All blame goes to Blaise Cendrars: "There is nothing more than Patagonia, Patagonia, that suits my immense sadness". Blame also goes to Bruce Chatwin: "No sound except that of the wind, whistling through thorny bushes and dead grass, no other sign of life except a hawk and a motionless cockroach on a white stone". Blame also goes to Luis Sepúlveda: "Patagonia is a part of me, of my sentimental inventory", "A landscape of the soul". Blame also goes to Paul Theroux: "When I finally arrived there, I had the sensation of landing in nothingness, in a non-place".

All blame goes to three men on a journey, three men on bikes, three men in "Patagonia" (Terre di mezzo, 160 pages, 22 euros): Francesco Frank Lotta, radio narrator on Radio Deejay, Paolo Penni Martelli, photographer, and Willy Mulonia, cycle traveler. Frank, Penni, and Willy, "the voice, the eye, and the heart": a thousand kilometers in a couple of weeks "at the world's edges", not to tell of a feat, but to "listen to stories, breathe new scents, fill our eyes with space and our skin with wind".

Part diary and part novel, part maps and many photos, part cycling and part psychoanalysis, part memory and part philosophy, especially that glacier of ice, that horizontal space, that dilated and stretched time, that intensity heightened by solitude and amplified by silence. And the encounters. Like the one with Mario: 94 years old, from Trentino origins, founder of a rare and remote bicycle shop, his birth cost his mother's life, his body now crushed by age, expropriating land from strangers to return it to local populations. "I never sought life, it found me. I was just open and predisposed to the path God had chosen for me". Or like the one with a tree: "It's not particularly tall, and it wouldn't even be beautiful by conventional standards: the crown is bare, the trunk color is a tired brown, but its position and the way it leans into the wind make you fall in love. Alone in the middle of nowhere, unique and isolated for kilometers, it's at the center of a desolate plain marked by infamous and constant currents".

This "Patagonia" reminds one to look and look at oneself, teaches how to stop and restart, warns to breathe love and friendship, invites distributing affection and respect. "Life runs fast". Even on a bike.