The old boy limps determinedly towards us, intent etched across his weathered face. “Here we go,” we think, struggling to finish our mouthfuls of cheese-and-bresaola rolls and sticky jam crostata. Had we parked our support vehicle in a restricted spot? Perhaps strayed on to the wrong cycle path on our approach?

As he arrives, his face softens. His bald head is creosoted by the sun, and he bears the distinctive tan lines around elbows and neck of the career cyclist. Ninety-three years young, he wants to talk bikes – surveying our super-light, carbon-fibre numbers like he might an old friend who’s had a facelift. His daughter keeps pestering him to sell his own aluminium racer, he tells us, but he’s resisting. “I like to go out to the garage in the evening and just stare at it,” he explains. “It makes me happy.”

Our nostalgic Florentine friend is in for quite some treat later this month. For not only is cycling’s showpiece event descending on his nation for the first time in its 111-year history, it’s practically passing his front door. Le Grand Départ, the nomadic, gospel-spreading Tour de France curtain-raiser, will feature three Italian stages, the tastiest of which is the opener, Florence to Rimini: 205km from the Cradle of the Renaissance to the Romagna Riviera via the unforgiving slopes of the Apennines. And we’re riding it.

A half-hour earlier we’d set off from beneath the crenellated walls of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence’s tourist-thronged Piazza della Signorina, as the Tour riders will do on June 29, and threaded our way across the Ponte Vecchio – dodging the selfie-snapping pedestrians who’ll be safely stowed away come race day. Then, through the haze of a late-spring Tuscan afternoon, we’d glided along the south bank of the Arno to the suburb of Bagno a Ripoli, start of the race proper and our nominated fuelling spot.

I’m riding with Jaron, a long-standing mate with a strong cycling pedigree and an even stronger cycling wardrobe. He looks every inch the Tour pro; I look like a rugby player with a driving ban. But our appreciation for this dangerously compulsive pastime runs equally deep, as it does for the third member of our makeshift team: Alessandro Piazzi. The 62-year-old is on support duty, driving a high-spec Elnagh campervan packed to its retractable roof with tempting victuals. A veteran employee of bike tour specialist Via Panoramica, Alessandro has the quiet self-assurance of someone who could incinerate you on a climb and be two cappuccinos deep by the time you reach the summit cafe.