Leonardo Scarton’s Hundred Maps: From Italy to Japan Along the Cultures of the Silk Road

Welcome back to BAMtastic, our series where we interview travellers who amaze and inspire us with their stories and experiences.

We managed to talk to Leonardo. We stumbled upon him thanks to his beautiful travel videos, and what immediately caught our attention was this: we’re used to cyclists travelling by bike and doing extraordinary things. With Leonardo, we got the opposite impression: he’s a traveller who almost by chance chose the bicycle to explore the Silk Road.

His name is Leonardo Scarton, @leonthesilkroad on social media, and he learned to ride a bike at 19. He only got his first bike two years ago.

Today, on that very bike, he is travelling the ancient route connecting Italy to Japan.

But reducing his journey to kilometres, mountain passes crossed or countries lined up on a map would probably be the least interesting way to tell his story. The most obvious one.
For Leonardo, the bicycle is first and foremost a tool for connection. A slow and vulnerable way of travelling through places, meeting people and trying to understand how cultures, languages, religions and communities change as you move eastwards.

We reached him (unfortunately only by phone) while he was in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, after around eight months on the road and after crossing the vastness of the Mongolian steppe.

Before getting on a bicycle and setting off from Italy towards Japan, who was Leonardo?

Defining yourself is always the hardest thing.
I lived in Garbatella, Rome, until I was 19. I think my passion for travel came later, perhaps during university, when I started getting into the mountains and trekking.
I’d already had a strong fascination with Asia for quite some time, with that whole world that includes China, Japan and cultures we practically never study back home.
As a child, though, I had a huge passion for archaeology. Then, as I grew up, I completely abandoned it, almost without realising.

Maybe that instinct I had as a child became, twenty years later, the engine that drives me to do what I do today. It’s just that for many years it remained completely dormant.
I studied economics because, to be honest, I had absolutely no idea what to study. Then I tried to save myself at the last minute by choosing environmental economics.

As a field of study, it’s wonderful: you deal with regeneration, forests, renewable resources and how to preserve them over time. I don’t want to use the word “sustainable”, because by now I prefer to avoid it.
The problem came when I entered the working world. I did an internship at the United Nations, at the FAO. It had been a huge ambition of mine, but when I got there I found myself facing mostly grey bureaucracy.
Then I worked in private consulting, like so many people my age. And I actually have to thank consulting, because it gave me the money to travel and, above all, taught me a method that I now use to structure my research too.

But it’s brutal work. It completely drains you.

That’s where the idea came from that, if I had to choose a future, I wanted it to be something capable of bringing me back into contact with nature and the outdoors. If I have to work, I want to do it in that world, because that’s where I feel good.
In the meantime, I had met Sayaka, my wife. We first met in 2018 and then found each other again in 2022. She really encouraged me to pursue this project. Having someone beside you who believes in you and in your dreams makes an enormous difference. I’d say it’s almost essential.

Your journey, though, doesn’t seem to be simply a trip from Italy to Japan. Behind it there’s a huge amount of cultural, geographical and anthropological research. How did you build it?

The idea was to try to understand the nuances between different peoples. To travel from Italy to Japan and observe how humanity changes along the way, trying to understand both the present and the past. Because I think you can only truly understand the present when you start studying its roots.
To prepare, I used countless websites, resources, ethnographic studies and, above all, maps. Maps, maps, maps.

I constantly have them on my phone.

They help me know, for example, that Kazakh communities live in western Mongolia, that in the north there are populations with shamanic traditions, and that in the south you find the peoples of the Gobi.
They’re starting points.
You can’t expect to completely study the customs, traditions and history of every population you encounter. What interests me first of all is knowing: who lives here?
Then, when you arrive and start talking to people, curiosity takes over. You discover that yurts in western Mongolia are built differently from those in the east or north. That shamanic rituals are more deeply rooted in certain areas, while elsewhere you find Buddhist or even Christian communities.

For me, this is one of the greatest pleasures of travelling.
These are all things you could easily read about in a history or anthropology book, but experiencing them has a completely different impact. Today I can connect that information to images and specific moments. If you asked me where I was from day one to day two hundred, I could probably tell you every single city and even what I ate there.
Your brain helps you build these connections. Reading a book allows you to learn, of course. But living it is different.

As I was listening to you, I was thinking about Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino and, inevitably, Marco Polo. In a way, centuries later and with a completely different means of transport, you’re retracing some of the routes travelled along the Silk Road. Is there a place you’ve encountered so far that you feel you should write much more about? An absurd city that turns from imaginary into real?

