IF HANNIBAL FAILED to march through the gates of Rome it was perhaps because taking Rome by force did not appear to have been one of his key objectives. No clearer did this become than in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Cannae, where the Carthaginians had mighty Rome in their sights but their leader, like Bob, couldn’t pull the trigger.
Exasperated by Fabius’s delaying tactics, the Romans had elected two new consuls in January 216 BC. The first, Paullus, was an advocate of the old Fabian approach of containing Hannibal’s army, while the second, Varro, was determined to force the enemy into open battle. To make matters more intriguing, both consuls joined the bolstered Roman army on the campaign trail, with each man given ultimate command on alternate days. In essence, this was like Dave Brailsford telling Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome that they would divvy up daily leadership of Team Sky during the Tour de France: appealing for neutrals, a disaster for anyone with any sense.
Despite being considerably outnumbered outside the small Apulian town of Cannae in August that year, Hannibal was architect of Rome’s most comprehensive defeat. Luring the enemy forward, Hannibal simultaneously attacked both flanks with his cavalry. This supreme double envelopment is still celebrated today as the greatest tactical feat in military history. Encircled and annihilated within a single stroke, the Romans were killed at a rate of six hundred a minute. Such was the enemy’s numerical advantage that Hannibal even ordered his men to slash the hamstrings of the Roman infantry so that, incapacitated, they could be slaughtered later, once the battle was won. An estimated seventy thousand Roman soldiers were killed and another ten thousand captured in what was one of the bloodiest encounters the world has ever seen. By some cruel irony, Varro, largely responsible for the defeat, survived while the reluctant Paullus, who didn’t even want to be there in the first place, perished.
According to Livy, Maharbal, the leader of the Numidian cavalry, urged Hannibal to strike while the iron was hot and march on Rome. But Hannibal hesitated, allowing the Romans to regroup. ‘You know how to win victory, Hannibal, but you do not know how to use it,’ Maharbal rued, albeit apocryphally in all likelihood.
For Rome was 400 kilometres away from Cannae and defended by at least two legions. Hannibal knew that his army was exhausted and that they lacked the requisite siege engines to breach the 7-kilometre-long city walls. Instead, his plan was to continue marginalizing Rome from its allies in southern Italy and bring about the eventual surrender. Attempting to reverse the conclusion of the First Punic War that so enraged his father Hamilcar, Hannibal sought to make a peace with Rome in which Carthage could dictate crippling terms.
So Hannibal resisted the temptation of displaying the same impetuousness that proved the downfall for many of his enemy leaders, and continued his quest to extend Carthaginian influence – which included overseeing the arrival of forty new war elephants smuggled past the Roman naval blockade that had been in place since his influence in the south had grown. Capua, then Italy’s second largest city, soon defected to Carthage. But the Romans had learnt from their mistakes, finally coming round to the attritional tactics of Fabius the Delayer, who was re-elected as consul on three occasions. Enforcing a policy of strategic stalemate at home, Rome took the fight abroad, attacking the Carthaginians in Spain, Sicily and Sardinia. Once Sicily fell, Hannibal’s Italian campaign started to flounder. Sensing a change in the wind, Rome then besieged Capua in 211.
In a likely bid to divert Roman attention from Capua, Hannibal finally marched on Rome – seven years after he had shaken the city’s foundations by crossing the Alps. Leaving a trail of devastation in his wake, Hannibal’s march seemed designed to cause as much panic as possible. But what then happened proved about as anticlimatic as Wiggo’s attempt to become the first Briton to win the Giro d’Italia. Incensed by news that the Romans took his advance so lightly that they were diverting troops to face his brother, Hasdrubal, in Spain, Hannibal even heard rumours that Roman businessmen were successfully selling off plots outside Rome – including the very land where his army was camped.
Incandescent with rage, Hannibal rode up to the gates of Rome and threw his spear over the Servian walls – much like a disgruntled Wiggins tossing his Pinarello into a roadside cliff. Still the Romans refused to come out and fight. To make matters worse, the demoralized Senate at surrounded Capua surrendered to the Roman army and the tables were turned. A disgruntled Hannibal took his army back south and holed up in the Calabrian town of Bruttium in the toe of Italy. Like those belonging to René Vietto and poor Apo Lazaridès, the toe was soon severed from its rightful owner.
After shadowing the bulk of Hannibal’s famous march on Rome by cycling 2,800 kilometres over the course of twenty-six successive days (400-odd kilometres more than anyone else who completed the whole tour, I hasten to add), there existed a fear that my own arrival in the Italian capital would also be something of an anticlimax. After all, it was not in the saddle of my trusty Felt road machine that I passed through the Porta San Pancrazio, but fast asleep in the van alongside Terry and Sam, both in a similar state of unconsciousness, as Bob took a series of largely unflattering photos of us drooling.
