eurovelo 8 in Italy: planning your route Books, maps and GPS tracks

Published on:  | Last updated: 13 March 2018

Books and paper maps

If you’re looking for a guidebook or paper maps then your best bet is going to be the guide­books to the Ciclovia del Po by Claudio Pedroni and Antenore Vicari and published by Edicicloeditore. Both are in Italian, but in my exper­ience the maps from edicicloed­itore are pretty good and the accom­mod­ation listings are still useful even if your Italian is limited:

You can buy direct from ediciclo, but they are also available from amazon.it.

There’s a useful leaflet with a map of the Giordano Cottur/Val Rosandra cycleway. You can download it from discover-trieste.it: Pista Ciclopedonale Giordano Cottur (the page has a link to a pdf map).

For the stretches of the route in the Veneto the regional tourist promotion author­ities produce useful guides. These are available as pdfs, and you can also get paper copies from tourist offices. There’s also a book of all of the guides to the veneto.eu routes. This costs 7€ - but I don’t know how widely available these are. The pdf guides can be downloaded from the cycle touring section of the veneto.eu website (en/fr/de/it/es/pt/ru) is extremely useful. See in particular:

Example of the maps included in the veneto.eu guides. This shows a section of the 'Via del Mare'. (Not shown actual size).

Example of the maps included in the veneto.eu guides. This shows a section of the ‘Via del Mare’. (Not shown actual size).

Another useful set of maps are in the brochure promoting a cycle route between the Lago di Garda and the Adriatic. The guide is available from tourist inform­ation offices in the Ferrara and Mantova areas. It’s also available as a pdf from Dal Garda all’Adriatico (it/en/de).You can also download and print out pdfs of the guides (download links: en  | it  | de ).

Part of the Lake Garda to the Adriatic guide. Not shown actual size.

Part of the Lake Garda to the Adriatic guide. Not shown actual size.

Digital maps

You can view the official routes along the Po on the Bicitalia website:

  • Ciclovia del Po shows the route along the north bank
  • Destra Po shows the route along the south bank in the provincia di Ferrara from Gorino on the delta to Stellata di Bondeno.

Open Street Map has the most compre­hensive coverage of cycleways. (Note, if you’ve not used it before you need to click on the layers button in the top right-hand side of the map and then select the Cycle Map layer). There’s a key (legend) for the map here.

You can get the OpenStreetMap/OpenCycleMap for use on your Garmin GPS (sorry I don’t know about other makes of gps). You can make them yourself, but otherwise you can use the ready-to-go maps from velomap.org, openfietsmap.nl, and garmin.openstreetmap.nl (note: for coverage of the whole of the route through Italy you need both the West and Eastern Europe downloads).

You can also use these maps on a Mac/PC - although Mac users face an small extra step of converting maps to gmapi format using JavaWa Map Converter. This is really very straight­forward. (you can get gmapi format maps from velomap but there’s a small charge).

Openfietsmap map

Screenshot of an Openfietsmap map showing a section of the eurovelo8.

The VENTO route

There’s a Google map of the VENTO route - this is an extremely useful resource for the Po section of the route.

GPS tracks

The download package includes gps tracks for the sections of the route that I’ve ridden. For other sections I think it’s better, and more honest, to send you to
the place where you can find the gps tracks and download them for yourself. Obviously as I haven’t ridden these bits I can’t vouch for the quality of the route or the quality of the track although I would regard all of these sources as reliable.

In Friuli Venezia-Giulia

The Open Street Map maps show the eurovelo 8 as it arrives into Italy and then the Val Rosandra/Giordano Cottur cycleway out of Trieste to Draga Sant’Elia where it connects to the regional FVG2. The FVG2 takes you to Grado where it joins the Ciclovia Alpe-Adria Radweg (also shown on the OSM maps) which takes you to Aquileia.

The download package includes my tracks between Muggia and Duino, as well as my suggested connection with the Trieste cycleway. I have also included tracks for the route from here to Porto Tolle at the mouth of the Po.

In the Veneto

All the variants of the route through the Veneto are shown on the OSM maps. I have included tracks of the route I took. 

The polesineterratraduefiumi.it includes a Google map of the Sinistra Po (north bank) route between Porto Tolle and Ostiglia (click on ‘ Visualizza Sinistra Po in una mappa di dimen­sioni maggiori’ then download the kml file from Google Maps).

In Emilia-Romagna

The Sinistra Po cycleway is shown on the OSM maps as far as Ostiglia on the border with Lombardia. The Destra Po cycleway is shown as far as Bondeno. The ferraraterraeacqua.it includes tracks for the Destra Po from Ferrara to the coast and the route between Ferrara and Bondeno.

In Lombardia

The detour via Mantova is shown on the OSM maps as well as some stretches of the main route.

The Po cycleways website (lecicloviedelpo.movimentolento.it) has lots of useful downloads

In Piemonte

The Po cycleway is shown on the OSM maps from Casale Monferrato as far as Sanfront. The Via Pedemontana is shown from the inter­section with the Po cycleway as far as Cuneo - this is also included in the download pack including my suggestion for a quiet route out of Cuneo. 

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Articles in this series

This article is part of a series about the eurovelo 8 in Italy:

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