Maloja is a pass that does two things at once: it sits at the head of the Upper Engadine, where the valley is wide and gentle, and it looks down over a cliff into the Val Bregaglia, where the road suddenly tumbles in a dozen or so hairpins toward Italy. The difference in character is startling. On the Engadine side the village lies by the shore of Lake Sils at around 1,800 metres, among larches and meadows, while a few hundred metres away the Italian side falls steeply, as if the mountain had been sliced.
The hairpins on the south side are among the best in Switzerland, tight, evenly spaced and well surfaced, and the road drops about 400 metres in a very short distance. They make a satisfying descent and a more demanding climb. You come out in the Bregaglia, a green valley with chestnut woods and stone villages like Stampa, the home of the Giacometti family, whose artist sons Alberto and Giovanni were born here. At the bottom lies Chiavenna, in Italy, twenty-five kilometres away.
Maloja has a particular weather phenomenon called the Maloja snake: when moist air from the south pushes up the valley in the morning, it forms a long, winding bank of cloud that curls over the pass, and the effect looks like a snake wriggling across the mountains. Sailors on Lake Sils know the Maloja wind, which blows up the lake on summer afternoons and fills sails across the water. The painter Giovanni Segantini lived in a small chalet above the village and died on the nearby Schafberg in 1899, and his panoramic mountain paintings seem to catch this exact light.
The village itself is small, with a few hotels and a large old palace-hotel, and fuel is not reliably available, so top up in Silvaplana, ten kilometres away, or in St Moritz, fifteen. The pass is open all year, though snow can make the hairpins tricky in winter. Even on a warm day, the air is cool and thin, and the lake can be icy. For the riding, come in the morning, when the road is quiet and the cloud sits on the pass in a long, silent drift.