Michele Minessi is a cyclist. Full stop. He is someone who simply likes to pedal from home or from not far away. He looks for his adventures in those spaces that we all look at as we speed along the motorway. He also sees those spaces flowing fast, but he takes note of them and then rides back there on his bike, with his Miss Grape bags loaded with many things, but above all with good food and an unfailing bottle of wine.
A mid-mountain bear, the kind that gets lost in the trees, that loves solitude, that shuns rallies, races and the sociality that very often is also synonymous with Gravel movement. He is not a loner, but a selective one. Because if you have to get lost in a mountain valley 50 km from your first home, better to do it with someone to whom you have to explain nothing, especially you don't have to justify how you ended up there. You just wanted to go there.

Because for Michele it is not the time or the destination that is important, but everything you experience along the way, even better if shared with a couple of friends, the right kind, the kind you don't even have to talk to because they understand everything at a glance. He doesn't like to recount his adventures, he loves living them and photographing them, trying to convey his feelings through still images... and most of the time he succeeds really well. He loves to get to the top of a mountain, to stop and sleep alone where no one else is and to see the mountain lights from above. He looks down and thinks about the people who are having a good time with him and wonders if they are the ones who are wrong or if he is the one who doesn't understand.

His passion for discovering the little adventures around his home began early on, as a child he would run off into the woods to build forts and invent battles with the imaginary beings that lived a few steps from his house, then he discovered the bicycle and the exploration on two wheels began.

It was an overwhelming love, but not monogamous. Because in the midst of adolescence there were other things to do, discos, parties, music, and the bike was gathering dust, but over time the dust became less and less and Michele began to choose the bike as his life companion, every day to go to work, every day to go up 'to the chalet' after work, always pushing the pedals a little further, never stopping.
He spends his day thinking about what to do on the bike, where to ride. Planning the trip, where to pitch the tent, where to bivouac, what to put in the panniers and what is the best way to load the panniers.

Gravel, enduro, road, any discipline is his discipline and if there is no bike there are the mountain shoes that always take him up, always looking at those little lights at the bottom and still wondering who is really doing it wrong. Inside him, though, the answer is obvious, because nothing in the world could keep him from leaving his front door and getting on his bike to go and discover another path, another corner so close that it can take you so far away. Because adventures to be adventures do not have to be far, they have to take your spirit far away.