Michele Minessi is a cyclist. Period. He's someone who simply enjoys pedaling, starting from home or nearby. He seeks out his adventures in those spaces we all glance at as we speed by on the highway. He too sees those spaces pass quickly, but he takes note and then returns on his bike, with his Miss Grape loaded with many things, but above all good food and an inevitable bottle of wine.
A bear of the mid-mountain, the kind who gets lost among the trees, who loves solitude, who shuns rallies, races, and the socializing that is often synonymous with the Gravel movement. He's not a loner, but a selective one. Because if you have to get lost in a mountain valley 50 km from your first house, it's better to do it with someone you have nothing to explain to, especially not to have to justify your idea of how you ended up there. You just wanted to go.
Because for Michele it's not the time or the destination that matters, but everything you experience along the way, even better if shared with a couple of friends, the right ones, the ones you don't even have to talk to because they already understand everything at first glance. . He doesn't like to tell his adventures, he loves to live them and photograph them, trying to convey his feelings about him through still images... and most of the time he succeeds really well. He loves to get to the top of a mountain, stop to sleep alone where there is no one else and see the lights of the mountain from above. He looks down and thinks of the people who are having fun in company and wonders if they are the ones who are wrong or if he is the only one who doesn't understand.
The passion for discovering the little adventures that surround his home was born right from the start, as a child he ran away into the woods to build forts and invent battles with the imaginary beings who lived a few steps from home, then he discovered the bike and exploration on two wheels began.
It was an overwhelming love, but not monogamous. Because in his mid-adolescence, there were other things to do—clubs, 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 lifelong companion, every day to go to work, every day to go up to the cabin after work, pushing the pedals a little further and further, never stopping.
He spends his day thinking about what to do on his bike, where to ride his bike. Planning the trip, where to pitch the tent, where to bivouac, what to pack in his bags, and the best way to load them.
Gravel, enduro, road, any discipline is his discipline and if there is no bike there are mountain shoes that always take him high, always looking at those little lights below and still wondering who is really doing it wrong. Inside him, however, the answer is obvious, because nothing in the world could stop him from leaving his front door and getting him on his bike to go and discover another path, another corner so close that it can take you so far. Because adventures don't have to be far away to be such, but they have to take your spirit far away.
