You are listening to Kilometer Zero by the Cycling Podcast, powered by Zwift. The fitness

app where fun is fast. Daniel, here we are three or four days into the

Giro d'Italia. We got your head around the fact that it is the Giro. Does it? I mean, as we drove

off Mount Etna tonight, it was dark and it struck me that that's very unusual at Grand Tour

to be heading away from the stage with darkness falling. Yes, it's quite disorienting, isn't

it? There's a certain feel in the air, particularly when you've been doing the Giro for many years,

may become synonymous with the Giro and the Giro becomes synonymous with many other

visions of Italy and flavours of Italy, of course, that we always speak right in the podcast,

but I think of the poppies, particularly in the north of Italy and the flatlands of the

Poe, Delta and the light, the long nights. Quite different here, you get the sense that Italy's back

to work and the stage starts and stage finishes are quite muted. It is quite strange. I think we

imagined it a few months ago when we did our Giro and we talked about the Giro of the rebirth

or a Giro of the rebirth. We expected it to feel or we were maybe thinking it would feel very festive

and like a big celebration of life getting back to normal, but of course life isn't back to normal,

yet, is it? And the Giro is not back to normal. No, I mean, the Covid crisis struck first and

very hard in Italy, of course. And I get the sense, I've had a sense since that happened of a

sense of trauma in Italy and among Italian writers. A lot of them talk about it, perhaps more than

writers from any other country. I'm not exactly sure why that is, but it's cast a long shadow, hasn't

it? And Covid is still with us and it's still present. But I think I've got a real sense in Italy of

just how big a trauma that was when it hit and how we're still getting over that.

Yeah, I think so and I think we've spoken the spring about how Italy's history has sort of

popped marked with these natural disasters, many of them, but also, you know, the

...