A great adventure has just started from Fiat's Lingotto headquarters in Turin, with the legendary Fiat 500. A journey of over twenty thousand kilometres, that will symbolically link Turin and Beijing, the next two Olympic capitals. At the end of the Games next year, the city of Turin will pass the Olympic baton to the Chinese capital that will host De Coubertin's modern Games for the first time.

The protagonists of this amazing journey are Danilo Elia and Fabrizio Bonserio, who will cross two continents in a 1973 Fiat 500 R bought for this occasion. The car is over 30 years old, and has covered thousands of kilometres on the streets of Rome; it has been completely overhauled, and some mechanical components have been replaced with original spare parts, with the help of Fiat workshops.

The programme envisages an average mileage of 2000 km a week, along major and minor roads to Tiananmen Square in Beijing, where it will park in front of the Museum of Chinese History, at the foot of the clock that is counting down the days remaining to the 2008 Olympics. It will certainly be an exhausting journey in a Fiat 500, and much of it will be on dirt tracks, but it will also be a fascinating adventure lasting twenty thousand kilometres, which the two travellers have been dreaming of for years, after numerous other exploits.
 
Danilo Elia, 32, is a passionate traveller. He began when he was an adolescent, crossing the whole of Europe from Bari to North Cape; he has travelled from Moscow to Ulan Bator in the legendary Trans Siberian Railway; he has toured Norway by bicycle, Iceland by mountain bike, Nepal by motorcycle, and Tibet by 4x4, and today he cannot wait to leave for Beijing in the sparkling beige Fiat 500.
 

Fabrizio Bonserio, 33, does not worry about details: East, West, North or South, it is all the same! An untiring driver, he has often accompanied Danilo. He has travelled to North Cape, from Bari to Minsk and again from Bari to Kaliningrad. He has spent long periods abroad, in the UK, the USA and Lithuania. Now he is anxious to put this great little car to the test in the Taklamakan desert.

The route

Danilo Elia and Fabrizio Bonserio leave Lingotto and Turin today, by major and minor roads, going through Novara, and reaching Milan tomorrow, where they will visit the Annicinquanta exhibition at the Royal Palace, and the brand new Fiat Café (inaugurated to coincide with the 2005 Furniture Show).

From there, they will go to Verona, Treviso and over the border into Slovenia at Gorizia. They will continue through Eastern Europe, Hungary and Ukraine to the Russian border. In Russia they will pass through Volgograd and Astrakhan, and into Kazakhstan at the delta of the Volga. They will follow the northern coast of the Caspian Sea and on to the Aral Sea.

They will cross Kazakhstan to the former capital of Almaty and then turn West into Kyrgyzstan and then Uzbekistan. Once they reach Tashkent, they will visit the legendary cities of Bukhara, Samarcand and ancient Khiva, and then they will head straight for Turkmenistan and the capital Ashkhabad, where they will turn East once again, along the ancient Silk Road.

Time and weather permitting, they will visit Kyrgyzstan; if not, they will head for the Torugart pass, through the Tien Shan mountains, the mythical Blue Mountains that for centuries were crossed by caravans going East. This will take them into Xinjang, the most remote and mysterious province of the immense territory of China. At that point they will be about 4000 kilometres from Beijing, which they should cover in about 10 days, across the Urumqi oasis, the province of Lanzhou and Inner Mongolia. They will pass the Great Wall of China and arrive in Tiananmen Square, with the first Fiat 500 ever to reach Beijing by land from Italy.

The rosiest predictions are that this epic journey will take at least a couple of months.