It is incredible how every worry and tiredness flows away when you start pushing on your pedals and this generates a kind of general wellness on your mind when you do it within a group of person riding for the same and powerful reason.
This is exactly what happened when around 50 people moved their bicycles from Marghera in the direction of Bassano.
We know that today is only the first step towards the final goal to Brussels where we will arrive on 7th of November, but we know as well that the first day is always a crucial moment for every long-distanced ride, especially when you don’t know until the end, who will be part of your ride.
But this is a usual condition for Ride With Us!, the open ride asking action for climate change where everybody may join the group in any moment and for the desired distance.
Before leaving from Marghera’ Municipality, we received by Gianfranco Bettin – the President of Marghera’ Municipality – the first letter to deliver to the European Parliament. Be the Postman of climate change’ request of action is one of the main mission of the 2019 RWU tour and we collected it together with the two of IUAV and Ca’ Foscari Universities received by Stefano Munarin.
We look our clock and we realized that it is already time to move on, because we had several stops planned before arriving in Bassano.
The first stop was already in Dolo, where Opzione Zero’ friends, a local ONG committed to protect the area from use consumption and having interesting projects for planting large number of trees, offered us cakes, fruits and beverages….something always appreciated by cyclists!
But it was already time to move close to the Brenta River in the direction of “Casa a Colori”, a very interesting experience of co-housing in Padua, where the business is mixed with the possibility to help who is living without having real possibilities of house and work for him/her. Here Meri Scarso, a representative of the Vice-Mayor Arturo Lorenzoni, even Alderman of the Mobility, and of the Alderman of Environment Chiara Gallani delivered to us the letter of the Padua Municipality. She was followed by a representative of the “Lista Civica” from the Municipality of Selvazzano.
But we met here also Bruno Giraldo, who created the project Breath with us to monitor the air quality through all our trip. More information on it is available in the website section dedicated to this project, including the link where it is possible to check the air quality of the places where we passed through during our trip.
After a good dish of pasta we start riding in the direction of Castelfranco, we rode in a beautiful warm day of sun that was fully enjoyable for us but invite us to think how unusual it is for the end of October.
Before arriving in Castefranco, we met the old friends of Ponti di Pace (Brìdges of Peace) and in Castelfranco a group of young activities of “Fridays for Future”. One of of them was 13 years old, probably the youngest participant of our tours (if we excluded Mila, the 4 months old child that accompanied us during the Wien stage last year, but curried by her mother Hanna).
Finally we arrived at 5 pm in the main square of Bassano where other friends of the FIAB, the Italian environmental and bicycle association, greeting us.
Just the time for a quick beer and we were ready for the conference of Thierry Robert Luciani, ARPAV, for the very interesting speech on VAIA, the exceptional storm that affected exactly one year ago the mountain of Nord-East Italy. It was quite evident for us the connections with a so extreme event with climate change and the potential impacts of it on our life. A natural connection was also with the conference of yesterday evening, when at “Al Vapore” in Marghera, we had the opportunity to understand by Georg Umgiesser (oceanographer researcher at ISMAR/CNR) the implications of the existing sea level rise trend with the city of Venice and its lagoon.
Mountain and see linked in different way to the same problem: climate change!
We welcomed the letter received by the Bassano Municipality with the full acknowledge of how important is to deliver to the European Parliament the global message that is behind these letters.
It is crystal clear that there is not more space for empty words: now it’s time to act!
