UP & OVER

Join Octane as we celebrate 200 years of the Stelvio Pass, one of the most famous roads the world has ever known

- Andrew English

AN OVERDRIVE HELPS of course; first gear, then second, click into overdrive and then out and down into first again for the next hairpin.

The rev-counter swings up and down and, depending on your tyres and differential, the inside wheel spins or chirps. And if it all feels a bit strained when you start off in Stilfs (or Stelvio in Italian) in the Southern Tirol, don’t worry: you're going to be supremely well-practised after the 48 hairpins on the northern side of one of the most famous Alpine passes, which celebrates its 200th anniversary this year.

The Stelvio Pass or, as the Austrians call it, the Stilfser Joch is the highest paved eastern Alpine pass. Peaking at 2757m (9045ft), it was created two centuries ago to link Lombardy – now part of Italy but then part of Austria – with the rest of that country. This was because the 1815 Congress of Vienna had redrawn Europe's Napoleonic borders and annexed Alta Valtellina and Lombardy Veneto to the Austrian empire, leading to the need for a direct route between the two. It lay so close to Switzerland that during the First World War, in the battles known as ‘the White War’, shells Fired between the Italian and Austro-Hungarian lines were landing in neutral Switzerland and both sides had to agree to shell each other only on strict angles of attack.

The chief engineer was Carlo Donegani and he did a fine job with the tunnels and stonewalled corners - each and every one numbered. On the southern side, the high school in Sondrio is named after him. Depending on who is counting and from which side, there are a total of between 75 and 88 hairpin corners, although some are more hairpinning than others, notably those on the northern side.