Places

Cycling stops in Dolomites

83 places · 6 routes · South Tyrol, Trentino & Veneto, Italy

Nowhere else are the great climbs stacked this close together. Four passes ring the Sella massif in a single loop, and a rider can take all four before lunch: Campolongo, Pordoi with its Coppi memorial at the top, Sella, Gardena. The Giro has crowned more Cima Coppi winners here than anywhere.

The famous names are only the frame. What the roads pass are the rifugi that feed the whole range, the Ladin villages of Alta Badia where the Maratona starts each July, the pale walls that made this a UNESCO site in 2009, and a cake culture that arrived from Vienna and never left.

The war is still the terrain

The front line ran through these summits from 1915, and the engineering is what you now ride and walk to. Italian troops cut nearly a kilometre of tunnel up through Lagazuoi from the Cengia Martini ledge, and walking down from the hut today usually means walking through it. On the Tofana di Rozes, Lieutenant Luigi Malvezzi's men drove a shaft 500 metres into the Castelletto at up to thirty feet a day, then packed the end of it with explosive.

The smaller details are the ones that stay with you. At Forte Tre Sassi, left unusable by bombardment, the Austrians kept up the appearance of a working garrison to draw Italian shells, and a soldier there joked that the shelling cost the Italians more than the fort had cost the Austrians. Gun crews hid 210 mm artillery among the Cinque Torri and took their targets by field telephone from a spotter on Averau. Above Cortina, the Ossario di Pocol began as a plain cemetery where the 5th Alpine group buried its dead in 1916; the shrine came later, between 1932 and 1935.

Every name three times

Signposts here carry Ladin, German and Italian, and the order changes with the valley. The Pordoi is Jouf de Pordoi, Pordoijoch and Passo Pordoi; the Gardena is Ju de Frara and Grödner Joch; Sassolungo is Saslonch and Langkofel. It is not decoration: Ladin is the older language of these valleys, and the reason a pass can appear to have three different names on three consecutive signs.

The names carry their own information. Secëda comes from the Latin siccus, dry; the serrated peaks along its northern edge are the Odle, needles in Ladin. Croda del Becco is named in Italian for the ibex on its slopes, in German for the lake below it, and in Ladin as Sas dla Porta, the rock of the door, after an opening in its summit ridge. Piz dles Cunturines belongs to the Fanes epic, whose warrior princess Dolasilla rides into her last battle in silver armour carrying thirteen arrows.

Four passes, and the one that decides it

The Sella Ronda circles one massif over four passes, and a rider can take all of them in a morning. From Arabba the Pordoi climbs through 33 hairpins that tighten as the valley drops away. The Falzarego road is the last stretch of the Great Dolomites Road, opened on 13 September 1909 after nearly a decade of construction the Alpine clubs of Bolzano and Merano had asked for.

The Giau is the one that breaks the loop open: 9.9 kilometres and 29 hairpins from Selva di Cadore, and it has decided the Giro more than once. Fedaia held the race's first summit finish on the Marmolada in 1970, won by Michele Dancelli. Campolongo was the last climb of the 1993 loop stage from Corvara back to Corvara, where Claudio Chiappucci crossed it alongside Miguel Indurain. Further south the quieter ones, Manghen, Rolle, Valles and Cibiana, carry the same history with none of the traffic.

Where you stop

The rifugi are the culture, not the amenity. Lagazuoi is the highest hut in the Dolomites at 2,752 metres, its terrace facing the Tofane. Scoiattoli was built beside the Cinque Torri in 1969 by the guide Lorenzo Lorenzi and is still run by his family, named for the climbing group formed there in 1939. The Agreiter family have kept Scotoni for fifty years on Alta Badia's stretch of the Alta Via 1, grilling lamb and venison over an open fire. Fuciade was a barn on the high pastures above Soraga before it opened as a refuge in 1960.

Down in Cortina the habit is pastry rather than altitude. Lovat has been baking on Corso Italia since 1928, renovated in 2005 without changing what it makes; the Embassy a few doors along is known for its Sacher and its strudel. On the Alpe di Siusi, Malga Sanon serves South Tyrolean and Ladin cooking from a stube heated the traditional way.

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