Any dismay at not riding those final kilometres evaporated once we reached the last in a long line of luxurious temporary residences – a former seventeenth-century convent on the edge of the vibrant Trastevere area of Rome. My mind fluttered back to eating tapas in Barcelona and Paolo’s suggestion that the Trastevere was where I’d find the best food in Rome. Well, he wasn’t wrong – for that evening, despite following our not inconsiderable late lunch with zero pedalling, we moseyed into the Trastevere for a triumphal Roman banquet.
Our last supper together took place at a wonderfully hectic family-run trattoria called Da Fabrizio, where plates of deep-fried zucchini flowers, artichoke hearts, lumps of tangy pecorino and a wooden tray of cured meats and salamis arrived before we’d even had the chance to sit down. A terracotta bowl of rigatoni all carcerata – rich black truffle and stringy cheese ‘prison pasta’, a Fabrizio special – would have crowned the meal perfectly. But the coronation was still to come: chef Fabrizio’s wife – a real bruiser of a woman who would have given Surus the elephant a run for his money – emerged from the kitchen brandishing a medley of mains for us to share, including meatballs in tomato and pea sauce, veal stew and stuffed beef involtini.
‘Buon appetito,’ she said in a gravelly smoker’s voice that befitted someone I had already witnessed sparking up surreptitiously on two occasions behind the curtain that led into the kitchen. Both guilt and shame accompanied half an hour later the clearing of the hearty spread into which we had accumulatively failed to make many meaningful inroads. But judging by the matronal corpulence of the resident dominatrix, the leftovers would not remain left over for long.
After polishing off a light lemon sorbet we then raised a glass of rather sharp local Lazio plonk to toast the completion of our monumental cycling challenge. Perhaps only I saw the irony in acknowledging the culmination of a remarkable journey all-but-finished by Hannibal by drinking the kind of sour wine that would have lifted the spirits of his men in times of need.
‘Lovely stuff, this, Dylan,’ said Terry before emptying his glass. ‘Any chance of another bottle?’
The next morning I confused everyone by turning up at breakfast with my cycling kit on.
‘I thought I was having a nightmare,’ said Terry when he emerged downstairs after his morning ablutions. ‘I saw him getting ready and for a minute I forgot we were in Rome. I cursed my alarm for not going off and was just getting used to the idea of riding that damned bike again when I realized that we were in Rome – and that I had probably drunk too much last night.’
‘Please don’t tell me you’re riding back to Barcelona without me,’ enquired Bob, all packed up and ready to fly home to Seattle via London.
‘I wish! No, I’m going to check out some cycle shops around town and see if they can pack up my bike for the trip home. I thought I’d also do some sightseeing from the saddle. When in Rome, and all that . . .’
I said my goodbyes and assured Bob that I wasn’t going to try and notch 100 kilometres around the hectic streets of Rome. Terry and Steve also had morning flights to catch to the UK. ‘It’s time to face the music,’ sighed Terry, although I could tell that he was actually looking forward to seeing his wife after almost a month away. With his own better half about to give birth to their second child, Dylan’s afternoon flight to Sydney couldn’t come soon enough. Meanwhile, Sam’s brother Ben had arrived in town and the pair were about to embark on a five-day road-trip back to Barcelona to return the hired van and bikes. Finally, the remaining Antipodean element of the trip – troopers John, Kay, Sharon and Bernadette – were, like me, spending a few days acclimatizing in Rome before their respective journeys home.
Taking on the pulsating chaos of Rome by bike seemed about as safe as wandering around Cannae dressed as a Roman soldier with one’s thighs exposed to the elements. Not only were most of the wide, unmarked and heavily distressed streets cobbled and dissected by the deep grooves of tram lines, but the confusion of traffic lights on display seemed to be just that – mere decorations offering, if anything, a suggestion as to what drivers could do, should they feel like it.
