The Nivolet road goes nowhere. It climbs the Valle dell'Orco into the Gran Paradiso national park, reaches a pair of lakes just under 2,620 metres, and stops. That dead end is also why it is one of the most cinematic roads in the Alps — the closing scene of The Italian Job, with the coach balanced over the drop, was filmed on it.
Forty kilometres and 2,017 metres of climbing, which makes it the largest single ascent in this collection. The average of five per cent is meaningless: the first twenty kilometres are a two-to-four per cent valley road through Locana and Ceresole, and the climbing proper starts around kilometre thirteen and again after the Ceresole reservoir, with kilometres at 10.4, 9.5 and 8.9 per cent near the top. There is even a kilometre of descent at the reservoir.
It is a climb that has to be ridden in two minds — conserving through the valley, then climbing hard for two hours above it. Frames that feel quick on a short steep col and vague over a long day get found out on roads like this one.
Photography
Michael Blann
Rider
Every SWI is laid up for one rider — their weight, their power, the way they actually ride. One uninterrupted carbon shell, formed in a single mould, built for a body rather than a size chart. It is the whole reason the same mountain feels different underneath two frames.
Michael Blann
For the people who live beneath them the great European ranges are simply a way of life. For everyone else they are scenery. For a cyclist they are none of those things — they are an appointment with your own limits, and the reason a road that goes nowhere useful is worth riding at all.
Michael Blann has spent years photographing the climbs that made the sport: the Alps, the Dolomites, the Pyrenees, the Ardennes. The pictures are landscape photography of a very high order, but the book is really about what those places do to the people who ride them — an argument built from light, weather and altitude, with recollections from professional riders threaded through it.
If you have ever ridden one of these roads, or intend to, it is the closest thing to being back on it.
Find the book
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