This self-led bike tour of Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna is a great way to bond with friends, featuring charming towns, medieval cathedrals and hard-to-beat cuisine A sunlit spring evening in the northern Italian city of Cremona: the warm breeze raises flurries of white, cottony poplar seeds that swirl around the piazza; swallows perform aeronautic displays, circling the 16th-century cathedral and its spectacula... [6939 chars]