Stelvio Pass
Passo dello Stelvio
Interesting facts
- Up to 2,000 labourers a day worked on the road during the summers of its construction, and it opened in October 1825 after five years and three months.
- Until 1848 the pass was kept open in winter for horse-drawn sleighs, and the journey of about 50 km between Bormio and Prad took nine hours with changes of horses.
- The avalanche-prone eastern ramp was once protected by wooden snow galleries about 3.5 km long in total.
- In the 1848 revolution a handful of Lombard insurgents closed the road simply by setting fire to its wooden avalanche galleries above Trafoi.
- That episode convinced Field Marshal Radetzky to build alternative military roads over the Tonale and Aprica passes, and the Stelvio soon lost its strategic value.
- In 1634 the Spanish Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand led about 21,000 soldiers over the pass into the Vinschgau during the Thirty Years' War.
- The six tunnels on the Bormio side, together nearly 700 m long, were the hardest engineering problem of the whole road.
- Before the Second World War the pass hosted hill-climb races with stars such as Tazio Nuvolari, Rudolf Caracciola and Hans Stuck, who won in 1932 in a Mercedes SSKL.
- A bank branch at the summit claims to be the highest-altitude bank counter in Europe.
- The obelisk at the top was originally designed as a summit marker for the Ortler and was set up on the pass in 1925 with a new Italian inscription.
Why it is worth it
The Stelvio Pass, Passo dello Stelvio in Italian and Stilfser Joch in German, carries a road over the Ortler Alps at 2,757 metres, the highest paved pass in the Eastern Alps and only a few metres lower than the highest in the whole range. Its fame rests on the northern ramp, which climbs from Prato allo Stelvio past the village of Trafoi through 48 hairpin bends stacked one above another on a bare mountainside, each one numbered on a stone. Seen from the top, the road hangs below like a coiled rope dropped down the slope, with the glaciers of the Ortler massif shining across the valley.
The road is an engineering monument of the early nineteenth century. The Austrian Empire built it between 1820 and 1825 to connect Lombardy, then a Habsburg possession, with the Austrian heartland, and its designer, the engineer Carlo Donegani, drew a line that climbed 1,871 metres on the northern side alone. Until the First World War the pass marked the frontier between Austria-Hungary and the Kingdom of Italy, and the peaks around it were the scene of a bitter high-altitude war fought in ice and rock. The Swiss border runs along the ridge just above the summit, at the Dreisprachenspitze, the "three languages peak".
For cyclists the Stelvio is sacred ground. The Giro d'Italia first crossed it in 1953, when Fausto Coppi won the stage, and when the race climbs it the pass is honoured as the Cima Coppi, the highest point of that year's route. The southern side, descending towards Bormio, is gentler and more open, with long sweeping bends and a series of tunnels and galleries carved into the rock. All around stretch the protected valleys of Stelvio National Park, founded in 1935 and the largest park in the Italian Alps, where deer, chamois and ibex graze below the pass.
Getting there
The pass links Prato allo Stelvio in Val Venosta, to the northeast, with Bormio in Valtellina, to the southwest; the Umbrail Pass branches off just below the summit to Santa Maria in the Swiss Val Müstair. Sondrio, the provincial capital of Valtellina, is about 60 km away, and the nearest airport is Bolzano (BZO), about 67 km away; the larger airports of Milan and Innsbruck are further.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Stelvio Pass is a mountain pass in northern Italy bordering Switzerland at an elevation of 2,757 m (9,045 ft) above sea level. It is the highest paved mountain pass in the Eastern Alps, and the second highest in the Alps, 7 m (23 ft) below France's Col de l'Iseran.
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46.53000, 10.45400per Wikidata