Panoramic bike tour of Ferrara
Meet your guide at Ferrara's main Train Station, where you will pick-up your bike and start the tour.
Starting with a look at the Po's bank, a central point for the growth and development of the city, you will then ride towards the Church of S. Giorgio fuori le Mura, with its characteristic and slighlty slanted bell-tower and where the tomb of Cosmè Tura, painter of the Estensi family, lays. You will then return inside the city walls in order to reach S. Antonio in Polesine, an outsanding monastic complex of the Thirteenth Century, with its sacred atmosphere and that hosts a cloistered convent of Benedictine nuns.
You'll take a look at Ferrara's main square, with its amazing Cathedral in Romanesque style and the City Hall, where you will be dragged into the history of the Estensi family, who paved the way to the Renaissence in Emilia Romagna. A stop at the Estense Castle is therefore mandatory: an incredible fortress that still stands in the city centre, surrounded by its moat.
Afterwards, you will ride along the city walls, completely suitable for cycling, and from where you will be able to ammire a part of the city which is inside the city walls but still submerged in the green countryside of Ferrara. From here you will take a glimpse of the Certosa, the monumental graveyard.
You will then head towards Urbano G. Bassani's park, a green area of 1,200 hectares also known as "the Green Addition", that engloves a series of gardens equipped with all the facilities for the Dukes of Este's personal free time and entertainment.
A ride through the famous Corso Ercole I d'Este, boulevard named after the Duke who commisioned the enlargement of the city during the Renaissence, will take you to the cross-over of two of the main Streets of the Addizione Erculea , where the famous Palazzo dei Diamanti, with its incredible shape due to over 8000 pyriamidal stones, stands.
You will then ride through the Massari Park, an English-Style garden with its secular Lebanon Cedar trees, and into Piazza Ariostea, a huge eliptic area where the oldest Palio in the world still takes place nowadays.
The tour will end at the main Train Station, where you will deliver your bike.
