Dear Ciccone, we're almost there. After the last episode in Naples, your carefree Giro as an additional domestique for Pedersen is closing, and your own Giro is opening up. Although you've presented and approached it without pressure and obsession, allowing yourself to express freely with a serene mind, we from the outside continue to see it as a decisive and definitive Giro: after the disastrous years of late Covid and the volcano at the eyebrow, this time you've finally arrived as you should, without accidents in your way, without the related side effects of anxieties, tensions, doubts, and fears upon resumption.

You've granted yourself and us a good spring, to the point of consolidating the opinion of half of Italy that you wouldn't be suitable for stage races, much better for one-day classics, given that in three weeks, there's always a day or hour when you lose your head and mess everything up.

Let's be straightforward: this Giro arrives punctually and providentially to establish a truth. Let's be honest: you're arriving without ifs and buts, the condition is perfect, you've even caught the coincidence of a Giro lacking insurmountable champions, let's grant Roglic due respect, but all the others are definitely within reach. It's the ideal Giro for a truly talented and rated Ciccone: a Giro if not to win, at least to celebrate on the podium, but immediately after Roglic, no lower. Provided Ciccone is Ciccone, an adult and fierce Ciccone, the Ciccone awaited by an afflicted and neglected Italy for at least five years, anyway after Nibali.

However we want to lighten it, so as not to create too much pressure, the situation is set in these terms: it's the last call, the opportunity is too favorable, wavering and winning a stage when you're thirty minutes back no longer has any meaning. At the age you are (30 years old) and the salary you earn (one million and two), it's no longer time to push back expectations and promises. The discussion must be clarified and closed here, this time, in the most propitious Giro d'Italia of your career. You've never arrived here so in shape, you've arrived without even one of the three nowadays out-of-reach opponents, you have a magnificent team behind you, you have an entire nation hanging on your legs, out of desperation and withdrawal syndrome. One cannot ask for more or better.

After the playful and light Giro of the first stages, where you enjoyed yourself freely helping Pedersen (although in my opinion spending too much, like a classic rider), Tagliacozzo awaits you. It's your climb, it's your region, it's your people: there's no better opportunity to start serious work. With an agreement that already applies now: even in case of success, let's see not to consider it a finish line, but a starting point. A flying start towards the true Giro of another Ciccone. The Ciccone imagined and dreamed since Nibali's retirement. In vain. From Tagliacozzo onwards, do the right thing: make us change our minds.