The Giro d’Italia, and other travels by bicycle
Riders in the Giro d’Italia getting ready to set off from Siena (Image credit: via BikeRaceInfo)
For as long as I can remember, I have enjoyed cycling – although, growing up in Denmark, it was kind of a necessity. I first learned to cycle there, and this part of my upbringing gave me the confidence to love travelling on two wheels. I’ve had a passion for cycling ever since and was proud to lead the group in my Year Five cycling proficiency course, knowing that it meant that the teacher thought I was trustworthy on my bike. Moving to Cambridge, the first thing I did was acquire a bike, and I couldn’t manage without it. My friends know I cycle dangerously fast sometimes, a remnant of learning on Denmark’s safe segregated cycle paths. During the 2020 lockdown, cycling was my escape – both literally and metaphorically – as I cycled around the towns and villages locally to me almost every day. Writing this as I am now, isolating with Covid, I’d like nothing more than to be back on my bike.
However, an element of cycling culture I’ve always been a little out of touch with is cycle races. I’ve had a passing interest in the Tour de France, as I think many people have, and enjoyed watching cycling events at the Olympics on the television, but that’s about the extent of it. This is, however, until I saw the Giro d’Italia pass through Siena while I was living there in 2021. The thought of a major international bike race passing through the small town I was living in was too good an opportunity to miss out on.
I remember the day being almost unbearably hot, as many of Siena’s summer days are (especially for unacclimatised Brits like me!). Walking to class that morning, everything appeared normal, other than a few more people than normal standing in the Piazza del Campo, Siena’s main shell-shaped piazza, for 8am on a Thursday. I began to wonder if the race was going to be smaller than I had anticipated. However, I was proved wrong, as I discovered when I exited my class on the east side of the city at 10.30am. In the intervening two hours, the city had been transformed, with crowds of people suddenly occupying the streets, many dressed in the fuchsia pink of the race’s logo, waving Giro d’Italia flags. Every shop I walked past was suddenly adorned with Giro bunting. I was stunned by how quickly the city had changed, all of its residents taken up in the atmosphere. This electricity was something I felt regularly in Siena; from vintage car shows to outdoor concerts, if there was an event, you went. If you didn’t go, it would be as if you had gone, as everyone would spend the next week either asking you if you went, or telling you about their experience of going. The Giro d’Italia was no different.
Siena transformed for the Giro d’Italia (Image credit: Jenny Frost)
After class, I walked to my friend’s house on the west side of the city, a little outside Porta Camollia, one of the gates through Siena’s historic city walls. When I arrived there, crowds were already beginning to gather by the gate, and my friend, being significantly taller than I am, had the far better vantage point. I ended up settling for a small gap between the shoulders of two tall men, hoping they wouldn’t move too much, wishing they might take pity on the five-foot-four studentessa Erasmus stood behind them.
After half an hour or so of waiting, some of the TV cars started to come past, so we knew the cyclists were approaching. We begun to hear cheering from further up the street, where people lined the roadside from the gate, where we were, right up to the Piazza del Campo, where the cyclists started from. When they finally arrived where we were waiting, they came past in a flash – over 200 elite cyclists speeding past us in a little under thirty seconds. I hadn’t considered the fact that, with the start having been only minutes ago, all the cyclists would still be in a huge clump. After they passed us, everyone began to disperse, and that was that. I felt intensely happy and excited to have been witness to a small part of the Giro, even through a gap between people’s shoulders. I followed the rest of the race on Twitter, my Instagram story being the only evidence I’d been there at all.
The Giro d’Italia, with the Vuelta a España and the Tour de France, is one of cycling’s most elite races. It takes place across three weeks each summer, and is famous for its hilly, undulating routes which take the sport’s most talented riders from the south to the north of the Italian peninsula (except in 2021, where the starting point was the northern city of Turin). The first Giro took place in 1909 and was originally conceived as a means of promoting the newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport – which still exists today, famous for its pink pages, and is among Italy’s most widely read. 2022’s Giro will begin on 6th May, continuing until the end of the month, and riders will start in Hungary before travelling to Sicily, from where they will ride north to the race’s end point in Verona. The race won’t be passing through Siena this time. My thirty seconds stood watching the racers by the gate of Siena isn’t set to be repeated for a long while. I think eight-year-old me, still wobbly on her first Danish bike, would have been pretty happy I was there.
