The Giro. It is Italy's own grand tour and takes place at the end of May and has been held since 1909.

The 1914 Giro was one of the toughest that ever took place with only eight, yes eight, finishers at the end of the Tour from a start number of 81. Some of the stages were in excess of 400km long, and the competitors would start at midnight, and ride for around 24 hours.

And it is was this infamous tour that Moore decides to replicate. He has also chosen to ride it on a bike that is 100 years old with wooden rims and cork brakes and some genuine woollen garment. None of your lycra in those days. He builds the bike, a Hirondelle, himself with a lot of help from able assistants and other mechanically adept people and following a scant amount of training, boards the plane to Milan.

Moore tries where possible to follow the original route, but as there was no map kept, and roads have changed then it is not always as easy to do. The lack of training is immediately apparent, as well as the the very sharp learning curve that is the Italian traffic system. He writes about his experience in hotels and guest house from the truly superb to the frankly appalling. He easts an awful lot of pizza and tries his best to reduce the Italian red wine lake.

Moore writes in an easily accessible style, he is witty and on occasions very very funny. He has a keen eye and there is plenty of detail of the people and place that he travels through on his own tour. It is not quotes as good as French Revolutions, his book on the Tour de France, but I really enjoyed it. ( )

A generally witty account of a man coming to grips with the seedier aspects of the sport that he loves while at the same time doing something very hard to get to grips with his sense of mid-life crisis. Having not read any of Moore's earlier books I can't say how it stacks up against those stories but I enjoyed this one well enough. There is the Chekovian element of suspense in that one wonders for the duration of the book whether the warnings about the dodgy structural integrity of the vintage bike that Moore is attempting his adventure on come to pass. ( )

I've been a fan of Tim Moore since the release of his first book "Frost on my moustache", way back in the early 1990s, so I was pumped to see it for sale at an airport bookshop just prior to a long-haul flight. And while, like Moore's bicycle's back tyre, I was somewhat less pumped by the end of the book, it was full of moments of great humour (also note my "pumped" gag).

Moore decides to retrace the steps of the "worst bicycle race ever", the 1914 Giro d'Italia, on a one hundred year old bike he fixed up himself. Personally, I'd have picked something somewhat easer to retrace but a man's got to have a hobby, I guess.

At it's best, Moore is his hilarious best, aiming his most vicious barbs at himself, but it seems at times like I've read this before, which in a case we have. Moore's earlier "French Revolutions" covered about everything I wanted to know about bicycling but Moore covers much of the same ground here and there's only so many ways one can describe feeling absolutely knackered after riding up a mountain.

My favourite sections of "Gironimo" are Moore's retelling of the 1914 tour and the unbelievably bad conditions the riders had to deal with. My hats go off to the finishers, for coming away alive and relatively unscathed (in most cases).

As an aside, I found that Moore looks a lot like former England cricketer Graeme Swann, which was unnerving for some reason. ( )

Absolutely brilliant account of Tim Moore's bike ride around the most terrible Giro of 1914. Tim's writing is hilarious and I laughed out loud many, many times. ( )

Very disappointing. The Stephen Mangan read extracts on Radio 4's Book of the Week fooled me into thinking that this would be witty and informative both about Tim's own journey and the 1914 Giro D'Italia. Instead Mr Moore appears to be most interested in himself, rather than Italy, the route he rode or the 1914 race. His writing style is crude and juvenile witty and he appears rather up himself. Won't read another. ( )