The roads unite peoples and territories. The Passo dello Stelvio more. For two round round centuries that Stelvio brings together different worlds not only Lombardy, Trentino and Switzerland; They are not the Valtellina, the Val Venosta and the Val Mustir. Goes beyond the boundaries. He touches the sky caresses him, transcends curves, asphalt and hairpin bends to tell an infinite story made of dreams, hard work, of businesses, hands and badils, faces, champions, great victories, great defeats, of sports, politics, of images that time has left inheritance and that tell two centuries of written life and rewritten on a step that is still a passage after being a bend.
The Stelvio is for anyone a challenge. Starting with Carlo Donegani, the engineer from Brescia, commissioned by Francesco I d’Abburg to build it when, after the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the Lombard-Veneto kingdom was formed, an integral part of the Austrian Empire, and the idea of a street that connected Milan with Vienna was born by crossing the Rhaetian Alps without going through Switzerland. The project was already mentioned in a draft of the Napoleonic era but Donegani put us from his.
The construction works began on June 26, 1820starting from the center of Bormio and continuing towards the old bathrooms. A climb that seemed to never have to end but that the project also wanted to keep around 10 percent in slope, never too much more but not too much less. And that is perhaps one of the secrets that have made the Stelvio an icon, the possibility of climbing, descending, climbing with the right tribute of fatigue. Thirty -four hairpin bends from the Valtellinese side who, in more recent eras, then became 40, and 48 from the South Tyrolean one.
It was a “cyclopic” job considering means and technologies of the time. A job that saw over 2,500 workers busy during the day and in practice even at night since for six years, more day less day, they lived there, on that mountain and on those roads camped in tents and work buildings. They built everything that asked the engineer Donegani, everything that served and much of what has remained. Curves, hairpin bends, support walls, galleries, paravalanche, safety infrastructures, barracks for the refreshment of travelers, shelters, a barracks, an oratory and five cantonier houses where they could live and survive in winter the maintenance of the road maintenance that had the arduous task of freeing it with the blades from the snow.
On July 6, 1825, with solemn ceremony, the Austrian emperor Francesco I d’Abburg inaugurated the highest road in Europe By giving the engineer Donagani the honorary title of Conte, for the daring and power of his visionary project. The end of the conflicts and the history delivered both sides of the Stelvio to the time to the time of communication for horses and carriages and which, in modern times, at the end of the thirties, became the state road number 38. Such remained. Such was preserved with some small adjustments, with the enlargement to the double direction of travel, with the asphalt and with its history that during the day the day has consolidated the ties with the people, with the territory with the means that pass, which pass by leaving behind every time pieces of history.
Especially the bikes. Especially cycling That on these hairpin bends he has not only written stories and history, but has taken root, he consolidated his origin. The Stelvio stands at great cycling as Wimbledon at tennis, as Wembley to football and perhaps more. Tiring and silent because the chatter after first kilometers are zero. A mystical climbing for those who go to pedals because it is only the breath that breaks the sacredness of a climb that is a juice of cycling and history. Almost always “Cima Coppi”, the highest in a Giro d’Italia. Always a show.
Everyone has gone up on these hairpin bends. “Cannibali”, “Pirates”, “Pistoleri”, “Sheriffi”, “Yankee”, “Cowboy”, “Tassi” “kids with the tuft”. Pedilates of glory that enclose the myth of a sport that from Fausto to Gino to Felice is an epic to bring to the school desks to tell the country that we have been and that, with a little nostalgia, we would like to go back to being. Like cycling, popular sport, the Stelvio brings together all the possible worlds, perhaps very far away which, however, between hairpin bends, pedagles and cars turn around the same planet.
On this passage the sense of the high mountains is found With its slow rites, with its silences that are values and traditions that punch with the festive of the centaurs. The Stelvio of dreams is “silent”, powerful and absolute tribute and temple of the cycling imagination. Once upon a time there was the Stelvio and there will be forever. There is two hundred years. An infinite novel that excites, even when you reread pages already read. In 1953 Fausto Coppi won his fifth Giro d’Italia beating the Swiss Hugo Koblet who had the pink jersey in his pocket. It was the first time that you went up to up there: «The Stelvio is something never seen before. It’s a monster … “he confessed. But he was not afraid, if he made him a friend and wrote the story.