Book excerpt: Australians are great travellers, possibly because most Australians are immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants. I’m sure there has been a gene selected for the Australian population simply because we’re all immigrants. I chose to travel by bicycle around Italy, not because I am particularly green, although knowing that the only greenhouse gases I generated were those that I transpired was seductive, but because it was obviously a very efficient way of moving through a landscape that is essentially a vast, open air museum.This is not the story of just where I went and who I met, but also what I saw and, most importantly, what I thought and felt. The tour yielded a return far in excess of the calorific effort that went into it. I was a 61-year-old man at the time, living with prostate cancer, in need of a travel experience that would teach me something about the meaning of life. This account captures something of the excitement and wonder of exploring, by bike, what is undoubtedly one of the great civilizations