The secret road

The road is the kind of grey a wet school jumper goes, with the lack of central markings indicating how narrow it is

Comeglians sits like a button on a Chesterfield sofa, pinned to the valley floor as if tethering the mountains rising biliously at its sides. There are rather a lot of towns like Comeglians in the Carnic Alps, little more than footnotes to the provincial highways yet still somehow containing everything one could need: a restaurant, a supermarket, a post office, a bank, an ironmongers, a hotel. As we ride I check them off in that order. By the time we pass the fountain – renaissance nymph draining into stone trough – we’ve hit the town limits and we’re on our first climb.

This is how Italy’s northern mountains work. As a general rule, trying to build higher up the peaks is like balancing a marble on a seesaw, with the emphasis on the saw, so towns cling to the feet of the jagged limestone cliffs in a way that means most roads out must go up. It’s how Marco has been able to plan a ride that will total just 65km but yet aggregates some 2,800m of ascent.

Even so, he does need a little bit of help to achieve such stats, which is why he has drafted in a notorious friend. The name’s Zoncolan,