Can the GRAB Finally Transform Cycling in Rome
Rome has always been easier to love from a distance. Up close, its streets are a daily negotiation between ancient stone, speeding Vespas, diesel buses, and a road network that was never really designed for anything beyond the urgencies of the moment. Getting around the city by bicycle has, for most of its modern history, been an act of either heroism or folly. The GRAB, the Grande Raccordo Anulare delle Bici, or Great Bicycle Ring Road, is an attempt to change that. Whether it will actually succeed is another question.
The idea is elegant in its simplicity. The GRAB is conceived as a roughly 50-kilometre cycling loop connecting the centre of Rome to its outer neighbourhoods, threading together existing bike paths and newly built sections to create a single continuous ring. The route is extraordinary on paper. It passes the Colosseum and Palatine Hill, skirts the Baths of Caracalla and the Appian Way, cuts through the Quadraro neighbourhood, traverses the Valle dell’Aniene Nature Reserve, and winds through Villa Ada, Villa Borghese, Via Giulia, and Via dei Fori Imperiali. To ride it in full would be to experience Rome as few tourists, and even fewer Romans, ever have, not as a series of destinations but as a continuous landscape.
The project did not emerge from City Hall. It was conceived by cycling and environmental associations with the aim of promoting tourism while valorising Rome’s historical, artistic and natural heritage. It was formally presented by Legambiente and VeloLove in May 2015, more than a decade ago, and has since passed through the hands of several municipal administrations, survived bureaucratic gridlock, been promised for one occasion after another, and finally, in 2024, seen actual construction begin.
The delay is instructive. From the original presentation in 2015, it took until November 2024 for works to officially commence, nine years of plans, studies, funding rounds, political changes, and procedural obstacles. The project was linked first to the Jubilee of 2025, with Rome’s municipality committing to complete it in time for the millions of pilgrims expected to visit, an aspiration that was quietly dropped as deadlines slipped. Construction, when it finally arrived, was awarded directly to Astral, the regional mobility agency, to avoid further delays. All six construction lots must be completed by June 30, 2026, or Rome risks losing the PNRR funding that is financing the project.
The first section to be inaugurated, in April 2025, was approximately 300 metres of cycle path on Via di San Gregorio, beside the Colosseum, where the road was reconfigured to reduce traffic lanes and create a protected bike lane. It was a modest beginning for an ambitious project, and critics noted that a ramp at the start of the path had been hastily added in asphalt on the morning of the inauguration itself, after complaints on social media. Rome, it seems, cannot entirely help itself.
What is actually being built, though, is more substantial than the stumbling start suggests. Construction along Via Celio Vibenna, opened in January 2026, includes a physically separated cycle lane with a 50-centimetre protective kerb. A new lot opened in March 2026 in the Tor Pignattara area, where the cycleway now runs bidirectionally along Via Camillo Manfroni. On Via di San Gregorio itself, the intervention has been significant. The roadway has been cut from four lanes to two in each direction, and the non-traffic zone on the Palatine side has expanded from 5 metres to 15, a genuine reclaiming of urban space from the car.
The GRAB is integrated with Rome’s public transport network, intersecting metro, tram and train lines to enable intermodal travel, the idea being that it functions not only as a tourist attraction but as a practical artery for daily commuters cycling between the centre and the periphery. Whether Romans will take to it in those numbers is a cultural question as much as an infrastructural one. Rome is not Copenhagen or Amsterdam. It was not built for bikes, and its relationship with cycling has always been complicated by its topography, its traffic culture, and its political tendency to announce infrastructure boldly and maintain it badly.
But the potential is real. The original project designers noted that over 80% of the route runs through parks, green areas, riverbanks, pedestrian paths and low-traffic streets, meaning that much of the infrastructure was always latent in the city, waiting to be joined up. The GRAB does not impose a cycling city on Rome. It tries to reveal the one that was already, partially, there.
For visitors, particularly cycling tourists and urban trekkers the project is partly designed to attract, the completed ring would offer something genuinely rare. A way to experience the full arc of Rome, from its ancient centre to its twentieth-century periphery, on two wheels and without a car in sight. Whether that vision survives the June 2026 PNRR deadline, the vagaries of Roman construction, and a decade of accumulated scepticism is the open question. Rome has been promising this for ten years. The clock is finally running.
