Cycling’s richest current talent pool is reportedly getting a Grand Tour on its doorstep. The opening stage of the 2027 Giro d’Italia is set to roll out of Trieste and loop back to the city via neighbouring Slovenia, a sprinter-friendly day that will carry the peloton through the home country of Tadej Pogacar and Primoz Roglic.

Urbano Cairo, the owner of RCS Media Group and parent of race organizer RCS Sport, confirmed the Trieste Grande Partenza during the Festival dello Sport in Trento over the weekend. The arrangement with the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, reported at close to €10 million, covers three stages in Italy’s north-east and ends a tug-of-war with the region that in 2025 lost out to Albania.

Stage 2 is reported to finish in Pordenone, named Italy’s capital of culture for 2027. A third Friuli stage is still being negotiated, with around twenty regional municipalities said to have expressed interest in hosting.

Zoncolan returns from the Ovaro side

From the north-east the race is expected to head south along the Adriatic, cross the Apennines to Naples and climb back up the Tyrrhenian coast before swinging through Tuscany, Liguria and Piedmont and returning to Friuli-Venezia Giulia for the final mountain weekend.

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Stage 20 is set to finish on Monte Zoncolan, likely after a start in Lienz, Austria. The climb will be approached from Ovaro, the steeper of its two faces and the side the Giro has always used for its signature stage finishes. That side has not been raced at the Giro since 2018, when Chris Froome won the stage six seconds ahead of Simon Yates with a late solo attack. The British rider went on to win the overall title the following week, in what remains his only maglia rosa.

The “true” Mortirolo and a Vicenza TT

Earlier in the final week, a mountain stage is expected to finish in Aprica, which marks its centenary in 2027. Italian reporting points to the Passo Gavia preceding the “true” Mortirolo from the Mazzo di Valtellina side, the climb’s hardest face, which has been largely absent from the race in recent editions.

A hilly individual time trial to Vicenza is also pencilled into the draft route, a profile that tends to reward the overall contenders rather than specialist chrono riders.

Trieste the only piece RCS has confirmed

Only the Trieste Grande Partenza has been publicly confirmed by RCS. Everything beyond that still rests on reporting by Antonio Simeoli of Il Messaggero Veneto and the specialist site Tuttobiciweb, which first mapped out the proposed route.

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Pogacar, the biggest name in Slovenian cycling and the sport’s current dominant rider, will not race again in 2026 after a high-speed crash on stage 8 of the Vuelta a España in August left him with a concussion, a fractured left collarbone and a stable C7 cervical fracture. His UAE Team Emirates squad confirmed shortly after surgery that he would not line up again this year, and his 2027 programme has not yet been announced.

The Grande Partenza is due to be presented in Trieste on 12 October 2026, with the full 2027 route scheduled to be unveiled in Rome on 3 November. The 110th edition of the race is set to run from 8 to 30 May 2027.

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