Tuscan Maremma Grand DeTour — North Loop

Independent arrival · hotel check-in

The Grand Tour of Maremma starts from the city that’s both the beginning and the end of the loop.
After dropping your bags at the hotel, a walk through the narrow streets of the old town is non-negotiable.
The pace here is calm and unhurried — a long way from any big city.

Before leaving Grosseto’s old town, walk the Medici Walls: a green, fully pedestrian corridor that wraps around the oldest part of the city.
Then you get in the saddle.
Before leaving the plain, there’s a stop at Roselle: you walk among the remains of a city that started as Etruscan and later became Roman. The journey back in time continues at Vetulonia.
The climb to Vetulonia is the first real test for your legs. At the top, a village of just over a hundred people — but one look around and you’ll see there’s more here than a sea view. Like Roselle, Vetulonia was one of the most powerful city-states in ancient Etruria. The descent brings you back to sea level through the Diaccia Botrona Nature Reserve, where pink flamingos move slowly through the shallow water. The day ends in Castiglione della Pescaia.

There’s a beach in Tuscany where the sand sounds like a violin. It’s not a legend: it’s called Cala Violina, and you’ll reach it on this third stage. You’ll approach by bike, following a road that winds through Mediterranean scrubland — the same road the Grand Duke’s soldiers patrolled in the 1500s, which is why it’s called the Via dei Cavalleggeri.
55 kilometers with the scent of rosemary and salt mixing as you get closer to the water. Cala Violina’s sand, its coastline, and the scrubland around it have made it one of the best-known beaches in Tuscany.

You leave the sea behind and climb inland. Before the big finish, there’s a stop that’s worth the whole route: Lago dell’Accesa, where you can swim and rest. Steps from the lake, Etruscan remains. The archaeological site is free to enter.
From here you head to Massa Marittima. A village where Piazza Garibaldi and the Cathedral with its stone staircase open up suddenly after the climb — one of those breathtaking moments no photograph can quite capture.
You have to see it for yourself.

On this fifth stage, you ride to a place where the earth breathes. The Parco Naturale delle Biancane, just outside Monterotondo Marittimo, looks like nothing you’ve seen so far: white steam rising from the ground, mud pools bubbling, the sharp smell of sulfur in the air. Geothermal energy in its rawest form.
The place is so unusual it’s sometimes called the Iceland of Maremma. The Museo MUBIA is definitely worth a visit, and on the way back, Monterotondo Marittimo itself: a village powered entirely by geothermal energy.

64 kilometers, nearly 1,200 meters of climbing: the kind of day on a bike you don’t easily forget. The destination? Villages still untouched by mass tourism.
Places that are still lived in, day after day, at a slow pace.
Prata is one of them: a small, quiet village tied to the story of Pia de’ Tolomei — the woman Dante mentions in the Purgatory, in one of the most famous passages of the Divine Comedy.
From Prata you ride to Tatti, a village where the narrow lanes feel like stepping straight back into the Middle Ages.
Roccatederighi suddenly opens with a view over the Maremma that alone is worth the climb. Then Casal di Pari: birthplace of Aurelio Galleppini, the illustrator who created Tex Willer — the iconic protagonist of Italy’s longest-running Western comic series. A hamlet of a few houses that shaped the cowboy imagination of millions of Italian readers. The day ends in Pari, overlooking the Farma and Ombrone valleys.

The day starts downhill, toward the Terme di Petriolo. Sulfur water at 43°C, ideal for a soak, flows down into the Farma river. The route then passes through Paganico, a walled village where the medieval fortress of the Cassero Senese can still be seen amongst the building to this day. The ride continues through gentle rolling hills to Batignano, where the castle ruins overlook the Grosseto plain.
From here you descend to the archaeological site of Roselle and take the bike path back to Grosseto, where the loop closes and the journey ends.