This time of year, the days in Ferrara, a slightly out-of-the-way medieval castle town in northern Italy that I visited in late September, have a charming monotony to them.
In the warmth of early fall mornings, tourists from other parts of Italy as well as further afield in Europe circle around the 14th-century castle’s moat and drawbridges or wander inside for the baronial view from there. On the main street nearby, where cars are banned, crowds file past a towering statue of the ascetic friar Jerome Savonarola. Judging from the conversations I could overhear, the pedestrian traffic was mostly made up of Italians.
There was one feature of this movement above all that caught my attention, though, and it is a good thing that it did: Weaving their way through the flow of shoppers and gawkers were well-dressed people on clanky bicycles, gliding through the crowds with a speed and self-assurance that suggested it was other people’s duty to get out of their way.
