There is an old Italian saying that the best ideas are born at a table, not a desk. And if that table happens to be outside a sun-warmed café, with a small ceramic cup of something dark and magnificent sitting in front of you, and a bicycle leaned against the wall nearby, then you are not just having an idea. You are having a moment. The kind of moment that, in the films of the 1970s, would be accompanied by a sweeping orchestral score and a slow zoom on someone’s face as they stare into the middle distance with the look of a man who has just understood something profound about the universe.
We are two friends, and one of us already had a road bike while the other had a mountain bike. A perfectly good machine, built for trails and mud and the kind of terrain that requires commitment. The problem with a mountain bike, it turns out, is that it makes an early morning tarmac rides somewhat less appealing when the person next to you is effortlessly spinning along on something designed for exactly that purpose.
So the MTB wasn’t ideal, but it was there.
Then came the road bike, for the other one of us, and with it, something shifted. Suddenly, early mornings that had always been theoretically available became actually, genuinely, enthusiastically available. We started riding together in the way you can only ride together when you’re equally equipped and equally unhurried. Not training. Not racing. Just moving through the world at the exact speed where things become interesting again.
And the thing that kept making things interesting was what happened when we stopped. We love coffee. Not in the functional, I need caffeine to exist way that most of the world loves coffee, but more seriously than that. We are the kind of people who have opinions about extraction times. Who have owned espresso machines that cost more than some of our furniture. Who, when stopping at a café during a ride, are conducting an informal audit.
Somewhere between these café stops mid-rides, a question started forming itself: why isn’t there a club in Ljubljana for this?
Not a competitive club. Not a peloton that blows past you like a single terrifying organism of carbon fibre and aggressive tan lines, leaving you feeling simultaneously passed and judged.
Something more in the spirit of a Saturday morning in 1978 somewhere in Tuscany, a group of friends on bikes, going somewhere interesting, with a firm agreement that wherever they end up, the coffee had better be worth it.
We started mentioning the idea to people. Friends, acquaintances, that guy from work who always arrived slightly windswept. And what we found, again and again, was recognition.
It turns out there are a lot of people who love cycling but not competition. Who love coffee but don’t want to make it into a hobby that requires a certificate. Who love the idea of a weekend morning with somewhere to go and someone to go there with.
Every club needs a name. This is non-negotiable. And the name needs to carry something — some flavour of what the thing is actually about. We did not want something that sounded like a corporate wellness initiative or a fitness app. We did not want a name that implies you are always trying to go faster and higher and further until presumably you achieve some kind of cycling apotheosis, and are taken directly to the top of Mont Ventoux where Tadej Pogačar bows down to you.
We wanted something that felt like it belonged to a different era. The era of riding for pleasure. The era of the long Sunday. The era when a group of friends on bikes was simply a group of friends on bikes, and the destination was always, at least in part, a café.
ARDECCI.
Now here is the thing about this name that we quietly love: it is a small joke, a linguistic sleight of hand, and a statement of identity all at once. To an Italian ear — or to anyone who has spent enough time reading menus in Umbria — it sounds convincingly, warmly, unmistakably Italian. It sounds like a village, or a family name above a bakery door, or something a retired cycling champion might name his vineyard.
But we are not Italian. We are from Slovenia. And here, ardecci is a playful twist on the word for red, Rdeča.
We took that word, dressed it up in a little Italian tailoring, and sent it out into the world looking like something from a 1974 cycling catalogue. The result is ARDECCI: a Slovenian soul in an Italian suit, which, if we are being honest, is a pretty accurate description of what we are trying to do with the entire club.
It is, we think, exactly the right name for a group of people who love cycling, love coffee, love a touch of the theatrical, and are constitutionally incapable of taking themselves completely seriously.
The philosophy is simple: cycling is a way of moving through the world, and coffee is a ritual of presence. Put them together and you have something the Italians figured out decades ago. That the point of the journey is not the destination, but the conversation you have when you get there.
La bella vita. Not the expensive life, not the optimised life. Just the beautiful one.
Our rides are not races. We ride at the pace of conversation. We choose routes that go somewhere worth going. And this year we started building the ARDECCI Café map. A living, growing map of cyclist-friendly cafés and destinations, earned through actual visits and actual coffees. Not sponsored. Not curated from a list. Found the proper way, the ardecci way, by bicycle. Everyone can access the Café map by signing up for free.
We are still a small club. We will tell you this honestly and without embarrassment. We are not a movement, not yet. We are a group of people who like bikes and coffee and each other’s company, and who think those three things, combined with sufficient dedication, can amount to something genuinely lovely.
But we are growing. And to achieve our ambitions, we are introducing paid memberships.
Nothing alarming. Nothing that will require you to justify to your household why you are spending money on another thing. The cost of an Espresso membership basically amounts to one fancy coffee a month.
What it buys you is not a service so much as a belonging. A card — metaphorical for now, possibly literal in the future, we haven’t decided yet. Your membership helps build the café map properly. It’ll go toward organising rides that are worth the alarm clock. Toward making an ARDECCI coffee van a reality (more on that later). And toward the gradual, joyful work of finding every cyclist-friendly café within reasonable riding distance of every member, so that no one ever has to stop at a terrible café again.
That is a worthy cause. We think you will agree.
So here is what we want to say to you, directly and without excessive flourish:
If you like the idea of a Sunday morning with somewhere to go and someone to go there with, you are welcome here. If you have ever driven past a beautiful road and thought I should cycle that someday, you are especially, particularly, genuinely welcome here.
ARDECCI will likely not make you faster. We are not going to give you a training plan or tell you about zone two heart rate or suggest that you track your sleep. We are going to find a good route, pick a café at the end (or at the start, or even both) that deserves the ride, and spend a Sunday morning being alive in a way that the rest of the week, for all its virtues, rarely allows.
That is the whole offer. Bring your bike. We’ll take care of the rest.
— Marcel & Tilen, The Founders
P.S. — If you know a café that deserves to be in the guide, tell us about it. We will go there. We will drink the coffee. We will sit outside if the weather allows. And if it earns the name, it goes in the book. That is a promise.
