Trafoi is the last village before the Stelvio gets serious. It sits at about fifteen hundred metres in a narrow valley in South Tyrol, and above it the wall of the Ortler massif rises in a dazzling block of snow and ice, the highest peak of the Eastern Alps outside the Bernina range, at 3,905 metres. German is the first language here, with Italian a close second, and the church, the wooden balconies and the dumplings on the menu all say Tyrol rather than Lombardy. A short walk up the valley takes you to the Three Holy Springs, a pilgrimage spot where, the story goes, the Virgin appeared to a local shepherd girl in the nineteenth century, and a small chapel has stood beside the water ever since.
For riders the village is a staging post. From here the road climbs to the famous series of hairpins that lead to the Stelvio Pass, which at 2,757 metres is the second-highest paved pass in the Alps. The road was built in the 1820s by the Austrian Empire, to link its Tyrolean lands with Lombardy, and it was engineered by Carlo Donegani. The numbering of the bends, forty-eight in all on the Prato side, is a local tradition that every rider recognises. Coming up from Prato allo Stelvio, you pass through Trafoi on the way to the first of them, and the real work begins just above the last houses.
The weather decides everything. The pass is usually open from about late May or June until October, but snow can close it at short notice even in summer, and a bright morning in the valley often becomes fog, rain or hail at the top. Traffic in July and August can be enormous, with buses, cyclists and groups of motorbikes sharing narrow bends, so leave early or ride on a weekday. If you wait until midday, the queue can be longer than the view.
This is a good place to prepare. There are hotels, gasthofs and cafes in the village, with soup, cheese dumplings and apple strudel on offer, and a stop here before the climb is a good idea. Fuel is less certain. Prato allo Stelvio, about ten kilometres down the valley, has stations and larger shops, so fill there rather than hoping to find something on the mountain.
The Stelvio National Park lies all around, a protected area of glaciers, larch woods and alpine meadows where ibex and marmots live, and in the quiet hours you might see both.