Books are journeys. You travel through a story or a tale, through a life or an era, with your eyes and with your heart, with memory or with imagination. Books help you travel, and they don't necessarily have to be manuals. You travel while standing still or lying down, on a train or in a bathroom, in a tent or in a hotel, with fantasy or in memory. Books give you a direction, they build a bivouac, they offer a destination, but they also give you meaning, they create consciousness, they discover liberation. The most beautiful journeys are made on a book, by reading it.

Books are also travel companions. For his Venice-Beijing bicycle journey, Alberto Fiorin traveled with Marco Polo's "Milione". One hundred days on pedals (and pages), in which the first glance was the road, the first heartbeat was home, the first shiver was a surprise, and perhaps already the anticipation of surprise. However, the first comparison was with that ancient journey that had become a travel companion, the description of that journey from over 700 years before. Until the last day when Fiorin "obstinately pursued it" and finally found himself facing the Marco Polo Bridge in Beijing. "And on this river there is a very beautiful stone bridge. And I tell you to the world there is not one made like this, because it is well 300 paces long and eight wide, so that 10 horsemen can well go one beside the other; and there are 34 arches and 34 pillars in the water; and it is all of marble and columns, made as I will tell you (...). And so it goes along the entire bridge, so that it is the most beautiful thing to see in the world".

Fiorin pedaled from Venice to Beijing at least five times. The first time when, excited, he planned the journey. The second time when, moved, he did it not only with Marco Polo on paper but with his friend Dino in flesh, after "a Fantozzi-like failure in 2001". The third time when, having returned this time by plane, he told the journey in dozens of meetings. The fourth time when, committed, he wrote and described it. The fifth time when, now, grateful, he remembers it, finds it again, repeats it through this "Marco Polo on Pedals" (Ediciclo, 204 pages, 18 euros). The Silk Road. A path of adventure, knowledge, experience. Fiorin is honest to the end: "Certainly we made no extraordinary discoveries, in this world now completely unveiled, yet, in our small way, we too made extraordinary encounters in these boundless lands, we observed realities inconceivable to our eyes, we often went back centuries". Again: "We touched with our own hands the truth of what Paolo Rumiz keeps saying: 'Slow travel is the greatest antidote to national prejudices. It's the most direct confrontation with the Other, an invaluable tool of knowledge'. Our slow transhumance gave us the opportunity to observe different people and customs, cultivating the free and curious gaze that guided Marco Polo".

The world changes from one moment to the next, always faster than a week ago, let alone 700 years ago. Yet Marco Polo's journey and that of Fiorin with his friend Dino resemble each other in the geography of expectations and setbacks, in the maps of pitfalls and surprises, in the grammar of the strongest emotions and thus of another kind of journey, the interior one, intimate, personal, where you are always alone, a bit lost and bewildered, very willing and determined. The rest – so much, so very much – is easier to tell: from the Danube to Tiananmen Square, from camel caravans to columns of trucks, from their two bikes to a China where you no longer bike, from the mother of all apples to the triumph of plastic. They departed on April 25, arrived on August 1st, 2024, 81 stages, 10,500 kilometers. Marco Polo had taken not 99 days, but 24 years. "We had the opportunity – writes Fiorin – to approach an infinitely large world and we discovered and knew it in our own way, as infinitely small and infinitely slow, two stubborn little ants balancing on the thread of a single parallel, crossing half the planisphere". Even stubborn little ants pedal in their own small way.