It was the fastest stage of the Giro, and the riders sped into Medole, at kilometre 83, like a fifteenth-century influx of immigrants from the Brescian famine.
A legal judgment in 1481 ruled that immigrants to Medole were to be treated as foreigners, with limited rights, until 150 years had passed from the arrival of their first family member. Ninety years later, 110 immigrant families petitioned the Duke of Mantua for relief. He confirmed the privileges of the natives, and the peloton sped out of town as quickly as it had arrived, without taking a second to glance at Titian’s The Risen One Appears to the Mother by Titian or Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ, two major artistic treasures kept in a provincial parish church. How thoroughly Italian.