The past month had seen me emerge relatively unscathed from a gauntlet of underhand obstacles and nefarious challenges – including flash floods and lightning in Tuscany, flying ants in Umbria, militant mosquitoes in Piedmont, boiling wax in Barcelona, blocked bowels in Catalonia and rabid, humping dogs in the Pyrenean foothills. I’d survived being run off the road in Céret and nudged into a ditch near Lucca, possibly by a driver fleeing the advances of two petrol station prostitutes. I’d locked my rear wheel on a tight, slippery bend off the back of Mont Ventoux – and lived to tell the tale. I’d braved the elements to ride the twenty-one hairpins of Alpe d’Huez twice in one afternoon – before descending in the dark past potholes and fallen rocks. I’d tackled some of the most ferocious climbs Europe has to offer, much of the time on a cocktail of painkillers after ravaging my knees on a sodden solo ascent before we’d even left Spain. I’d dodged cows, sheep, goats, marmots and enough roadkill to fill a zoo, even managing to clock up a maximum speed of 93.2 kmph despite a frayed front tyre, worn-out brake pads and my trademark tachophobic tendencies. I’d ridden gung-ho on the wrong side of the road on a blind bend just to beat a Velosophy sparring partner at his own game in the agricultural north of Italy. I’d eaten more duck, cheese and truffles than should be medically advised. I’d even managed to extricate myself from a rum encounter with a crackpot Frenchman calling himself the ‘Baron’, caught red-handed while taking a leak beside a deserted Roman aqueduct he claims to have inspired the Mona Lisa.
None of the above, however, was anywhere near as dangerous or life-threatening as taking on the rush-hour traffic in Rome with said front tyre just one sharp-edged cobble away from exploding.
But I was on a mission. A bike ride to Rome would be incomplete without the money shot: a symbolic photo of one triumphant Lycra-clad amateur cyclist in front of the Colosseum with his bike, punching the air with a huge grin.
Wearing my dayglo green shorts to warn off erring drivers, I powered down the Via di San Gregorio hoping to avoid the fate that befell Denis Menchov on this very road in 2009, when the Russian lost control of his bike on the rain-soaked cobbles during the deciding time trial on the final day of the hundredth Giro, skidding along the surface for 20 metres and tearing into his pink skin-suit, before remounting and doing enough to secure the overall victory in the shadow of the Colosseum. (He needn’t have been too concerned – his main rival that year, Danilo Di Luca, was later fingered for taking the same kind of drugs that Michael Rasmussen claims were habitually administered to his former Rabobank team-mates, including, er, Menchov. For his part, the ‘Silent Assassin’ has always denied any wrongdoing – but after Rasmussen’s allegations came to light, Menchov retired and fled the sport quicker than a speeding Ferrari.)
Just as the Eiffel Tower, Buckingham Palace and Opera House are synonymous with Paris, London and Sydney, so too can the aura of Rome be captured in the crumbling Colosseum. A photo here was essential, as was riding on down the Via del Corso to toss some coins into the Trevi Fountain before sitting for a post-gelato caricature in the Piazza Navona (why the old artist insisted on depicting me with bulging muscles is beyond my comprehension – particularly since I’d lost 7kg since leaving Spain and was almost as spindly as an overweight pro during the off-season).
While posing for the sketch people gathered behind the artist, their early laughs and thumbs-up being gradually replaced by querulous looks of bemusement and so-so signals of appreciation. My mind wandered, as it would every day while on the bike. None of this – the ornate fountains, the nearby Pantheon with its oculus and dome, the Colosseum itself – would be here today had Hannibal managed to bring his bold plan to total fruition.
The Second Punic War was the closest Rome came to destruction – before Rome had even become everything that it became for us today. A victorious Hannibal would have shifted the focus of ancient history across the Mediterranean and towards Carthage. There would have been no Caesars, no Roman Empire, no school Latin lessons learning the mantra of Caecilius est in horto. Grumio might well still be slaving away in the kitchen, but he wouldn’t be preparing stuffed dormice for Quintus to eat after a long day in the Forum – no, he’d be filling pig stomachs with sausages and pouring glasses of vintage balsamic for Hanno, his wife Metella and their son Mago before they went to watch the weekly crucifixion and child sacrifice on the spot of land where the Colosseum, in a ghastly alternative universe, might have stood.
Victory, however, eluded Hannibal. No man would ever defy Rome for so long or hold out against such unfavourable odds. But his influence in the toe of Italy slowly dwindled until he was forced to send for his brother Hasdrubal to bring reinforcements from Spain. Hasdrubal led yet another army of elephants across the Pyrenees and Alps before being killed and decapitated in the Apennines by the Romans in 207 BC, his head carried across Italy and tossed into Hannibal’s camp.
