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At dawn the road turns white . This is Gaiole in Chianti , a village in the hills of Tuscany , and the pale roads that climb away from it have a name : strade bianche , the white roads , made of gravel and dust instead of asphalt . Today they belong to L'Eroica . It is a bicycle ride , but an unusual one . Every bicycle must have been built before 1987 : a steel frame , a leather saddle , wheels without a single piece of plastic . To change gear , Pietro reaches down and moves a small lever on the frame , the way riders did fifty years ago . He wears wool , and the wool grows heavy with sweat on the climbs . The bicycle was his grandfather 's . It is slow , and the hills are long , but Pietro does not hurry , and neither does anyone around him . L'Eroica is not a race against the clock . It began in 1997 , when a man named Giancarlo Brocci wanted to protect both these white roads and the older , harder way of cycling before they disappeared . Halfway up , there is a rest stop . Riders lean their bikes against a wall and eat : bread , a piece of pecorino , a glass of red wine . By evening Pietro 's legs ache and the dust has turned his face grey . The bicycle carried him the slow way , the hard way , with nothing to hide behind . That , he understands at last , was always the point — and his grandfather had known it all along .
