On Saturday 10 October 2026 the Lombardia passed once again in front of the Madonna del Ghisallo, the little church above Bellagio where cyclists hang their bicycles on the walls. The race, now in its 120th edition, had set off from Bergamo, followed the lake from Lecco to Bellagio and from there taken the classic climb, the one with the hairpins in the woods, cresting about sixty kilometres from the finish.

Tadej Pogačar was missing: he had won the previous five editions and had been out since the end of August after a crash at the Vuelta. Paul Seixas crossed the line in Como alone, a Frenchman who had turned twenty sixteen days earlier: no one had ever won the Race of the Falling Leaves so young, not even Giovanni Gerbi, who took the first edition in 1905.

At the top of the climb, at 754 metres, stands a small church with a three-arched portico and a bell tower older than the rest of the building. Inside, where elsewhere people hang silver hearts and votive tablets, there are bicycles: the Tour de France bikes of Gino Bartali, a Bianchi of Fausto Coppi, the bent frame of Fabio Casartelli, the Olympic champion from Como who died at the 1995 Tour. Around them, pink and yellow jerseys, pennants, hundreds of photographs of cyclists who are no longer here. And a bronze torch that has been burning since 1949, the year Pius XII proclaimed the Madonna del Ghisallo patron saint of cyclists.

On 14 October the Museo del Ciclismo, built beside the church, turns twenty, and until 1 November, when it closes for the winter, it is hosting an exhibition of twenty bicycles ranging from Marco Pantani to Pogačar.

Those who come by bike find a climb that cyclists from half the world know by name; those who arrive by car or bus find a place that can be understood even without ever having pedalled.

The name comes from a legend. A count named Ghisallo, attacked by bandits while crossing these woods, is said to have taken refuge in a chapel along the road and promised the Madonna a church in exchange for his life.

He survived, and the Madonna of that chapel took his name. The place, in any case, is genuinely ancient: Ghisallo appears as a locality between Civenna and Magreglio in a notarial deed of 1135, when churches are not yet mentioned.

The church you see today was built in 1623 in place of an older building, of which the bell tower remains. The three-arched portico at the entrance was added in 1681. Inside is a single hall ending in a small square apse, with the presbytery closed off by a wrought-iron gate. The venerated image is a Madonna nursing the Child: it was a 16th-century fresco, detached in 1950 and transferred to canvas, and the mosaic in the centre of the façade reproduces it.

A small error has also survived in the catalogue of cultural heritage of the Lombardy Region. The protection order of 4 September 1922, by which the State placed the building under protection, records it as «chiesetta della Madonna del Ghirallo», with an r in place of the s.

Il Lombardia came through here for the first time on 2 November 1919, almost exactly a year after the end of the war. The Ghisallo was then an unpaved road, made of long series of hairpins, and in the reports of the Gazzetta dello Sport it did not yet have its name: they spoke of the «climbs of Magreglio». Among the riders were three Swiss, the brothers Max and Henri Suter and Oscar Egg, who in those years was collecting speed records. According to contemporary accounts reported by Swissinfo, Egg was so impressed by the climb that he turned his bicycle around and went back to Milan.

Eight riders reached the finish. Costante Girardengo won, with eight minutes over Gaetano Belloni, and Henri Suter was third. Since then the Ghisallo has been the climb of the Lombardia. The race has changed route many times, moved starts and finishes between Milan, Como and Bergamo, in some editions tackled it from the opposite side or descended it, but it has almost always come back up here.

That the church belonged to cyclists, the cyclists had decided for themselves. According to a reconstruction by Il Foglio, in 1945 it was Don Carlo Gnocchi, then a military chaplain, who noticed that after the race the riders left caps and water bottles before the Madonna, as people elsewhere leave votive offerings.

The man who gave shape to that devotion was the parish priest of Magreglio, Don Ermelindo Viganò, who arrived in the village in 1944 and in 1947 asked the pope to proclaim the Madonna del Ghisallo patron saint of cyclists.