It’s difficult to answer because, first of all, I try to avoid cities.
But if I think of a place, I’d definitely say Tajikistan, and the Pamir in particular.

The Pamir is a sort of holy grail of adventure cycling. I think I met more cyclists there than during the entire rest of my journey. One of the things I find most fascinating is observing how these populations developed within the different valleys. With no tunnels, for centuries mountains created much stronger lines of separation than rivers did. To the south you have Afghanistan and to the north Tajikistan: along certain stretches of the border you essentially find the same people speaking the same language, today separated by a political border.

But within Tajikistan itself, moving from the Wakhan Valley to the Pamir Valley, you can encounter different peoples speaking different languages. I find that incredibly fascinating. I’d love to understand much more about who the Wakhi are, who the Pamiris are, who the Tajiks are. And above all, to understand what is happening between the two sides of the Wakhan Valley.

A hundred years ago, they were essentially the same people. Today, on one side, in Afghanistan, you find a society in which half of the population, the female half, is heavily repressed and does not have the freedom to go out, attend school, go to university or freely access medical care. On the other side you have Tajikistan which, despite all its poverty, is a society where women have a completely different level of freedom. And I also found a level of happiness among people that surprised me.

It’s something I perceived differently, for example, in Georgia, where poverty seemed to be experienced in a much harsher way. Or here in Mongolia, where many people tell me that in recent years huge numbers of young people have been moving towards the capital in search of new job opportunities and a better future, which then isn’t necessarily better at all. Nomadic life is losing its central role. Families are getting smaller, family units more restricted. In Tajikistan, on the other hand, especially in rural areas, I could still strongly feel the presence of the extended family, with all the children and an extremely vibrant social fabric. It’s a world I’d really like to study and tell more about.

On every sufficiently long journey, statistically speaking, sooner or later you reach “the place where everything goes wrong”. The place where everything seems to fall apart. Has it happened yet?

I’ve never really had the feeling of being in trouble and not knowing how to get out of it.
I’ve had lots of small difficulties. In Georgia, for example, the problem was dogs. In Afghanistan, Kazakhstan and here in Mongolia, the wind. In Tajikistan I had food poisoning and was really, really sick, to the point where I had to stop.

Perhaps, of all the places, the Wakhan Valley was the most difficult section. I was riding that stretch with Dario, a friend of mine from Rome. In two days he got eight punctures. In eight months of travelling, I’d had three in total. Incredibly bad luck. At one point he had to go back to town along completely destroyed roads: it took him practically an entire day to cover eighty kilometres. I, meanwhile, developed a severe rash on my leg, perhaps an infection, and had to go to a small hospital. Everyone there was incredibly kind to me.
But fortunately I’ve never thought: “I’m really in trouble and I don’t know how I’m going to get out of this.”

Now you’re in Mongolia: an enormous and very sparsely populated place. I imagine solitude has become an important part of the journey. Do social media help with that?

Absolutely.

Not so much because of editing the videos, but because they allow me to stay in touch with people. There are people who have commented on almost every video I’ve posted for the last two hundred days and, inevitably, a kind of bond develops. I also receive feedback on the feelings I try to express in my texts or videos. Sometimes other people point out things I hadn’t even realised myself. From that point of view, I really don’t feel alone. One of the things I feel I’ve given up most during this journey is precisely being part of a community. When you stay in one place, one of the best things you can do is build a social fabric around yourself, a support community. It’s something you learn very clearly while travelling through the rural areas of these countries. Because I’m constantly moving, I don’t have that community.

Every day I meet different people, maybe I have an amazing time with them, but the next day I have to say goodbye. Social media, even though they’re full of people I often have no idea who they really are, partly fill that void. Replying to every single comment is good for me. Sometimes it’s an exchange of ideas, other times it’s simply a bit of conversation. But in the evening or the following morning, it feels good to have had that contact.

Then you set off again and spend the whole day alone.

You said that initially the bicycle was mainly an economical means of transport. What has it become now?

I initially discovered the bicycle precisely as an economical means of transport. Only later did I realise that it was also a way of connecting with other people.

You’re exposed.

You don’t have a full-face helmet, you’re not enclosed inside a vehicle or behind a dashboard. You’re in a position of vulnerability towards the outside world, and so other people approach you much more easily. Today, yes, I can say that the bicycle has become my means of transport.

