Stage 02 of 05
Stage 2 — Ostuni to Monopoli
Off the escarpment, through the olive country, and out onto the Adriatic. One of the two stages that run north-west — one of the two where the season’s wind is in your face.
Ostuni sits on the last rise of the Murgia before the land drops to the sea, which is why it is white and visible from a long way off and why this stage begins with a descent. Below the town the ground flattens into the coastal olive plain, and within a few kilometres you are riding between groves on roads that run dead straight to the horizon.
This is the stage that takes the route to its northern limit at Monopoli. Everything after it runs south. That single fact shapes the day more than the terrain does: from May to November the prevailing wind is northerly, so today is the day you ride into it, and tomorrow is the day it starts pushing.
Travelling north-west into a northerly. headwind, May–Nov The exception is April, when the wind comes from the south. Why.
- Distance
- 41 km — road distance, not a recorded ride. One of the two short stages, with the Valle d’Itria
- Elevation
- Ostuni sits on a hill and Torre Canne is at sea level: you lose that height in the first few kilometres, then the road is flat to Monopoli. No climbing figure — on ground this flat, GPS height error is larger than the hills
- Surface
- Asphalt throughout, on provincial roads
- Traffic
- Normal outside the summer, heavier in July and August
- Direction
- North-west — against the season’s prevailing wind
- Best bike
- Trek Checkpoint ALR, for the descent on hydraulic brakes
- Road to avoid
- SS379
The descent, and why the brakes matter
The drop from Ostuni to the coastal plain is not alpine and it is not trivial either: a sustained loss of height on roads that were built for tractors and are surfaced accordingly. On a loaded bike, sustained braking is the thing that tires your hands, and it is the clearest practical reason we point people at the Checkpoint rather than the Domane for this route.
The Checkpoint has hydraulic disc brakes; the Domane AL has mechanical ones. On a five-minute descent the difference is negligible. On a long one with panniers and a rough surface, it is the difference between modulating the brakes and squeezing them. The two bikes side by side.
The road you must not take
The SS379 is the fast coastal trunk road that runs Bari–Brindisi parallel to the sea, and it is the obvious line on a map between these two towns. It carries fast traffic and it is not a road to be on with a bicycle. The route stays inland of it throughout, using the minor road network between the groves.
That costs you distance and it costs you nothing else. The parallel country roads are quieter, more interesting and better shaded than the trunk road, and outside summer weekends they carry little more than agricultural traffic.
Olive country, and what happened to it
The plain below Ostuni is one of the oldest olive landscapes in Europe, with trees on it that are measured in centuries rather than decades. It is also close to the northern edge of the Xylella front, which has moved up the peninsula from Gallipoli since 2013.
What that means on the bike is a landscape in transition rather than a uniform one: stretches of intact ancient grove, stretches of standing dead trunks, and stretches of cleared ground with young resistant varieties planted in rows. It is genuinely striking to ride through and it is not what the brochures describe. It also means less shade than you would expect from a photograph, and the difference gets more pronounced as you go south on later stages.
Torre Canne and the coast
The route reaches the sea around Torre Canne, and from there the character changes completely: flat, open, exposed, with the wind coming straight down the coast at you. This is your first taste of what stage 3 is like for a whole day, in the direction that makes it hard rather than the one that makes it fast.
Monopoli at the end of it is the best town on the northern half of this route to spend an evening in: a working fishing port with an old centre that has not been prettified out of existence, and enough of a town to have a proper choice of places to eat. It is also on the main railway line, which matters if you want to shorten the route or shuttle a stage.
When to ride it
Early, and with the wind forecast in front of you rather than behind. The Tramontana — the northerly — is described locally as blowing for three or four days at a time, which matches the station data showing north dominant for the whole warm season. On a stage that runs north, that means a headwind here is rarely a single bad afternoon: if it is against you today it may well be against you the day after.
The practical response is to ride this stage on the calmest day of your week rather than the most convenient one, and to keep the long flat southbound stage for the windiest. Same total distance, considerably less suffering. Wind by month.