The day before the big stage through the Dolomites, the Giro went in circles on the Slovenian border and, for a day, the Giro d'Italia was a tour of a border region, where every hamlet seems to have five names, or more: Italian, Slovenian, German, Friulan, Bisiaco.
The border has changed here so many times, you sometimes think entire towns have been moving across the landscape: Gornje Cerovo, three times the category 4 climb of the day, used to be Cerovo Gorenje. It is Cerò di Sopra in Italian, although formerly Cerou di Sopra or Cerou Superiore; in German it is, or was, Ober Cerou, and in Friulan, Cerò di Sore. It has, in its time, been part of the Holy Roman Empire, the Ostrogoth Kingdon, the Byzantine Empire, the Kingdom of the Lombards, the Duchy of Friuli, the Roegnum Italiae, the Austro-Italian Marches, the Kingdom of Italy, Italica, the Republic of Venice, the Habsburg Empire, the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, the Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral (a Nazi German district on the northern Adriatic coast created in 1943), Zone A of Venezia Giulia under the British-American control of the Allied Military Government (AMG), Yugoslavia, and, now, Slovenia. History runs deep in this part of the world, and people have learned to adapt to a changing world.
