Ten months on the road, from deserts and mountains to a new life in Japan.Ten months after setting off from Italy, the Roman cyclist reflects on the deserts, mountain passes, unexpected kindness and moments of solitude that shaped his journey and the new life awaiting him in Japan.When Wanted in Rome first spoke to Leonardo Scarton in February, he was already several weeks into an extraordinary journey: cycling from Italy to Japan, carrying his belongings on his bicycle and sleeping in a tent. Born and raised in Rome's Garbatella neighbourhood, Leonardo had left behind a career in environmental consulting to pursue an idea that had been taking shape for years. His destination was Japan, where his wife was waiting for him. But he was careful to make one distinction. "I'm not going to Japan. I'm returning to Japan," he told us at the time. He also insisted that reaching his destination was not what mattered most. Thinking about the thousands of kilometres ahead would have been overwhelming. Instead, he concentrated on the next day, the next stretch of road, the next place to sleep. Now, ten months after setting off, Leonardo has reached Japan. Along the way, he has crossed deserts, climbed mountain passes at more than 4,000 metres, suffered a serious bout of food poisoning in Tajikistan and experienced the generosity of strangers in countries whose languages he often could not speak. Not everything went according to plan. In Mongolia, relentless headwinds forced him to abandon a planned crossing of the Gobi Desert and take a train to China instead. But perhaps the most significant changes have been less visible. What began as a physical challenge has become a reflection on time, solitude, human relationships and what it means to feel at home. As he approached the end of his journey, Wanted in Rome caught up with him again to find out what had changed since our first conversation and what comes next. When we spoke in February, you insisted that you weren't going to Japan, but returning to Japan. Now that you're there, does it feel like coming home? From Busan, I could have taken a ferry and arrived much sooner. Instead, making this final part of the journey slowly, knowing that I still had time to reach my destination by 8 November, has been really good for me. It's allowing me to gradually readjust to everyday life in Japan, even though I'm still far from home. And I really want to get home now. You also told us that you never thought about the destination, only about the following day. When did Japan finally become real? Only when I actually arrived in Japan. If anything, the further I've travelled, the more I've learned to live in the present. I still think about today and tomorrow, rather than the final destination. I don't think I've fully realised what has happened yet. I suspect that will only come once I'm home. What has changed is that I sometimes find myself looking back and asking what this experience has taught me. What have I collected along the way? What has become part of me? And how will I express all of that once I'm back? Because from now on, a new life begins. And that is just as exciting as the journey itself, perhaps even more difficult. Before leaving, you worried about the moment when your body would start demanding something in return. Did that moment ever come? In the end, my body held up remarkably well. I think the Sahara was physically the most destructive part of the entire journey, but not necessarily because it was the most difficult environment. It was because I was just starting out. The further I travelled, the more the bicycle became part of me. Putting up the tent, finding food, knowing how to move from one place to another, all these things gradually became completely normal. Both physically and mentally, everything became easier. You have a background in cartography and planned your route meticulously. Where did the map let you down? In the Gobi Desert. That was the one section I was forced to skip because maps don't show you what the weather will actually do. When you're facing sustained headwinds of 50 or 60 kilometres an hour, in a desert that would normally take seven days to cross, everything changes. At a certain point I asked myself whether the suffering would really be worth it. It was seven days of desert, all looking more or less the same, and I'd already spent around twenty days crossing deserts. I wasn't prepared to suffer for no reason. So from Ulaanbaatar I took a train directly into China. That's something the maps don't tell you. What was the hardest moment of the entire journey? When I became ill in Tajikistan. When you're healthy, you can deal with almost anything. A climb to 4,600 metres, rough dirt tracks in Mongolia, long stretches of desert, as long as your body is functioning, you can face those challenges. If you're tired, you stop. Then you start again. The real problem comes when your body is completely exhausted. In Tajikistan, I suffered a terrible case of food poisoning. I spent three days in my tent outside the home of an elderly woman who looked after me. She fed me, helped me eat and cared for me until I recovered. That was probably the most difficult experience of the journey. In Corato, someone told you to be like a mule: slowly, but always moving forward. Did you remember those words? Many, many times. Especially during the climbs in Tajikistan. We went from an altitude of around 400 metres to 4,600 metres. It took two weeks, and physically it was devastating. At that point, the only thing you can think about is taking one step at a time. Slowly, like a mule. In February, you told us that the world was far more welcoming than people imagine. After all these kilometres, do you still believe that? Absolutely. But I've also understood that hospitality takes different forms depending on the culture. In China, for example, particularly outside the western regions where different ethnic groups live, it's much less common for someone to invite you into their home. In Confucian-influenced cultures, including Japan, the family home is