And so, confirming the hopes suspended two months ago, the Giro di Campania is no longer just a memory. No, it is a return, with the definitive ratification by the Campania Region finalized yesterday afternoon, thanks to the concrete commitment of President Roberto Fico and Sports Assessor Fiorella Zabatta. A return, then. And what a spectacular return, for this race dear to us and to you, created by Il Mattino in 1911: indeed, thinking about it carefully, fifteen years before the noble Calcio Napoli was even born.

The 2026 Giro della Campania, on the UCI calendar as an international category 1.1 race, which less aridly identifies the quality of our—we will always feel it as such—race: just one step below the World Cup classics, Sanremo, Lombardia, Flanders, Roubaix, to be clear.

The 2026 Giro della Campania will be on the calendar on Sunday, September 20, organized by Terenzi sport, and will be an extraordinary race in the name and for all of Campania. 'La Petite Boucle', the little loop, as we liked to rename it in italics—in modest parallel to the 'Grande Boucle', which is the Tour de France—will be, for its return, the 64th edition, the finest and most majestic thing one could imagine. It will be the virtuous communion of an extraordinary geography—ours, a France, indeed, in sixteenths—which will exalt as is right the Caserta of the Vanvitellian Royal Palace and the Naples of Piazza Plebiscito, confirmed as starting and finishing points, but will know how to tint with a unique shade all our provinces.

It will be emblematic of our entire world, which has capitals and sentimental cathedrals everywhere, and which only a sport as human and noble as cycling knows how to make shine. And believe us, wherever there is cycling there is history, on a fascinating route, where at every corner—modernity does not remove the ancient, it can instead chisel it—one recognizes the cornerstone of a cyclist who passed through it, and the future. Yes, from Caserta itself where on the avenue in front of the Royal Palace in 2001, we were there, Dimitri Konychev won the last edition, passing through Maddaloni, the navel of cycling in Terra di Lavoro, to Arpaia and Montesarchio, climbs today softened by asphalt, where Pasquale Carbone and Arcangelo Bove once raced on stone, lucid at almost 100 years old, at the Gran Premio della Montagna of Montefusco, Sannio and Prata di Principato Ultra, where in the '40s—we weren't there, we admit it—Gino Bartali would crumble the group...

And then the passage through Avellino and Montoro, Montoro Inferiore or Superiore as it may be, and it is the same love for Campania testified by Vittorio De Martino, until we see the stars again at Vietri, on the Gulf of Salerno. And from there, we would tell you in person everything that happened in 63 years of 'Campania', the gaze of the riders—we would want them all Italian, but we will always find them all ours—on the sea of the Amalfi Coast, beautiful land of love, and that right turn that stamps immensity on history, there is no memory that enchants more, if not in the 'Campania' the sea-climb comparison, which one lives or dreams of facing Agerola. And it was a choice of field, not of song, a brilliant one, by those who traced this route, to insert precisely Agerola, in the edition of the good return.

Agerola, and the hymn to the glory of Fausto Coppi in 1955, the extreme flight of the heron, almost 36 years of age, the details in the chronicle we will dedicate to you, which takes the wheel from the cycling world and the infinite modesty that wrung his heart. Agerola and Fausto Coppi, we will write it all together well before 'giggiriva', which at Furore has already left the rest of life behind, a personal challenge, a clandestine love, a career end chased away on an April day that Magni and Monti, Astrua and whoever you want saw as we did too remotely. Coppi and Agerola and the viewpoint of Bomerano from where in the following years—Gino Palumbo would tell—at every fugitive who appeared they would unhappily ask 'but is that Coppi?', and it was at most instead Sabbadin, 1958. Coppi gone forever.

The 2026 Giro della Campania will then be the race to glide onto the plain,—one year Livio Trapè won attacking downhill, it was 1961—and as it approaches Naples beloved by cycling. Thoughts like sails above the sea that day, Sunday the 20th Naples will honor a finish without equal, never in the past at Piazza del Plebiscito, the Campania that loved the Albricci, to know the winner of a race that will never be for us and for you—not even in 2026 which we feel at our age fleeting—an emotion of little consequence.

from Il Mattino, August 7, 2026