Their adventures started on a ship. Some had embarked at Genoa while others, wanting to limit their time on the waves, met their colleagues at Naples. From there they crossed the Tyrrhenian Sea to Sicily and the city of Palermo, ready to commence the 1949 Giro d’Italia.
Among the 102 starters were fierce rivals Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali. Ahead of them was a race of over 4,000km culminating in ‘a difficult and daring foray into the French Alps, the same ones that act as the supreme judges of the Tour when it runs in an anti-clockwise direction’. So wrote Giuseppe Ambrosini in La Stampa before expressing the hope that ‘our two champions the whole world envies’ would set out to win rather than sacrifice opportunities for fear of leading the other to victory.