Stone-Ideas.com 
They are On the Road Again, the stonemason couple Orianne Pieragnolo and Louis Dutrieux, who have set out in Juli 2022 to cycle the “Route de la Pierre“ from France to China and back. What they are planning is a research trip: They want to discover how their profession is carried out in other countries and what examples of architecture with natural stone there are there. Now they have changed the program slightly, after arriving in Uzbekistan as planned in December 2024 and returning to their winter quarters at home.
The current route since the end of May 2025 will first take them back west: for three weeks, they will cycle through Georgia again, as they did at the beginning of the second stage, “in addition to our bikes and our tools, there will also be a television crew with us,” they write on Facebook. The film is to be broadcast on the French-German culture channel Arte.
Since their launch, they have published reports (“logbook”) every three months on their webpage, which can also be read online in English. In between, short updates in French and English appeared on their Facebook page.
From Uzbekistan, they announced a new route plan, and it sounded as if they would first have to return to their roots in France to calm down mentally. After many months of continuous discovery and learning, they probably needed some kind of sedimentation of the newly acquired knowledge so that they do not immediately lose it from their minds and end up with a pile of disorganized photos and memories.
In their October Facebook post, they poetically express the oversaturation: “We are overwhelmed by the desire to rediscover our childlike spirit, which makes everything around us a discovery.“
At that time they were in Uzbekistan, and the post continued: “Uzbekistan was one of the countries that shook our minds and attitudes, that allowed us to rethink the foundations of our lives, imagine a different way of thinking and understand hospitality the way a child lends his toys, with an alert heart and amused eyes.“
The first leg of the trip probably had only been simple and merely inspiring. Much of the route ran downstream along the Danube. Among other things, the program included a visit to the European Stonemasons’ Festival in Budapest, Hungary, a kind of family reunion for the sector.
All in all, the route to Bulgaria was 4100 km long in numbers.
After a winter break at home, they resumed their journey on the Black Sea in June 2024. The following second stage was eight months long and covered over 6,000 km through Central Asia with Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. The tour had the Caucasus mountain range and the foothills of the Himalayas in view and led through the endless dry plains of Central Asia.
This part of the adventure began with the ferry crossing from Bulgaria across the Black Sea: In their report, the two describe how they first parked their delicate bicycles in the hold next to heavy trucks, and how they spent 2.5 days among wild fellows drinking vodka and playing dominoes and sharing a cabin with them: “A horde of modern Argonauts made up of long-distance truckers, giant builds, thunderous laughter, tattooed muscles and the spirit of tarmac travellers!”
The Facebook report from October tells of Uzbekistan, where the country’s cultural delegate took them under his wing. They had contacted him from France. In the capital Tashkent, the monumental Center for Islamic Civilization is currently being built with local limestone on the facades. The niches around the entrances have mosaics made of local white marble with exotic imported stones, for example from Brazil.
In the future, the stages will be reduced to three months. One report suggests that they want to get away from the idling of just moving around in order to have more time and better conditions for their research. There will be “longer periods of analysis” of the stone objects they come across along the way.
The project’s website now has an online shop (“Boutique”) where you can buy the first creations inspired by the project, for example limited edition travel photos on fine paper or the L’Astella Création with linocut prints.
Photos: Orianne Pieragnolo, Louis Dutrieux
