Seen and not Seen Again: Italy's great race forgets its great ambassadors and most renowned theaters, but rediscovers the Mountain that launched the Pirate into orbit when he was a twenty-two-year-old amateur. Departing from Bulgaria and concluding in Rome, the penultimate day will be in the Dolomites, with an eye on the Piani di Pezzè, in the shadow of the Civetta. It will be fun, and it will help us forget the blunders we made along the way.
For the one hundred and seventeenth year, the descent towards the presentation of the new Giro d'Italia has begun (the 109th edition to be held from May 8 to 31, 2026). The vernissage—so to speak, given that weeks later everyone knows everything!—is set for Wednesday, December 1, 2025, in Rome, at the Auditorium Parco della Musica... streamed live via the web.
It's not the premiere at La Scala, as we all know. But it's also not the last opportunity to make the Giro d'Italia spectacle a chance to rekindle passions and reinvigorate the love for Italy in the hearts of those who long to be closely linked to the wonders that always create enviable images around the planet.
Location aside, the impression is that the decline has become a kind of drift. And this is heartbreaking, because a curtain rising in a time slot with inevitably low audiences is a mere curtain on an event that is increasingly slipping into the corner of Italians' attention: not only those in Italy, but also, and perhaps above all, some of the eight million compatriots living around the world who maintain a special bond with the peninsula.
Once upon a time, the Presentation was with a capital P. It was celebrated—yes, celebrated!—on a Saturday, in a large theater (from the Piccolo to the Arcimboldi in Milan, from the Fenice in Venice to the Carignano in Turin, etc.) or in the Rai studios because they were excellently equipped for the live television broadcast that attracted champions old and new, high-profile partners, artists capable of entertaining the audience in attendance and at home: Sergio Castellitto, Pierfrancesco Favino, Raimondo Vianello, Pippo Baudo, Cristiana Capotondi, Carla Fracci, and so on and so forth.
What can I say?: Out of sight, out of mind.
The Giro has the potential to send postcards to every latitude, treasured in our hearts and minds. And what does it do once again? It betrays its primary vocation as Italy's window and gives space to... Bulgaria, following the example of what was achieved a year earlier to the complete advantage of Albania, which, among the Adriatic coastal resorts, is truly a privileged competitor to the tourism capitals of Romagna, Marche, Abruzzo, and Puglia.
Sure, in 2026 the Tour will set off from Barcelona and the Vuelta will start in Monte Carlo. Well, the charm of the aforementioned destinations is easily swallowed up in a single bite: Sofia, Plovdiv, Veliko Tarnovo, and Burgas. While Albania proved to be a breeze to reach in 2025, Bulgaria is a decidedly more complicated destination to invade. And so the Giro's Grand Departure will be experienced in... smart fun, which is the hobbyist version of "working remotely" in the time of the pandemic. How we'd love to be wrong...
Please: whoever can, stop this massacre.
Having turned the page of the outburst, let's turn our gaze to what will be proposed and of which we are somewhat aware, ignoring for the moment the endless transfers – which cause distractions in the caravan and exceptional stress on the riders, disrespecting them –, the double-edged time trial in Tuscany that represents a wink to Remco Evenepoel, the aspiration of having Jonas Vingegaard at the start!, the near-resignation of having to do without Tadej Pogacar, snubbing the sprinters, and so on.
This time, about ten days after the route was described in its entirety and completeness (on paper), we turn our gaze to what will be the penultimate stage of the 109th Giro d'Italia, the stage we know was designed in the Belluno area from Feltre to Piani di Pezzè, above Alleghe, up and down the Cereda, Duran, Staulanza, Giau, and Falzarego passes before the final climb along those five kilometers leading to Montagna Pantani. Yes, because it was right there, at Piani di Pezzè, that in 1992 the triumph of the man who, then still sporting a full mop of hair, would, over the years and with his exploits, become Italy's most beloved "bald-haired" rider, winner of both the pink and yellow jerseys, before indulging in exaggerations in his competitive cycling and his lifestyle in his life outside of sport.
The upcoming professional Giro will wind its way along the hairpin bends discovered by the amateur Giro d'Italia, when Pantani, then twenty-two, faced a host of rivals he would later defeat year after year in the top category: Vladimir Belli, Ivan Gotti, Mariano Piccoli, Mirko Gualdi, Francesco Casagrande, Davide Rebellin, Giuseppe Guerini…
It was 1992, it was written. After 24 years, the flavors of a cycling that betrayed its vocation by surrendering to banned practices and those proposed by bandits will resurface. It will happen above the Lake of Mysteries, around and within which a series of murders unfolded before and after the Second World War, conceived and staged between 1933 and 1946. Beginning in 1952, these were the subject of investigations initiated by journalist Sergio Saviane—not to be confused with his near-homonymous Roberto Saviano—which would ultimately be recounted by the narrator himself in a booklet entitled, aptly, The Mysteries of Alleghe. It concerns five murders committed in and around what was once called the Albergo Centrale. It began during the Fascist era with the killing of a waitress, Emma De Ventura, who supposedly committed suicide with poisonous iodine. And it continued with four episodes involving butchers, depressed girls suffering from sleepwalking, drownings, couples murdered by gunshots in a village alley, prisoners and then fugitives having been sentenced in absentia.
The NCIS series is laughable compared to those episodes. We realized this during our stays in Caprile and Alleghe, accompanying our daughters skiing on the slopes of the Dolomites, lesser-known than Cortina, but equally noble and breathtakingly beautiful. And we saw confirmation of this during our excursions to organize the Spartan Races in the mountains of the Civetta ski area, where an extraordinary European Obstacle Course Championship was held before the Covid-19 pandemic upended everything and everyone.
Well, at that time, with the stages of the Giro Made in Civetta in his heart, the effervescent Sergio Pra, descendant of that illustrious lineage, accompanied by his wife Daniela and children Alessandro and Francesca, in a small room of the historic Hotel Posta where the tested horses were exchanged for fresh ones back in the days when stagecoaches ventured over the 12 Dolomite passes that frame it—Sergio Pra, as they said—encouraged us to consider how that strip of land could return to the center of the collective imagination. And we began to hypothesize the return of the pink caravan to where Luigi Francavilla, the sole and inseparable friend of the plenipotentiary of Agordino (Leonardo Del Vecchio, aka Luxottica), was revolutionizing the landing of the first cable car rising from the unknown of Alleghe to the great beauty of the heart of Civetta.
Almost fifteen years later, the Giro will rediscover the Piani di Pezzè, which for cycling lovers are on a par with the Mortirolo, Carpegna, Marmolada, Oropa, Alpe d'Huez, Ventoux, and so on: in other words, the mountains branded by Marco Pantani, because it was there that the Pirate of the Peaks experienced his forays.
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