Alessandro “Alex” Battaglin, son of legendary cyclist, Giovanni Battaglin, has launched a new eBook called The Fast Track Guide to Your First Gravel Bike, which as the title implies, is aimed at helping initiates to the world of gravel biking learn everything they need to know about the discipline and help them choose the bike and equipment that’s right for them.

In his book, Battaglin regals his childhood years, growing up in the glow of his father’s prominence as both a cycling luminary and later an accomplished artisan framebuilder. 

Indeed, The Track Guide to Your First Gravel Bike chronicles the earliest years when Battaglin Cicli was producing as many as a few hundred  frames a day, up until recent times when outsourcing to the Far East had a profound effect on artisan framebuilding in Italy.

Battaglin explains how this prompted him and his father to reassess their business model and create a new vision for the future, which included scaling back production in favor of smaller batch artisanal bikes, as well as diversification into other materials such as carbon fiber and new designs that capitalized on remerging trends like the gravel bike.

As a result, Battaglin Cicli has morphed into three separate companies, Officina Battaglin, which continues the proud tradition of old-world artisan framebuilding in steel, Battaglin Road Bikes that extols the same in-house principles of handmade frame making in carbon fiber and the newly created Full Dynamix brand that focuses entirely on the ever-popular segment of gravel grinding.  

The Fast Track Guide to Your First Gravel Bike is free, and it can be downloaded from the Full Dynamix website here. 

more about the book…