traditionally a private space, one that outsiders don't easily enter. But that doesn't mean people are less welcoming. Hospitality is expressed differently, through eating together, drinking together, sharing moments of conviviality. I think we have to be careful about what we mean by hospitality. The values themselves may be universal, but the way people express them changes enormously from one place to another. The world is a very big place. You once said that to undertake a journey like this, you have to be happy alone. What have these months taught you about solitude? I would say that, more than being happy alone, you need to be at peace with yourself. As the journey progressed, I became increasingly comfortable relying on myself. Everything became familiar, part of my everyday life. But I wouldn't even describe these months as particularly lonely. In reality, I was never truly alone. Every day I interacted with people. Sometimes many, sometimes just one or two, but there was always some form of human contact. And that's a huge difference compared with life in a big city like Rome. In Rome, you might see the same people every day, take the metro, bury yourself in your phone or a book, and barely interact with anyone. You can feel much lonelier in that environment than you do travelling. On the road, the people you meet may be complete strangers, but there's an empathy and a human connection that transcends language and nationality. It's simply one human being meeting another, and discovering how they can help each other. You also told us that you felt rich because you had time. Are you worried about returning to a life governed by schedules? Not really, because even during this journey I've had a routine. I have to wake up at dawn and start cycling. If I don't pedal, I don't reach the next destination. So in a sense, travelling also means living according to a schedule. The important thing now will be to establish a new routine. I'm about to lose the routine I've built over these months and begin a completely different life. I think it's essential to have new projects and to know how you want to organise your days. Otherwise, returning home after an experience like this can be very difficult. You can end up feeling lost. You said that boredom was productive. Has all that time on the bicycle helped you decide what you want to do next? Yes, absolutely. I've spent a lot of time imagining what I want my life to look like from now on. Several people have encouraged me to write a book. It was something I'd always had inside me, but I never felt capable of doing. Gradually, that idea has started to take shape. So when I get home, a large part of my routine will revolve around writing a book. It won't be a book about this adventure. I want to write a novel, something more ambitious and developed. Perhaps it will take a year or a year and a half. Alongside that, I want to learn Japanese cooking, start running again, improve my Japanese and work at the restaurant. There are so many things I want to do. And many of those ideas emerged during the moments of boredom on this journey. When we first spoke, you mentioned possibly working in your wife's family restaurant, which has been running for four generations. Is that plan clearer now? Yes, definitely. I'll be working at the restaurant, partly because I want to learn Japanese cuisine properly. And from April onwards, I'm also planning to organise trips around Japan. The idea is to offer something a little different: organised but also deliberately unstructured trips. I don't want to put together groups of strangers. Instead, I'd like to work with people who already want to travel together, whether they're friends or families. I've developed the concept, and now I need to work out the pricing. One thing that's very important to me is keeping these experiences accessible. I find it absurd that a trip to Japan can cost €3,000, often with flights excluded. I spent around €6,000 on this entire journey, so the idea of charging someone €3,000 for a holiday seems excessive to me. Of course, there are different ways of travelling. Someone might want a backpacking experience, while a family might prefer hotels and more comfort. I'm working on different price ranges to reflect that. But yes, the project is becoming increasingly concrete. How does Rome look from the other side of the world? And what do you miss about Garbatella? I feel that Rome is changing a lot, both for better and for worse. I'm particularly curious to see how the cycling infrastructure has developed. After twenty years of talking about improvements, it seems that some real changes are finally beginning to happen. Of course, when we talk about change in Rome, we're not talking about the kind of transformation you might see in Beijing or Seoul. But progress is progress, and we should recognise it. At the same time, I know that some places are losing their character. Garbatella, my neighbourhood, is becoming increasingly gentrified. Many of the places I used to go to are closing and being replaced by new businesses that, to me, often seem to lack a soul because they don't belong to the community I grew up in. But perhaps that's just the classic complaint of someone getting older. You leave a place and want everything to remain exactly as you remember it. Neighbourhoods change. Cities change. And that's part of life. In our first interview, you encouraged people with big dreams to focus on the first step rather than the final destination. What would you tell them now that you've actually done it? I think the idea is still the same. When something becomes so important to you that you feel you simply cannot live without doing it, you find a way to make it happen. As long as a dream remains something distant, something you look at through binoculars, you may never move towards it. It becomes real when you feel a visceral need to do it. That's what pushed me to undertake this journey. So I would say: listen to yourself and understand what you truly need. I have countless dreams. There are millions of