‘At last I see the destiny of Carthage!’ Hannibal cried on seeing the (presumably heavily decomposed) face of his dead brother. He wasn’t far off the mark: after nearly fifteen years of fighting in Italy, Hannibal was recalled to his native country to face his nemesis Scipio Africanus, who had come on a long way since rescuing his injured father in the battle of Ticinus. Hannibal entered the resulting showdown – the Battle of Zama in 202 BC – with a larger infantry and the presence of eighty war elephants. But the Romans had a cunning plan: they played their trumpets so loudly that the elephants were provoked into stampeding their own lines. Rome’s superior cavalry then carried out a two-pronged attack which forced the Carthaginians into surrender after losing twenty thousand troops.
Once again, Carthage was obliged to sue for peace on humiliating terms. Among the conditions was a measure of disarmament whereby no elephants might be kept. Lance Armstrong thought he was hard done by when he copped a lifetime cycling ban – but this penalty was just too much for Hannibal. For seven years he tried his hand at being a de-elefanted statesman, but finally the daily sight of the city’s three hundred empty pachyderm stables gathering dust pushed him over the edge.
Outraged, Hannibal went into voluntary exile in Syria, home of his beloved Surus. From here he tried to revive his warmongering credentials until he was betrayed by the king of Asia Minor. With the Romans closing in, Hannibal, aged 65, took a swig of lethal poison. According to Plutarch, Hannibal’s last words were: ‘Let us now put an end to the life that caused the Romans so much anxiety.’ Thirty-five years later, after the Third Punic War, Carthage was obliterated by the Romans: its people killed and its city walls and port destroyed, Rome’s great rival city-state ceased to exist.
Over the course of my bike ride in the footsteps of this charismatic general I strove to emulate the movements of the man who brought the young Roman Republic to its knees. I did so by taking up the sport I’d previously (and so feverishly) followed only from afar, and joining a wonderfully diverse group of people to tackle terrain so beautifully woven into the fabric of cycling folklore. Poisoning myself was admittedly one aspect of the Hannibal legend I wasn’t prepared to recreate – but neither, too, did I succumb to the temptation of sourcing EPO from a Barcelona pharmacy (as had been suggested by one friend), providing what would have been a welcome stimulant for what seemed like a relentless succession of punishing climbs, brutal gradients and deadly descents.
There is a school of thought that suggests Hannibal’s failure to conquer Rome lay with the notion of his mercenary army going soft during its fifteen-year stay in Italy, perhaps enjoying the fresh produce of the countryside so much that they forgot about the conflict that had brought them over three mountain ranges in the first place. I could certainly empathize. Having crossed the biggest natural barrier in Europe, my own fifteen days in Italy seemed to have followed a very similar pattern. Following the victorious photo at the Colosseum I’d put the bike aside and, with it, banished all past conflicts with aching joints, ageing Americans, snoring Scousers and plucky young Australians with a penchant for quoting South Park.
For three days I wandered the streets of Rome, initially feeling about as lost as a fully dressed Numidian without his horse. But soon I settled into a routine, maintaining the kind of calorie consumption that I could get away with while cycling 100 kilometres per day for a month. Local specialities of spaghetti cacio e pepe (a simple dish with pecorino Romano and pepper) and cicoria (wild chicory leaves, shredded like spinach and cooked with garlic and chilli) became my staples. I once even had a second lunch to avoid a sudden downpour as bad as the cursed day of the World Championships.
With my legs now less lazy-lady and more pubescent-teenager, I climbed the Spanish steps, descended into the catacombs, danced on the pedlars around the Campidoglio, counter-attacked the crowds crossing the Tiber en route to the Vatican, and, late for my return flight, raced against the clock all the way up the Via Cavour to the railway station at Termini, to view the piece of the Servian Wall allegedly hit by Hannibal’s spear – now located, astonishingly, in the downstairs dining area of the local McDonald’s. For three days my extra loops usually involved a slight detour to the Gelateria del Teatro, whose flavour combinations would have got a ringing endorsement from the sorely missed Terry: chocolate orange with candied peel, lavender and white peach, dark chocolate and wine sorbet, white chocolate and basil, garden sage with raspberry . . .
Both my body and mind were in denial: if one believed it was still pushing pedals all day, the other, quite simply, wished it still was.
Reality hit home when I arrived at the airport laden with luggage, including a humongous cardboard box containing my dependable Felt, now dismantled, padded up and feeling generally neglected. Telling the amused and confused people in the check-in queue that I had just ridden my bike – this bike – from Barcelona to Rome stirred feelings of pride inside, but also served as a bleak reminder that the epic odyssey was now over.
The excitable old dear sitting next to me on the plane home was returning from a package tour organized by a Catholic charity. ‘It was marvellous,’ she beamed. ‘We got to look around the Basilica and we attended a service in St Peter’s Square. I stood just metres away from Pope Francis – it was so very inspiring.’