And you travel pretty light too. How much does everything you carry weigh?

Twenty-five kilos, including the bicycle.

The bike weighs eleven kilos and I carry around fourteen kilos of gear, including water. The bike is a Cinelli Bootleg Geo, a gravel bike. I run a gravel tyre on the front and a road tyre on the back.

The front gives me traction, while the rear helps me roll faster.

As for bags, I have a saddle bag, a frame bag, a handlebar bag, one bag under the down tube and another on top of the top tube.

And what are you missing?

Nothing. I have everything. I don’t carry a razor, scissors and lots of other things that I can easily find when I reach a town. Everything I carry with me has to be something I use practically every day.

Obviously, I have winter clothes for the cold and summer clothes for the heat. But if I can find something in a town, or if I only need it once a week or once a month, I don’t carry it. To shave, cut my nails or do anything else, I wait until I reach a town.

I also carry very little for bike repairs: patches, glue, Allen keys and two inner tubes. That’s it. I travelled in Kazakhstan with a guy called Giacomo who had brought practically everything imaginable. Then his bottom bracket broke. How do you repair a bottom bracket in the middle of nowhere? You can carry spare spokes and tools to repair all sorts of things, but in the end the one thing that breaks is always the thing you can’t fix. In Mongolia, for example, his pedals broke. So I decided to carry only what’s absolutely essential: what I need when I get a puncture or when I have to tighten the brakes. Everything else I sort out in town. If I ever had a really serious problem, which fortunately hasn’t happened yet, I’d stop a car, hitchhike and get somewhere where I could fix it.

You learned to ride a bike at 19, you don’t come from a cycling background and before setting off you mainly went trekking. After eight months, you still don’t feel like throwing the bike into a ravine and continuing by hitchhiking?

Absolutely not. In fact, today I genuinely love the bicycle as a means of transport. And by now I have a kind of debt towards the Leonardo of the past. I suffered so much to get this far that, if I threw the bike away today, I’d feel as though all that effort had been wasted.

I have to get home. I have no alternative. That said, the Mongolian steppe is something extraordinary. It’s incredibly introspective and allows you to spend a huge amount of time with your own thoughts. But after twenty days it becomes exhausting. The interesting thing is that it doesn’t weigh on me as much as I would have imagined. I think that if I had started the journey directly in Mongolia, I would have come out of it completely devastated. The fact that I arrived here after accumulating all the experiences that came before is helping me enormously.

They’re a bit like the stones that, one after another, form the line of the arch that creates the bridge. As Polo would say in Calvino’s book.
Back to more down-to-earth matters, when are you expecting to arrive in Japan?

I should arrive around October 10-15. And on November 8 I’ll be home. Home, by now, is Japan. I live there and I have to establish residency with a spouse visa. The plan is to live and work in Japan.

There’s one thing we want to make clear, though: this isn’t simply “a bicycle journey to reach your wife”.

Exactly. A lot of the time people interview me and the story that comes out in the end is: “Leonardo travelling for love”. But I’ve never said that. I’m doing this journey for myself. The fact that my wife was in Japan and studying extremely hard for an exam simply created the time and circumstances that allowed me to do it. But I’m not going to Japan because she’s stuck there and I have to reach her.

The journey comes first and foremost from a need of my own.

Last question, the one we always use to close BAMtastic. Do you have a guiding spirit? It could be a writer, a musician, a philosophy, a person or anything you feel close to in difficult moments and in the good ones.
Monkey D. Luffy. The one from One Piece. And I’m not joking.

He’s a reference point for everything I’m doing. I have an image of him on my bicycle, a piece of paper that I carry with me. And one of the first things I want to do when I arrive in Japan is go to his statue, raise a toast to him and thank him for giving me the strength to embark on this adventure. He’s been a reference point for me since I was a child. He’s a crazy person who lives with a smile and believes in his own dreams and in other people’s dreams.

So yes, I’d definitely say he’s my guiding spirit.

So thank you, Luffy. We hope to see you soon, in a little restaurant in a Japanese mountain village or, who knows, at BAM! 2027.
Who can say.

For now, there’s one thing we can definitely say: have a good ride.

Here are Leonardo’s links:
Insta: https://www.instagram.com/leonthesilkroad?stkn=MW84eTR1N2FrZmx6bQ==

YouTube channel:
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMRvxMuqOsnFBBtWsVOHe0Wi2kVWT26jw&si=R-ShESK3KP7j70bP