things I'd love to do. But what really moves you is that deep need to express something that you genuinely feel is part of who you are. After ten months on the road, what's the first thing you'll do when you finally stop cycling? I'll have a beer. There are several things I've deliberately saved for the end of the journey. I haven't cut my hair in ten months, because getting a haircut will be part of the ritual of arriving home. And I haven't had a beer in a very long time. Sitting down at the table with my wife's father and having a beer together is another part of that ritual. I've been saving these small moments for the end. I think they'll mark a clear dividing line between this experience and whatever comes next. Read our first interview with Leonardo Scarton, published in February 2026, in which he discusses the origins of his journey, his preparations and why he chose to travel from Rome to Japan by bicycle.

Ten months after setting off from Italy, the Roman cyclist reflects on the deserts, mountain passes, unexpected kindness and moments of solitude that shaped his journey and the new life awaiting him in Japan. When Wanted in Rome first spoke to Leonardo Scarton in February, he was already several weeks into an extraordinary journey: cycling from Italy to Japan, carrying his belongings on his bicycle and sleeping in a tent. Born and raised in Rome's Garbatella neighbourhood, Leonardo had left behind a career in environmental consulting to pursue an idea that had been taking shape for years. His destination was Japan, where his wife was waiting for him. But he was careful to make one distinction. "I'm not going to Japan. I'm returning to Japan," he told us at the time. He also insisted that reaching his destination was not what mattered most. Thinking about the thousands of kilometres ahead would have been overwhelming. Instead, he concentrated on the next day, the next stretch of road, the next place to sleep. Now, ten months after setting off, Leonardo has reached Japan. Along the way, he has crossed deserts, climbed mountain passes at more than 4,000 metres, suffered a serious bout of food poisoning in Tajikistan and experienced the generosity of strangers in countries whose languages he often could not speak. Not everything went according to plan. In Mongolia, relentless headwinds forced him to abandon a planned crossing of the Gobi Desert and take a train to China instead. But perhaps the most significant changes have been less visible. What began as a physical challenge has become a reflection on time, solitude, human relationships and what it means to feel at home. As he approached the end of his journey, Wanted in Rome caught up with him again to find out what had changed since our first conversation and what comes next. From Busan, I could have taken a ferry and arrived much sooner. Instead, making this final part of the journey slowly, knowing that I still had time to reach my destination by 8 November, has been really good for me. It's allowing me to gradually readjust to everyday life in Japan, even though I'm still far from home. And I really want to get home now. Only when I actually arrived in Japan. If anything, the further I've travelled, the more I've learned to live in the present. I still think about today and tomorrow, rather than the final destination. I don't think I've fully realised what has happened yet. I suspect that will only come once I'm home. What has changed is that I sometimes find myself looking back and asking what this experience has taught me. What have I collected along the way? What has become part of me? And how will I express all of that once I'm back? Because from now on, a new life begins. And that is just as exciting as the journey itself, perhaps even more difficult. In the end, my body held up remarkably well. I think the Sahara was physically the most destructive part of the entire journey, but not necessarily because it was the most difficult environment. It was because I was just starting out. The further I travelled, the more the bicycle became part of me. Putting up the tent, finding food, knowing how to move from one place to another, all these things gradually became completely normal. Both physically and mentally, everything became easier. In the Gobi Desert. That was the one section I was forced to skip because maps don't show you what the weather will actually do. When you're facing sustained headwinds of 50 or 60 kilometres an hour, in a desert that would normally take seven days to cross, everything changes. At a certain point I asked myself whether the suffering would really be worth it. It was seven days of desert, all looking more or less the same, and I'd already spent around twenty days crossing deserts. I wasn't prepared to suffer for no reason. So from Ulaanbaatar I took a train directly into China. That's something the maps don't tell you. When I became ill in Tajikistan. When you're healthy, you can deal with almost anything. A climb to 4,600 metres, rough dirt tracks in Mongolia, long stretches of desert, as long as your body is functioning, you can face those challenges. If you're tired, you stop. Then you start again. The real problem comes when your body is completely exhausted. In Tajikistan, I suffered a terrible case of food poisoning. I spent three days in my tent outside the home of an elderly woman who looked after me. She fed me, helped me eat and cared for me until I recovered. That was probably the most difficult experience of the journey. Many, many times. Especially during the climbs in Tajikistan. We went from an altitude of around 400 metres to 4,600 metres. It took two weeks, and physically it was devastating. At that point, the only thing you can think about is taking one step at a time. Slowly, like a mule. Absolutely. But I've also understood that hospitality takes different forms depending on the culture. In China, for example, particularly outside the western regions where different ethnic groups live, it's much less common for someone to invite you into their home. In Confucian-influenced cultures, including