Passo Fedaia
Pass · 2057 m · Dolomites
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Passo Fedaia at 2057 metres runs along the north shore of Lago di Fedaia, an artificial reservoir dammed in 1956 and fed by the Marmolada glacier above it. The Giro d'Italia first crossed the full pass in 1975; its final kilometres, a straight near 3km averaging 12% and peaking at 16%, count among the hardest in the sport. Marco Pantani attacked here in 1998 on his way to overall victory.
Michele Dancelli won the first-ever finish at the top of the pass in 1970, a stage from Arta Terme to the Marmolada, after an earlier attempt to send the Giro over Fedaia was cancelled by weather in 1969. The road returned through the following decades, and in 1993 Claudio Chiappucci beat Miguel Indurain to the summit, though Indurain held the overall lead that day and went on to win the Giro, with Piotr Ugrumov third. The pass returned to the race in 2022: Alessandro Covi won the stage from Belluno, and Jai Hindley dropped race leader Richard Carapaz on the final climb to take the pink jersey he held to Verona, becoming the first Australian to win the Giro. The dam that impounds the lake is 57 metres high and 622 metres long, and the reservoir behind it, roughly 2 km long, feeds a 20 MW hydroelectric plant on meltwater from the glacier above.
What you see
The road runs along the crest of the dam, with the lake on one side and the glacier-capped face of the Marmolada, the only true glacier left in the Dolomites, rising directly from the far shore.
part of: Cafés at the foot of the climbgiro ditaliareservoirmarmolada