- Sep 20, 2017
- 11,220
- 20,838
- 28,180
Stage 4: Alberobello – Lecce
With the exception of the final parade, this is the easiest stage of the race. It takes the riders deep into the heel of the boot, which I will refer to in the rest of this post by its actual name: Salento. This is the flattest part of Italy other than the Po Valley, but it has one thing going for it from a cycling perspective: the wind does blow here sometimes…Map and profile
Start
The race’s return to Italy is marked by a visit to one of Puglia’s quintessential tourist destinations: Alberobello. The town is mainly notable for one thing, and those are its Unesco-inscribed trulli. Trulli are round, unmortared houses that can be found throughout this part of Apulia, but they are far more numerous here than elsewhere. Their origin remains unclear: the most common theory is that the local lord forced the local peasants to construct dwellings without the use of mortar. The supposed reason is that such buildings could easily be torn down and therefore formed a loophole in the taxation the lord was subject to, but that doesn’t explain why most surviving trulli were constructed after the settlement was recognised as a town (and thereby freed from feudal obligations) in 1797.
The only other thing Alberobello might have been known has, for reasons that are obvious immediately, not been promoted in the way the trulli are: from 1940 to 1943, the Mussolini regime installed a concentration camp just outside the town. After the Allied invasion, prisoners of war were held here, before its final use by the postwar government as a camp to inter “undesired”, mostly female refugees until the site was shuttered in 1949. The latter episode was notorious enough at the time to inspire the 1950 film Donne senza nome (Women without a name).
As the first stage host in Italy, this is also the first place on the route that has been visited by the Giro before: Caleb Ewan won his first of a career five stages here in 2017. Italy also organised the men’s road race here as part of their very spread out national championships in 2022, with Filippo Zana taking the tricolor home.
(picture by FrancescaRM74 at Wikimedia Commons)
Route
The stage starts with a loop around to the east to take in the easiest Giro KOM on Italian soil I’ve seen for years, in the town of Putignano.
Following that brutal climb, it’s a short hop to the next tourist hotspot, Castellana Grotte. As the name suggests, the town’s name has been adapted to reflect the presence of one of Italy’s best-known caves. By this point, the coast is near, although we won’t see a whole lot of it due to the Giro doing its thing of sticking to the highway because of the abysmal state of southern Italian infrastructure in this part of the stage. The most notable stopoffs in this part of the stage are the intermediate sprint in Polignano a Mare (birthplace of Domenico Modugno, the original singer of Volare/Nel blu, dipinto di blu, which was the first of his record four Sanremo Festival wins) and the fortified port of Monopoli, which happens to be one of the twin cities of Sunday’s stage host Vlorë.
Upon heading inland and entering Salento proper, the riders pay a visit to yet another popular tourist destination: the white-walled town of Ostuni. However, this time there is plenty of cycling to talk here. In 1976, it organised the World Championships, and as this was the height of Freddy Maertens’ brief reign of terror there was really only one outcome here. The other notable part of this edition was the incredibly long lap of 35 kilometres: second only to Roma 1932 as far as ‘main’ circuits go, with only Imola 2020 (28.7k) and Zürich 2024 (26.9k) having come remotely close since. The Giro uses part of the same lap here, first passing through the finish line (which was not actually in Ostuni proper, but in the village of Montalbano), then taking on the main climb of that edition (a whopping 1.5k at 5.1%) into town. At its summit, there is the bonification sprint.
Ostuni also marks the easternmost extent of the low Murgia range, which is left definitively in the next town over (Ceglie Messapica, which will host the start of the stage after this one). Aside from a small ridge which the riders cross in Oria, dominated by its hilltop castle and cathedral, there really isn’t a hill in sight for the rest of the day. On the flip side, the landscape starts to open up after said ridge, the turning point being somewhere around Torre Santa Susanna at 64k to go. One town over, we have the final intermediate sprint in San Pancrazio Salentino. Otherwise, there is very little to talk about (at least by Italian standards) from either a technical or a cultural perspective in this final third of the stage, so we can safely skip ahead to dissecting the finish.
Finish
Final circuit number two, looping from the city centre to the football stadium and back. It’s a bit of a technical finish, with the key points being a sharpish right turn immediately backing into an easier left turn right before the flamme rouge, which should string things out ahead of the sweeping roundabout at just 300 metres from the line. To any sprinters smarter than the Ronde van Limburg bunch, it should at least help that they get a dry run.
The history of Lecce is an ancient one, as it was already a genuine town prior to the Roman conquest of Salento in 266 BC. Despite this, it doesn’t really play an important role until much later, existing first in the shadow of Brindisi, the endpoint of the Via Appia, then as the Migration Era started to take its toll in that of the more easily defensible port at Otranto. After the Gothic years upon the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire and the (re)conquest of Italy by the Byzantines between 535 and 554, Salento’s path diverges from most of the rest of Italy: whereas Byzantine rule proved short-lived in large parts of the peninsula, Lecce and most of the rest of the Salento remained in their hands almost continuously until its conquest by the Normans in the 11th century. Lecce fell in 1058, but this soon proved to be a blessing for the town, as it became the seat of a county that eventually grew to be the largest in the region. In the 15th century, its autonomy came to an end as the Kingdom of Napoli took over. Once again, this turned out to be a boon: as Napoli became one of Europe’s largest and most prosperous cities, Lecce profited too, becoming one of the largest cities in southern Italy. Its peak came in the 17th century, when it was one of the centres of the Baroque, and the city is famous for its well-preserved architecture from this era. As the Kingdom of Napoli was a Spanish Habsburg domain, the War of the Spanish Succession that followed their extinction in 1700. The Kingdom was initially transferred to the Austrian Habsburgs, but the Spanish Bourbons (re)conquered it in 1734. This led to a period of resurgence, but the golden age of both the Kingdom and Lecce itself were over.
As for its remaining history… well, this is southern Italy, you can fill in the blanks. Having said that, Lecce (both city and province) is doing comparatively well. Still the de facto capital of the Salento, the city especially stands out in the way of tourism, attracting more tourists than any other town or city in Apulia. In the Giro, it is a highly infrequent host for a city of its size owing to its peripheral location – this will be only the sixth visit in the race’s history, although that number does include the 1971 and 2003 grandi partenze. The latter stage, won by Alessandro Petacchi, is also the most recent Giro stage here. Away from cycling, the city’s sporting heritage is mainly in football, with local side US Lecce currently playing in the Serie A and its more famous sons including former Juventus captain and current Napoli manager Antonio Conte (five Serie A and one – controversial – Champions League titles as a player, four Serie A and one Premier League titles as a manager) and former Inter defender Marco Materazzi (also five Serie A and one Champions League titles, but of course far better remembered for being the target of Zinedine Zidane’s headbutt at the 2006 World Cup Final after having insulted the retiring French star in a way I can’t repeat here without getting banned).
The central square in Lecce, with the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre and a Baroque palace. (picture by Bernard Gagnon at Wikimedia Commons)
What to expect?
Although echelons are a realistic possibility, a second rest day is more likely.
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