The Run To

The walk to dinner in Santo Stefano di Sessanio comes with its own soundtrack. A harpist round one corner, a drummer round the next, the whole village dressed four centuries out of time. The Run to Palio was never just about the driving.



Yesterday: wine, ice cream, horse acrobats. Today: just the Apennines and a black Huracán making the most of every bend.

Day one, lunch stop. Local wine, ice cream with our name stamped through it, and a troupe of horse acrobats doing things on horseback that shouldn’t be possible. The pauses between the driving are half the reason we do this.

Palio’s always been about colour and pageantry.
We just swapped in horsepower.

You stop more than you think you will.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about a road like this. You plan the driving, and then you spend half the day pulled over on a gravel shoulder with the engine ticking, not saying much.
Olive groves all the way down to the water. A road that takes an hour to get nowhere in particular.
The Ferrari did the hard bit. We just kept finding reasons to switch it off.

The driving is worth the trip on its own. It just isn’t the whole trip.
First night in Rome, in the gardens of a Renaissance villa, a full orchestra under the trees and a woman floating above it on a cluster of balloons.

Then you walk back down to the car and drive out past the Colosseum, with half of Rome watching.

There’s another evening at the other end of the road. There always is.

Everyone talks about Monaco. But most of the run is Andalusian mountain road, and nobody was in any real hurry to arrive.
Four days of it, between the Sierra de las Nieves and the Grazalema gorges.

Love, The Run To x

That’s where lunch was. Parts of it have been standing since the 700s, and the road in curls round the foot of the hill, so you get a good few minutes of looking up at it before you arrive.
If it looks familiar, HBO borrowed it for Highgarden.

Júzcar was painted blue in 2011 to sell a Smurfs film. The deal was that Sony would paint it white again afterwards. When the year was out the villagers voted: 141 for blue, 33 for white.

So it stayed blue. And fifteen years later a convoy of supercars came round the corner and got comprehensively upstaged by a dog.

Slide six is where you see how much of it they painted.