Japan, the family home is traditionally a private space, one that outsiders don't easily enter. But that doesn't mean people are less welcoming. Hospitality is expressed differently, through eating together, drinking together, sharing moments of conviviality. I think we have to be careful about what we mean by hospitality. The values themselves may be universal, but the way people express them changes enormously from one place to another. The world is a very big place. I would say that, more than being happy alone, you need to be at peace with yourself. As the journey progressed, I became increasingly comfortable relying on myself. Everything became familiar, part of my everyday life. But I wouldn't even describe these months as particularly lonely. In reality, I was never truly alone. Every day I interacted with people. Sometimes many, sometimes just one or two, but there was always some form of human contact. And that's a huge difference compared with life in a big city like Rome. In Rome, you might see the same people every day, take the metro, bury yourself in your phone or a book, and barely interact with anyone. You can feel much lonelier in that environment than you do travelling. On the road, the people you meet may be complete strangers, but there's an empathy and a human connection that transcends language and nationality. It's simply one human being meeting another, and discovering how they can help each other. Not really, because even during this journey I've had a routine. I have to wake up at dawn and start cycling. If I don't pedal, I don't reach the next destination. So in a sense, travelling also means living according to a schedule. The important thing now will be to establish a new routine. I'm about to lose the routine I've built over these months and begin a completely different life. I think it's essential to have new projects and to know how you want to organise your days. Otherwise, returning home after an experience like this can be very difficult. You can end up feeling lost. Yes, absolutely. I've spent a lot of time imagining what I want my life to look like from now on. Several people have encouraged me to write a book. It was something I'd always had inside me, but I never felt capable of doing. Gradually, that idea has started to take shape. So when I get home, a large part of my routine will revolve around writing a book. It won't be a book about this adventure. I want to write a novel, something more ambitious and developed. Perhaps it will take a year or a year and a half. Alongside that, I want to learn Japanese cooking, start running again, improve my Japanese and work at the restaurant. There are so many things I want to do. And many of those ideas emerged during the moments of boredom on this journey. Yes, definitely. I'll be working at the restaurant, partly because I want to learn Japanese cuisine properly. And from April onwards, I'm also planning to organise trips around Japan. The idea is to offer something a little different: organised but also deliberately unstructured trips. I don't want to put together groups of strangers. Instead, I'd like to work with people who already want to travel together, whether they're friends or families. I've developed the concept, and now I need to work out the pricing. One thing that's very important to me is keeping these experiences accessible. I find it absurd that a trip to Japan can cost €3,000, often with flights excluded. I spent around €6,000 on this entire journey, so the idea of charging someone €3,000 for a holiday seems excessive to me. Of course, there are different ways of travelling. Someone might want a backpacking experience, while a family might prefer hotels and more comfort. I'm working on different price ranges to reflect that. But yes, the project is becoming increasingly concrete. I feel that Rome is changing a lot, both for better and for worse. I'm particularly curious to see how the cycling infrastructure has developed. After twenty years of talking about improvements, it seems that some real changes are finally beginning to happen. Of course, when we talk about change in Rome, we're not talking about the kind of transformation you might see in Beijing or Seoul. But progress is progress, and we should recognise it. At the same time, I know that some places are losing their character. Garbatella, my neighbourhood, is becoming increasingly gentrified. Many of the places I used to go to are closing and being replaced by new businesses that, to me, often seem to lack a soul because they don't belong to the community I grew up in. But perhaps that's just the classic complaint of someone getting older. You leave a place and want everything to remain exactly as you remember it. Neighbourhoods change. Cities change. And that's part of life. I think the idea is still the same. When something becomes so important to you that you feel you simply cannot live without doing it, you find a way to make it happen. As long as a dream remains something distant, something you look at through binoculars, you may never move towards it. It becomes real when you feel a visceral need to do it. That's what pushed me to undertake this journey. So I would say: listen to yourself and understand what you truly need. I have countless dreams. There are millions of things I'd love to do. But what really moves you is that deep need to express something that you genuinely feel is part of who you are. I'll have a beer. There are several things I've deliberately saved for the end of the journey. I haven't cut my hair in ten months, because getting a haircut will be part of the ritual of arriving home. And I haven't had a beer in a very long time. Sitting down at the table with my wife's father and having a beer together is another part of that ritual. I've been saving these small moments for the end. I think they'll mark a clear dividing line between this experience and whatever comes next. Read our , in which he discusses the origins of his journey, his preparations and why he chose to travel from Rome to Japan by bicycle.