It is said that Gino Bartali helped persuade Pius XII. The pope received him in the spring of 1949, during the Giro d'Italia, and asked him about the Madonna del Ghisallo. Bartali, who had won the Tour the year before and attributed the victory to her, answered with a nod.

The papal brief is dated 13 October 1949. For the occasion a bronze torch set out from Rome, the work of the sculptor Carmelo Cappello and blessed by the pope, carried to the sanctuary by a relay of cyclists. The last two to hold it were Bartali and Coppi, whose statues now stand in the square. The torch is still in the church, always lit, in memory of the cyclists who have died. Don Ermelindo became the first rector of the sanctuary and remained parish priest of Magreglio until his death in 1985.

Ten days after the brief, on 23 October 1949, the Lombardia came back this way. Coppi stayed covered in the bunch until the foot of the Ghisallo, then attacked on the climb and reached Milan with almost three minutes' lead over the Swiss rider Ferdi Kübler.

It was his fourth Lombardia in a row. He would win a fifth in 1954, and that record remained his alone for more than seventy years, until Pogačar matched it in 2025.

It is often said that the Madonna del Ghisallo is the patron saint of all the world's cyclists. Pius XII's brief actually speaks of Italian cyclists, and Paul VI called her that too on 28 June 1968, when he blessed the participants in an international cycling tour that was to travel from Rome to Como and from there to the sanctuary.

In his address he recalled the lamp lit by Pius XII twenty years earlier, which had never stopped burning since.

The rest of the world adopted her on its own. In France l'abbé Joseph Massie, parish priest of three villages in the Landes, took inspiration from the Ghisallo and in 1958 began turning an old chapel in Labastide-d'Armagnac into a sanctuary for cyclists, which John XXIII recognised in 1959 under the name Notre-Dame des Cyclistes.

In 1994 Ticino too had its cyclists' oratory, at Rivera, at the foot of Monte Ceneri. But people still come to the Ghisallo from far away: ten years ago the museum already counted more than ten thousand visitors a year, and more than half came from abroad.

The church is small and the walls are covered with objects. Bartali brought up here the two bicycles from his Tours, the 1938 one and the 1948 one. Between the two Tours came the war, and Bartali spent that one in the saddle too: pretending to train, he rode the roads between Florence, Assisi, Genoa and Rome with false documents hidden in the frame, intended for hundreds of Jews on the run.

He barely spoke of it to anyone; the story only came out after his death, and in 2013 Yad Vashem recognised him as Righteous Among the Nations.

Beside his are a Bianchi of Coppi, the bike with which Eddy Merckx won the Tour and the special one Francesco Moser used for the hour record. The jerseys are pink, yellow, rainbow and tricolour, and in 2017 Vincenzo Nibali, having just won the Lombardia, announced that he would bring his to the Ghisallo too.

There is one bicycle, though, that has won nothing. It is that of Fabio Casartelli, born in Como in 1970. In 1992, in Barcelona, he had won the Olympic gold in the road race. On 18 July 1995, on the fifteenth stage of the Tour de France, he crashed on the descent of the Col de Portet d'Aspet, in the Pyrenees, hit his head against the concrete blocks at the roadside and died that same day.

He was twenty-four. The frame from that crash, bent, was brought here. On the Portet d'Aspet, near the point of the accident, a sundial marks three dates with its shadow: birth, death and 2 August, the day of the Olympic gold.

Around them are hundreds of photographs of cyclists who have died, the badges of federations and sports clubs and the torch of 1949. Outside, in the square, stand the statues of Bartali and Coppi, the bust of Alfredo Binda added in 2011, the memorial stones dedicated to Don Ermelindo Viganò and Don Luigi Farina, and the bronze Monument to the Cyclist that Elio Ponti, a sculptor from Ponzate, made in 1973. From the terrace beside the church you look out over the lake.

