Umbria Region’s international cycling website, with a companion smartphone app, has 30 road bike routes, 22 for mountain bikes and 4 itineraries with stopovers. The road and MTB tracks are categorised by perceived difficulty according to distance, gradient and altitude gain.

The site ominously names this, Route 27, in the Difficult category, as “some seriously hard cycling across mountain passes of the Valnerina”. And it’s not joking. I ended up riding it in reverse, thanks to my Garmin having a moment near the start where the outgoing and returning tracks briefly overlap. This was not a bad thing because it meant that the longest, steepest climb was tackled when I was relatively fresh.

The ride is around 70 miles (112km) long, and I clocked 2,465m of climbing.

The route passes beneath a viaduct carrying the ex-Spoleto to Norcia railway line over the SS395 on the climb to Forca di Cerro. It is now a gravel/mountain bike trail — a jaunt for another day.