Bike - Gravel and Cyclocross
Gravel-bikes are bikes intended to travel mainly gravel and dirt roads, even better if white roads with a compact bottom or unpaved but not too rough tracks. No, the technical and steep paths of the most risky mountain biking are not the best bread for the teeth of a gravel bike, indeed, they are a context to be avoided, if only because on a technical, dimensional and geometric level a gravel bike is much closer to a racing bike than to a mountain bike. Get out of your head, however, to face a long granfondo stradistic riding a "gravel", it would be a deadly boredom and would mean mortifying the multifaceted character of this bike capable of ploughing different funds, even better if in search of adventure.
It is no coincidence that gravel biking was born in the USA, a boundless territory, an area where many secondary roads are still deliberately left unpaved, because they are too expensive to asphalt or maintain. These are roads often hundreds of miles long, and that, to understand, have characteristics of the bottom similar to those found in Italy on the comfortable dirt roads of "L'Eroica", the famous vintage cycling tour that takes place in Chianti. What has been happening for many years in the "States" is that those wide and long dirt roads are usually traveled by cyclists riding their mountain bikes: to tell the truth, the suspension of the mtb are decidedly oversized for those kinds of tracks, as well as the compact geometry of the mtb does not lend itself to roads where the speed of the vehicle is needed more than the ability to overcome technical obstacles. Precisely for this reason, overseas many have begun to approach those routes with the most performing cyclocross bikes. Over time this phenomenon has grown and as demand increases, the market has provided its answer, precisely going to codify this new generation of bicycle suitable mainly (but not exclusively) for the so-called "gravel road".