At a certain point the bicycles no longer fit. In the 1990s planning began for a museum beside the church, and the committee was chaired by Fiorenzo Magni, three-time winner of the Giro d'Italia. The Museo del Ciclismo Madonna del Ghisallo was inaugurated on 14 October 2006, the day of the Lombardia.

It is a three-storey building with large windows, and the route inside climbs along a ramp that bends in hairpins, like the last metres of the road outside. There are historic bicycles, archives, vintage newspapers and multimedia rooms, and a collection of more than fifty original pink jerseys, from the 1930s onwards, which the museum describes as the largest in the world.

For its twentieth anniversary the museum has staged the exhibition Ghisallo 20. The First Twenty Years of an Endless Story, open until 1 November 2026. It features twenty special bicycles, each tied to a feat: among them Marco Pantani's 1997 aluminium Wilier, Mario Cipollini's tiger-striped Specialized, the bike of Vincenzo Nibali's comeback at the 2016 Giro and the recent bikes of Remco Evenepoel and Pogačar.

The museum is at Via Gino Bartali 4, in Magreglio, and is open from 1 March to 1 November, every day from 9.30 am to 5.30 pm. A full ticket costs 6 euros, a reduced one 5, and holders of the Abbonamento Musei Lombardia Valle d'Aosta enter free. Before going up it is worth checking the museum website, because hours and prices can change. The church, by contrast, is free to enter.

When people say Ghisallo, cyclists mean the side that climbs from Bellagio. You start at the lake, at about 200 metres, and reach the sanctuary at 754: about ten kilometres and roughly 550 metres of elevation gain, with an average between 5 and 6%.

The average, though, does not tell the whole story of this climb. The first four kilometres, just outside the village, are the hardest, with hairpins in the woods and gradients around 9% that reach 14% at the worst points. At Guello the road flattens out and for about three kilometres, as far as Civenna, is almost level, with a few short descents. The last kilometre and a half climbs decisively again, and the finish announces itself with the bell tower.

The professionals, in the race, climb it in under twenty minutes: Paolo Bettini, in the 2005 Lombardia, took about nineteen and a half minutes. From the opposite side, from Erba via Canzo and Asso, the road is much gentler and only becomes demanding in the last kilometre and a half, with pitches of 10%.

There is also a variant for those who want more, which the Gazzetta christened Superghisallo in 1961: from Guello you turn towards Monte San Primo, climb to 975 metres at Pian Rancio and reach the sanctuary by descending from above.

Traffic is heavy, especially on public holidays, when Civenna fills up too, so it is best to start early and descend towards the lake with care. In Bellagio you can also rent e-bikes, and there are guided rides to the sanctuary.

The sanctuary stands in the municipality of Magreglio, at the highest point of the road linking Bellagio to Asso. By car you climb from Bellagio or from Erba, via Canzo and Asso, and this is the most convenient route for those coming from Milan: a little over an hour, depending on traffic. Without a car there is the C136 bus, which links Asso, Civenna and Bellagio and stops at the sanctuary.

For the church half an hour is enough; for the museum it is best to allow at least an hour. The Ghisallo combines well with a day in Bellagio: you can go up in the morning and come down to the lake for the afternoon, or the other way round, perhaps stopping at Civenna, which looks over the Lecco branch of the lake with the Grigne opposite.

Those who still have legs can continue on foot from Magreglio: in a good half-hour on the trail, among caves and small waterfalls, you reach the source of the Lambro, the same river that further downstream crosses Monza and Milan.

The Ghisallo is not the steepest climb in the area, nor the longest. More than a hundred years of Lombardia have made it what it is, together with a church at the top where you can stop and, above all, the riders, who left up here what they had: first a cap or a water bottle, then the jerseys and bicycles with which they had won, and also the one on which one of them had died.

Anyone who, after the Ghisallo, wants other places earned with their legs will find one not far away, above Civate: San Pietro al Monte, an abbey that can only be reached on foot.