Stelvio Pass
— — forty-eight turns into the thinning air.
Not only on a wall.
“Forty-eight numbered hairpins climb from Prato allo Stelvio to a saddle at 2,757 metres. From late May until late October the road belongs to cyclists, motorcyclists, and drivers who come for a single afternoon and remember it for years. The Ortler glacier holds white above the summit, the rifugi at the saddle stay open through the season, and the air at the top works on the body in the way altitude does. Top Gear once called it the greatest driving road in the world. In summer the road becomes briefly possible again.
Stelvio Pass, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Stelvio Pass (Passo dello Stelvio in Italian, Stilfserjoch in German) crosses the Eastern Alps at 2,757 metres on the border between Lombardy and South Tyrol, a few kilometres from the Swiss frontier at the Umbrail Pass. The northern road climbs from Prato allo Stelvio through 48 numbered hairpins; the southern road climbs from Bormio through 40. Italian engineer Carlo Donegani designed the route for the Austrian Empire between 1820 and 1825 to link the Valtellina with the upper Adige Valley after the Congress of Vienna. The pass sits inside Stelvio National Park, established April 1935, protecting roughly 1,300 square kilometres of high-alpine terrain across Lombardy and Trentino-Alto Adige.
At 2,757 metres the air at the summit carries about 73 percent of the oxygen available at sea level, which is the small detail every cyclist feels in the last three switchbacks. The Stelvio has been crowned Cima Coppi, the Giro d'Italia's highest point of the year, more often than any other pass in the race's history. Wind funnels through the saddle between the Ortler massif on one side and Piz Umbrail on the other. Above the treeline the slope is alpine grass, lichen, and edelweiss. Even in late August the summit temperature can fall below freezing by mid-afternoon, with the road still open and traffic still climbing through the hairpins.
The pass road opens once winter snow can be cleared, typically in late May or early June, and closes again in late October. Snow walls higher than a car often line the summit road well into June. For roughly five months the saddle belongs to cyclists, motorcyclists, drivers, and the small queue of cars waiting for a parking space at the rifugi. The Stilfserjoch glacier on the South Tyrol side has long been operated as the highest summer-skiing area in Europe, though the lift-served terrain has shrunk with the glacier in recent decades. Once each summer the Stelvio Bike Day closes the road to motor traffic for a Saturday and gives the climb back to cyclists alone.