat back up at you.
The two good windows are spring and autumn: right temperatures, dry surface, low light that turns the landscape into the photographs you’ve seen. Autumn also brings the traffic of the big organised rides — dates change each year, so check the organisers’ sites, and if you happen to be here on those weekends, know that every bed within thirty kilometres was booked months ago.
In winter the riding is excellent on dry days, but after rain the Crete become impassable for days: the clay does not drain.
This is what riders discover on day two: there isn’t a bar every ten kilometres here. You cross beautiful, completely empty hills, and between one village and the next there can be twenty kilometres of nothing — no fountain, no shop. The small villages keep small-village hours: the bar shuts in the afternoon, and on Sundays it may not open at all.
Two rules that work: carry more water and more food than you think, and arrange the main stop in advance instead of hoping something will be open when you get hungry.
Our farm is at Podere Olivello, in the countryside between San Giovanni d’Asso, Buonconvento and Montalcino: exactly the quadrant the gravel routes cross. Riders passing through find water, a shaded place to sit and — if they say so beforehand — a real meal.
It’s worth being clear about how it works: the restaurant runs on reservations, it isn’t a roadside bar. If you’re a group and want to stop for lunch, a phone call the day before is the difference between a laid table and a closed door. We cook what the fields give: hand-rolled pasta, spelt and pulse soups, garden vegetables, our own olive oil. Saturday evening is wood-fired pizza.
For those staying over, the apartment and the rooms have space to keep bikes under cover, and in summer there is the swimming pool — not a small detail after a hundred kilometres of gravel.