Muro di Sormano

We have a lot to thank the late Vincenzo Torriani for. An archetypally suave Italian businessman who favoured sharkskin suits and permanently had a cigarette hanging from his bottom lip, Torriani was by anyone’s measure the Godfather of cycling in a country where the sport is close to a religion.

Sole organiser of all the races run by newspaper from 1949 to 1989, he quite simply transformed the sport on Italian shores. He took the Giro d’Italia to parts of the country it had only dreamed of reaching, for example Venice’s Piazza San Marco, while introducing climbs and crowning legends – who