Her unconditional, unwavering support for one man made me think of those crazed cycling fans for whom Lance Armstrong can do no wrong. (Not that the Pope has yet perfected the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful programme of Sacramental wine abuse the Catholic Church has ever seen). Oddly enough, I found her devotion comforting. After all, the new-found verve that I held for the cult of cycling was arguably just as alarming for any outsider. After years of preaching about the sport without ever getting on a bike, I had finally taken the plunge and graduated as a cycling disciple.
As the plane took off I flicked through a colourful history of Hannibal by the eccentric English zoologist Sir Gavin de Beer, chuckling at a typically coltish analogy. ‘Let us suppose,’ the honey-tongued academic wrote in a bid to put an Anglo-centric spin on Hannibal’s achievements, ‘that during the battle of Britain in 1940, Rommel landed in Scotland with 20,000 men and thirty-seven tanks, that he destroyed half a dozen British armies in as many battles, and roamed about the country from Edinburgh to Plymouth, ravaging and living on the land for fifteen years until, in 1955, having failed to detach the Scots and the Welsh from the English or to capture London, he re-embarked and sailed home to defend the Fatherland, which Britain had at last succeeded in invading.’
If a better sentence has been written about Hannibal then I’ve yet to read it. Likewise, as we flew back over the same Alpine ridges that Hannibal and now I had traversed, I felt with utmost conviction that there could be no better cycling journey than the one I had just completed. Pedal power had been the perfect vehicle for tracing the military mastodon behind one of the most gripping episodes in ancient history, and for stepping in the seasoned cycling shoes of those spindly sportsmen whose antics have curiously become my bread and butter. I was returning to the UK a changed man: no longer a saddle-shy outlier in a world of wheels, I had been well and truly initiated into the ever-expanding Lycra army, my subsequent coverage and enjoyment of the sport enriched and permanently changed for the better.
Under bright sunshine the following spring, the peloton will gather beneath the towers in the main square of San Gimignano – perhaps after an early visit to sample some of Dondoli’s finest – ahead of the 2014 Strade Bianche race over the Tuscan dirt roads. I’ll watch on as the riders skirt the familiar towns of Pienza and Asciano, passing the cypress-lined driveway where I stopped to chomp a banana during that world champion downpour. I might even catch a glimpse of a solitary black horse experiencing one of his better days, keeping an eye on proceedings from his field beside the chalk road as Peter Sagan launches a pulverizing attack, taking only the eventual race winner – Polish youngster Michal Kwiatkowski – with him. The next day, in the Roma Maxima semi-classic, Alejandro Valverde will make his own decisive assault on the Campi di Annibale ramp south of Rome before defying the peloton by one slender second to take victory in front of a Colosseum clad in scaffolding.
Days later the 2014 Tirreno-Adriatico route will spirit the peloton past San Miniato and Cortona, along the west bank of Lake Trasimeno and through once-pigeon-infested Bevagna, while the Giro d’Italia’s main time trial in May will tackle the same undulating roads around Alba and Barolo as we did – though the pros won’t have the welcome distractions of wine tasting and truffle guzzling to alleviate their suffering. Later in the summer, Yves and Nanine may dress up their donkeys Félix and Margot in cycling regalia as a stage of the Critérium du Dauphiné passes a cheesy gratin’s whiff away from their home in the Alpine foothills. Weeks later, the obligatory photo of the maillot jaune reading a copy of L’Équipe during the second rest day of the Tour de France will no doubt be shot in the shadow of the lofty ramparts at Carcassonne, behind which tourists will feast on viscid cassoulet and steaks bathed in warm Roquefort.
This is what the future holds for me. While I’ll never be a campionissimo in anything but amateurishness, now that I’ve tested my mettle on the mythical roads of Europe my own comparatively minuscule cycling achievements will be indelibly linked to those of the pros. Experiences will mount up, for this is merely the beginning: an amuse-bouche; a foie gras macaron, if you will. The race is only just edging out of the neutral zone. Yes, I may be ten years older than Warren Barguil, the debutant stage winner back in Castelldefels, but like the scrawny Frenchman, my cycling career is very much in its infancy. This may be a sport whose reporters have a tendency to call anyone over thirty a ‘veteran’ but I have a whole decade on a recent Grand Tour champion and almost four on our very own Bob Berg, who last year clocked up a staggering 10,000 miles. My life on a bike has only just started, the knee pains will certainly return, but both the tastiest delicacies and hardest climbs are still on the horizon. The road ahead is long and, like Hannibal, I don’t intend on taking the easy route.