Lorenzo Carlini, owner of the Hotel Florenz, says:
"In 1996, at the moment we took over Hotel Florenz, it soon sounded important to develop a tourism that could not reduce the season just at a bathing tourism.
The chance meeting with Andrea Gallo -an important free climber of Finale Ligure- helped us to clear up how: “If you think to develop your hotel dedicating it to climbers, you are taking a wrong way, the real future of Finale Ligure is MTB”. The further step was to present myself enthusiastic to an importer of high level mountain bikes, Mauro Bertolotto, with whom I would have share the further 10 years.
Another decisive encounter was with a colleague hotelier, the keeper of Hotel Medusa – Marco Marchese – that seemed discouraged because of hotel association seemed not interested in such a kind of tourism. But after a series of meetings we pull out the great energy of the group and we perceived the great possibility of the available trails net and the will to develop the marketing of MTB.
The need to have an event that could make like a resonance box for international medias was born and the opportunity happened with “Valtellina Bike Festival”, whose organizer was intended to develop the format outside Valtellina area.
In ’97 the finals of Valtellina Bike took place in Finale Ligure with the participation of Paola Pezzo, Huber Paluber, Tomas Frischknecht etc.. It was the first Blu Bike CUP. In ‘99, thanks to an intuition of Bertolotto, the group applied itself to the organization of the first Italian 24 hours. So the 24h di Finale was born and today it is at its 20th edition with the participation of more than 2000 bikers.
Today Hotel Florenz is frequented by a lot of bikers and also Cannondale chooses Finale Ligure, worldwide paradise for bikers, to present the new collection. An event that’s brought in our wonderful place athletes and journalists of world-wide renown."
