Before a single cyclist ever turned a pedal on its slopes, the Passo dello Stelvio was already a monument to human ambition.

Following the Napoleonic Wars, the Congress of Vienna redrew Europe’s map, granting the Austrian-Habsburg Empire the province of Lombardy. A road over the Stelvio was conceived as a way to improve communications between this new territory and Austria via Tyrol.

Designed by the engineer Carlo Donegani, construction began in 1820 and was completed five years later, thanks to an army of two thousand workers who blasted through the mountain using five barrels of gunpowder a day.

Carlo Donegani

The result was astonishing: 88 hairpin bends — 40 on the Valtellina side and 48 on the South Tyrol side — snaking up to one of the most coveted summits in the Alps.

At 2,758 metres, it remains the second highest paved pass in the entire Alpine range.

The road carried traders, soldiers and travellers for well over a century before cycling arrived. During the First World War, the Stelvio became the scene of the ‘White War’, fought under extreme conditions between Italian and Austro-Hungarian troops. The pass and surrounding mountains were fortified into a front line, where soldiers fought through glaciers, avalanches and frostbite. There is a monument there containing the remains of 64 Italian soldiers who died on the Stelvio’s slopes.

Then came June 1st, 1953.

When the Giro d’Italia reached the foot of the Stelvio for the very first time, no Italian race had ever climbed so high. The race itself had seemed already decided. Hugo Koblet, the elegant Swiss champion, held the pink jersey, and had brokered what appeared to be a gentleman’s agreement with Fausto Coppi: no attacks the following day, in exchange for a stage win. With Coppi sitting 1’59” behind Koblet, the Giro was apparently over.

What happened next became the founding myth of the Stelvio. On the climb from Prato, Coppi attacked, got clear and descended to Bormio, putting 4 minutes 23 seconds into second-placed Koblet.

He won the Giro for a fifth and final time. Coppi’s comment on reaching the summit might seem overly dramatic to a non-cyclist, but you’ll know this feeling: “In the last few bends, I thought I was going to die.”

In 1972, the Spaniard José-Manuel Fuente won a brutal stage over the Stelvio with Eddy Merckx finishing two minutes behind in difficulty — yet Merckx still won the 1972 Giro overall by five and a half minutes. The image of the Cannibal suffering in the snow while still ultimately prevailing is quintessential cycling theatre.

In 1975, the Giro’s final stage was at the summit of the Stelvio itself, where Fausto Bertoglio and Francisco Galdos fought a final electrifying duel all the way to the top.

The Stelvio has also been at the center of controversies. In 1988, the stage was cancelled amid chaos — Laurent Fignon screamed foul, claiming the cancellation was designed to protect Italian Francesco Moser, and that the route was perfectly rideable. Moser won the race.

During the 1984 Giro d’Italia, it was claimed that an Italian TV helicopter flew behind Moser to ‘push’ him to victory in a TT.

There’s no solid evidence this decisively aided Moser but, I love this tale and I’ll keep retelling it..!

The real controversy in ’84 centered more on race design—heavy time-trial mileage and time bonuses—which disadvantaged rivals like Laurent Fignon and favoured the Italian.

That the Stelvio has become iconic with just a handful of Giro appearances testifies to the legendary nature of the events that have taken place on its slopes. Since 1965, whenever the Stelvio appears in the Giro, it automatically earns the Cima Coppi designation — the prize awarded to the highest point of the entire race — a title named, of course, after the man who first made it sacred.

For amateur cyclists, the pilgrimage has become a rite of passage. Each year on the last Saturday of August, approximately 12,000 cyclists participate in Stelvio Bike Day, when all roads to the pass are closed to motor vehicles.

They come from across the world to count off those famous numbered hairpins, to feel their legs dissolve somewhere around bend 30, and to arrive — gasping, shaking, grinning — at the chaotic, souvenir-cluttered summit. It is not a beautiful place up top, but the point, as ever for us, is the road itself: the same road Donegani’s workers carved from the mountain two centuries ago, the same bends where Coppi rode into legend, the same thin air where some of cycling’s greatest stories have been written, in sweat, in suffering and in snow.