When does the Giro d’Italia finish?

Every time it’s a little love story. With its highs, sometimes very high, and its lows, never very low. Every year, every May, a new beginning, a new falling in love that begins. And each time you know perfectly well that it has a deadline, just three weeks, that it’s nothing, a small time, so small that you can’t even really get used to it. Enjoy the moment, we tell ourselves, don’t think about the future, do you have three weeks? Enjoy these three weeks. Then we’ll see, you know they’ll come back anyway. The three weeks end and emptiness arrives, that sense of abandonment that appears on a Monday, always on a Monday, while the routine of everyday life starts again. His routine sucks a bit, because often, almost always, one wants, sometimes craves, somewhere else. We always think that elsewhere is better, it is almost never true, but so be it. Certainly it sucks a little more the Monday following when the Giro d’Italia has finished moving around Italy. And this is also the case because the Tour of Italy it is a way to reach that elsewhere to which we tend. The race throws it at your eyes, on a screen, at your imagination. Because this is also why you can see the Giro, because it encourages the imagination, it makes us move without moving, it takes us to places we’ve never seen, but which we always promise to go and see, to pedal, sooner or later.

When the Giro d’Italia ends, you never get used to it right away. It takes a few days to recover, to reorganize the afternoons. Three weeks are never enough for us couch or armchair cyclists, because three weeks are few, they go by as fast as the wheels of bicycles going downhill. However, it’s better not to tell the riders, that for them three weeks are a lot of days, a lot of road, a lot of effort: they can’t wait for it to end.

When the Giro d’Italia ends, those who are happy are those who stand by us, those who endure in silence the weekend afternoons on the sofa, the conversations about shots taken and not taken, sprints and mountains, surprises and disappointments, the past looking at a phone just before 2 pm, because there’s a bet on Bikoo to make and the chat with friends is a constant ringing.

When the Giro d’Italia ends, the bitterness remains that more time has passed, that maybe it could have been better, but maybe not, that spring is already over. Then we remember that after spring comes summer and that if spring is pink, summer is yellow. And that the Tour de France is a month or so away.

When the Giro d’Italia ends it’s like when a good book ends, a book that keeps you there and keeps you turning page after page. Only unlike a book, you know it’s going to start anew, with a new plot and other protagonists. Just knowing how to wait.

The Giro d’Italia 2023 ends tomorrow in Rome. It ends for the 106th time in its history. And we’ll have to wait eleven months and a week to see it flow on the roads of Italy again, take our afternoons for a walk, let us discover and rediscover new peaks, new mountains to climb, let us ring in new good intentions that who knows if and when we’ll realize.