Five bamboo bikes, one thousand miles: riding the Mille Miglia route through Italy

In the summer of 2019, five hand-built bamboo bikes lined up in Italy to ride roughly a thousand miles — following the route of the legendary 1955 Mille Miglia.

The idea

The Mille Miglia was an open-road endurance race that ran through northern Italy twenty-four times between 1927 and 1957. Its most famous edition was 1955, when Stirling Moss and his navigator Denis Jenkinson won in a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR at an average of just under 100 mph — a record that has stood ever since. The course looped out of Brescia, down to Rome, and back again.

We wanted to ride the same route at our own pace, on bikes we'd built ourselves.

What we did

A group of us took five bamboo bikes — every frame hand-built in our London workshop — out to Italy and set off on the old Mille Miglia loop: starting and finishing in Brescia, and rolling through Rome, Florence and Bologna along the way. Natural canes next to torched finishes, road tyres next to wider rubber; each frame built to its maker's own choices.

The outcome

The bikes covered roughly a thousand miles of Italian roads — climbs, long flat stretches, and everything in between. They were ridden, not displayed: a real test of frames that were wrapped and cured by the people riding them.

Why it matters

A thousand miles on a frame you built yourself is about as honest a test as bamboo gets. It tests the bike, the legs and the friendships — and it shows that a hand-built bamboo frame isn't a novelty piece, it's something you can trust on a serious ride.

Proof and links

• Original announcement: Tour de Sands, Bamboo Bicycle Club blog
• Companion post: "Over the summer five of our bikes cycled 1000 miles through Italy — all hand-built"
• Background: 1955 Mille Miglia (Stirling Moss & Denis Jenkinson)