Guide Profile: Frank Yantorno

CC guide Frank Yantorno does what he loves and it shows. He shares the story of his off-season life and tells of how he and his partner, Dana, have been able to make Italy home.

Many people have asked me, “What is it like to live, as an American, in a fairy tale place like Italy? How did you get there? How do you keep it together?”

I am a multimedia artist, and live with my sweetheart for the longest time, fellow CC guide and artist Dana. This winter we went telemark skiing in Val Senales with yet more CC guides and friends: Enrico, Suzie and G.P. Fosco When Ciclismo Classico talks about being a big family, it's true.

Right now, I am in the middle of a huge photo editing project archiving more than 18,000 images into a new system. My computer has been bonking. I know how that feels, so I am very patient.

Although I love my life as a guide, I consider myself first and foremost, an artist, then a cycling guide, then a mechanic, and lastly, an athlete. My art training helps me navigate the diverse cultures of guests on our tours; the tours and guests inform and inspire my art.

I've been a guide on Bike Across Italy more than 20 times, and Bike Across Italy II more than 15 times. I have close to 100 tours under my belt, yet every tour is a new experience. I believe the magic experienced by so many CC guests comes from the collective energy of the groups, and the family atmosphere we cultivate. This is why people come back to do our tours year after year and many do the same CC tour again.

I am a Colorado native with Italian immigrant grandparents from San Fili, Calabria. I have cousins who live there still, 30 minutes away from where we finish Bike Across Italy II.

I have both US and Italian citizenship. When we were kids, our uncles and grandparents made wine. My earliest cycling memory is riding my tricycle in my parents' unfinished basement, from barrel to barrel and wooden spigot to wooden spigot filling my borraccia (water bottle). The smell of fermenting wine is a common scent drifting all over Italy every year in the autumn. To this day, catching a whiff, while riding past someone's cantina, or on our many visits to wineries while on tour, brings back these childhood memories.

Our tour season coincides with the vendemia (grape harvest) season, so rather than make wine we collect very special honeys from all our travels around Italy, Sicily and Greece which we ferment into mead. We then distill it into a grappa-like ambrosian elixir. We have hopes of bringing it up to a small batch commercial production in the near future. It's a unique and ottimo digestivo!

I attended a Jesuit Catholic high school. My earliest introductions to art history happened as a result of a frustrated art-loving priest trying to teach Latin to a class of incorrigible high school boys. I remember zero Latin, but many of the art slides Father Becker showed us in Latin class had a profound effect on me.

While racing bikes (road and track) and working at my family's bike shop in Denver, I attended Metropolitan State College where I earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.

My Father was a dentist and sculptor, a Renaissance man. He was passionate about fine Italian Campagnolo bicycles. He rounded up the family of 6 to start a bike shop specializing in high-end Italian products which he imported directly. The bike shop helped pay for graduate school at New York University/International Center of Photography, where I earned a Master's degree.

I have a mechanic's certification from Campagnolo. This is my favorite certificate. It allows me the prestige of choosing to work on bicycles equipped with that symphony of Italian parts.

We sold the bike shop in 1991. I was finished with school and freed from family business obligations. So, thinking we (Dana and I) would take a year and play in the mountains before we got "real jobs," we moved to Aspen. Almost immediately, we saw there were no shops catering to a high-end custom road bike clientele, so we opened our own. Dana got a job at the Aspen Art Museum as a preparator and graphic designer, and I taught photography and photo history at Colorado Mountain College in the cycling off-season.

Our "one year of playing before we got real jobs" lasted nine years. At the shop we received catalogs from Ciclismo Classico, and would marvel at the itineraries; we knew many of the locations and had ridden many of the roads.

In 1999 we quit our jobs, sold everything and with $5000 we moved to Rome. Though my family had a house in Umbria and I had traveled around Italy growing up, I had never lived in Italy for more than a few months at a time.

Dana, on the other hand, attended Liceo Artistico (Italian Art High School) while growing up in Rome in the 70s. She already knew it well.  Upon arrival, she gave me her famous "touch every cobble stone in Roma” tour--and I never looked back.

After almost 100 tours with CC, I still may not have that "real job," but I have the best one in the world.