There are two roads from Airolo to the Gotthard. Almost everyone drives the modern one. The reason to ride here is the other one — the Via Tremola, laid in granite setts and stacked in more than twenty numbered hairpins up the wall of the valley. It is the longest surviving cobbled road in Switzerland and a protected monument, which is the only reason it was never resurfaced.
Thirteen kilometres, 923 metres, seven per cent. On paper it is the most ordinary climb in this collection: barely a kilometre falls outside six and a half to eight, and the summit is low by Alpine standards. The profile tells you nothing useful about it.
The setts are the whole test. Every stone is an input the frame either absorbs or hands straight to the rider, and over fifty minutes that difference stops being a comfort question and becomes a power one. A frame tuned only for smooth tarmac does not lose time here to the gradient. It loses it to vibration, and to the hands and shoulders that have been paying for the vibration since the first hairpin.
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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