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Dolomites Motorcycle Tour

The passes riders count in hairpins.

The Stelvio has forty-eight of them on the north side and a summit at 2,757 metres. The Gavia is narrower than a lane where it matters. The Sella Ronda is four passes in one morning. Between them are villages with three languages on the menu and a world war still cut into the rock. Departures announced soon.

How many hairpins does the Stelvio Pass have?

Forty-eight on the north side, numbered on stone markers, over twenty-eight kilometres from Prato allo Stelvio. Thirty-four more on the Bormio side, wider, with six tunnels. The summit is 2,757 metres, the highest paved pass in the eastern Alps and seven metres short of the highest in all of them. Until 1919 the top was the border between Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Switzerland kept a lookout on the peak beside it.

When are the Dolomites passes open to motorcycles?

From late May or June to late October, depending on the snow. The Stelvio usually opens in the second half of May and closes around the first of November; the Gavia runs a shorter season, early June to mid October, and its dates move by weeks from one year to the next. July and August are reliable and crowded, with afternoon thunderstorms and the whole of Italy on the road around 15 August. June and September are the months that work.

The Stelvio was built for an emperor who wanted to reach Milan.

Austria acquired Lombardy after Napoleon and needed a road from Vienna to its new territory that avoided Switzerland. Carlo Donegani spent a year surveying it and about 2,500 men spent five years building it, from 1820 to 1825, which is why the hairpins are stacked the way they are: the road was designed for horse-drawn traffic and it has never been straightened. The emperor made Donegani a nobleman for it, with the Stelvio in his title.

The passes in order.

Bormio, the Stelvio, and the Gavia, whose southern side is between 1.9 and 3 metres wide with a five-hundred-metre tunnel and no lights in it. East across the Val di Sole to the Sella Ronda: Campolongo, Gardena, Sella, and the Pordoi's twenty-eight hairpins. The Giau, twenty-nine hairpins and three avalanche galleries above Selva di Cadore. Cortina. The toll road to Tre Cime, five kilometres that never drop below ten percent.

A world war is still in the rock above the road.

Between the Falzarego and Valparola passes, five square kilometres of trenches, gun positions, and tunnels from the Italian front of 1915 to 1918 are open to anyone who walks in. Italian sappers drove a mine along a ledge into the Piccolo Lagazuoi and fired it on 20 June 1917. The scar is still visible from the pass. Helmets and torches are lent at the door, and the walk is a good use of the afternoon the bikes are parked.

The valleys between the passes have hotels of the Aman Rosa Alpina’s class.

The Aman Rosa Alpina in San Cassiano, a family hotel since 1939 and an Aman since 2025. La Perla in Corvara, a Ladin family house with thirty thousand bottles in the cellar. Castel Fragsburg, a 1624 hunting lodge above Merano. Bormio’s Bagni Nuovi, an 1836 spa palace at the foot of the Stelvio. Dinner is Atelier Moessmer in Brunico, three stars, or a rifugio at the top of the pass. The Harley-Davidson is waiting at the first hotel.

What riders ask about the Dolomites.

Whether the Stelvio is as hard as it looks, how the Sella Ronda is put together, and where the nights are spent. Three short answers.

Is the Stelvio hard to ride?

It is long and it is busy, not dangerous. Forty-eight numbered hairpins on the north side, most of them tight, with cyclists on every one and coaches on the wider ones. The Gavia next door is the harder road: narrower than a lane in places, with an unlit tunnel near the top.

How many passes are in the Sella Ronda?

Four. Campolongo, Gardena, Pordoi, and Sella, in a circuit of about sixty kilometres round the Sella massif, with roughly 1,800 metres of climbing. It is a morning’s ride if nobody stops, and everybody stops.

Where does the tour stay?

In the valley towns between the passes, which are South Tyrolean and Ladin as much as Italian, in hotels of the class of the Aman Rosa Alpina and La Perla in Alta Badia. The hotel list comes with each departure.

The other rides, and the experience.

Patagonia, Northern Thailand, the Dolomites, and Tuscany, each with its own page, and the page on the days, the hotels, the meals, and the motorcycle.

Join the interest list.

Argentina, Thailand, or Italy. Say which.