Every grand tour has to start somewhere. Mine starts on the shore of Lake Maggiore, on a stretch of road that’s been shaping this part of Italy for centuries before I ever clipped in.
We roll out from Baveno, a town that’s been quietly exporting itself around the world for 500 years. The pink granite quarried from the hills above town has ended up in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, Vienna’s Karlskirche, the columns of the Paris Opéra, the Christopher Columbus monument in New York, and even the Royal Palace in Bangkok, extensively used since the 16th century, especially in Lombard architecture, before being exported abroad via the region’s waterways. You’re never far from a piece of this town when you’re looking at grand buildings around the globe.
A few easy kilometres on and we’re in Stresa, the self-styled “Pearl of Lake Maggiore.” Stresa spent much of its history as a quiet fishing village before transforming into a resort town in the mid-19th century, and once the Simplon Tunnel opened in 1906 it became easily reachable from the rest of Europe. Ernest Hemingway recuperated here in 1918 and later set the hospital scenes of A Farewell to Arms in the same hotel -not a bad place to fuel up before the legs start hurting.
And hurt they do, because from Stresa the road tips up towards Mottarone. On a clear day the 1491m summit offers a genuine view of seven lakes at once: Maggiore, Orta, Varese, Mergozzo, Monate, Comabbio and Biandronno, along with the Monte Rosa massif, which earned it a spot among the ten most fascinating views in the world according to a 1954 New York Times feature.
The final stretch climbs a private toll road still owned by the Borromeo family and opened to cars in 1948: cyclists ride it for free, which feels like the one time being on two wheels actually pays off. From the top, a long, technical descent drops us into Armeno on the Lake Orta side.
From there the route quietly changes character. We cross the Colle della Cremosina, a modest pass that doesn’t look like much on a profile but has been doing real work for a very long time. It’s been a key link between the Lake Orta area and Valsesia since antiquity, historically used as a trade route that also spread metalworking skills and crafts common to both valleys, a detail that matters later, once we hit Omegna.
That trade road drops us into the Val Sesia, and into the heat. By the time we reach Varallo the temperature had properly turned the day into a fight. Varallo is home to the oldest Sacro Monte in Italy, founded in 1491 by the Franciscan friar Bernardino Caimi, comprising 45 chapels populated by over 800 life-size painted statues, and inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list — well worth a look if your legs need an excuse to stop moving. From Varallo, the Passo della Colma was the toughest climb of the day (even if not on the paper) due to the sun: 8.6km at an average of 5.6%, topping out at 932m, with a final ramp through the forest touching 9% before the road spits you out with a view over Lake Orta.
The long descent brings us down to Omegna, at the northern tip of Lake Orta, and it’s a genuinely strange place for a cyclist to end up sweating through: because this small lakeside town quietly designed half of Italy’s kitchens. Omegna is the historical forge of household items like the Moka Express by Bialetti, the pressure cooker by Lagostina, and the Alessi products that have furnished generations of Italian homes, with Alessi’s stainless steel tableware and interior objects created in collaboration with some of the best designers in the world. It’s also the hometown of children’s author Gianni Rodari: mappropriate, since by this point in the ride I was fantasising about anything other than the road in front of me.
From Omegna it’s a rolling run back along the lake to Baveno, closing the loop on a day that had everything: history, heat, two proper climbs, and a lot of very slow eating afterwards.
Strava Activity: https://www.strava.com/activities/19150192937
Stage 2 coming soon. If you want to follow the rest of this Tour de Pasta, or just see where I’m riding next, come say hi:
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