Five things we loved about the Italian Bike Festival - and one thing we didn't

We’ve been just down from Rimini on Italy’s Adriatic Coast this weekend at the Misano World Circuit for the Italian Bike Festival, and it was fantastic. We’ll be taking a look later in the week at some of the highlights of the show, but in the meantime, here’s five things we loved – and one thing we didn’t.

You can test a bike on a Moto GP circuit, and headwind apart on the home straight and the one pretty much parallel to it, the feeling of riding on a circuit like that is amazing – pro tip if you do Strava, take easy on the first lap, then watch all those PBs arrive on subsequent laps.

However tough your day has been, you will meet someone who has had it tougher, but is still smiling.

You will see all kinds of weird and wonderful bikes; who doesn’t love the bastard child of a wheelbarrow and... well, we do not know what, but it is laden with crisps which makes it a winner in our eyes.

Loads of cool stuff – from the latest state-of-the-art bikes to, well, something like this which is guaranteed to bring a warm glow to any cycling fan of a certain age.

Doggies. No, seriously. Cute dogs everywhere. Of course, the two black mini schnauzers were my favourites for reasons that are well documented on this site.

No, no, no, no, and – at the risk of repeating ourselves – no. If we want to see this sort of thing, we’ll go look at Michelangelo’s David in Florence.