The race will begin on Saturday, October 3 with a 16km individual time trial from the cathedral in Monreale to the center of Palermo.

The Grande Partenza was originally scheduled to take place in Budapest in May, but with the postponement of the Giro due to the coronavirus outbreak, three stages in Hungary were taken off the route The 2020 Corsa Rosa will run from October 3 to 25.

On Friday, RCS Sport announced that the Budapest time trial had been changed to the same distance to Palermo, ending the local debate over which Sicilian town or village would host the Grande Partenza. The Giro will then continue on to the three Sicilian stages that were already scheduled as stages 4, 5, and 6 on the route announced last winter.

Vincenzo Nibali (Trek-Segafredo), Peter Sagan (Bora-Hansgrohe), Simon Yates (Mitchelton-Scott), Remco Evenpole (Deceuninck-Quick Step), defending champion Richard Carapas (Team Ineos) and others have been confirmed for the 2020 Giro.

Sicily hosted the first Giro start in 1930, and the Gran Partenza has been held a total of nine times, most recently in 2008, when Slipstream-Chipotle won the team time trial in Palermo.

In recent years, the Giro has frequently visited Sicily, and RCS Sport has established a new four-day Giro di Sicilia in 2019. Sicily was already scheduled to host the Grande Partenza in 2021, but that has been moved up to October to host the opening four stages.

"We immediately accepted the invitation from RCS Sport to move the Grande Partenza from 2021 to 2020. We are proud to be part of this project which will be a driving force in the development of sport and tourism."

Thus the 2020 Giro will start under the stunning Norman cathedral of Monreale, famous for its mosaic interior. Monreale is located on the slopes of Monte Caputo overlooking Palermo, so the time trial course will be a fast one heading into the city.

"It will be a very interesting challenge because we start downhill," Giovanni Visconti (Vini Zabu-KTM) told Il Corriere della Sera (open in new tab). It's a time trial at 60 km/h, with a few corners in the final. Specialists will be the favorites to win.

The second stage starts in Alcamo (instead of Monreale as originally planned) and follows a rolling route to Agrigento and the impressive Valley of the Temples.

Agrigento was the site of the 1994 World Championships and where Riccardo Ricco took a stage win in the 2008 Giro; RCS Sport describes it as a "finisher's final."

The Giro's first summit finish will come on stage 3, when the race will travel from Enna to the summit of Mount Etna. This will be the Giro's third visit to the volcano in four years, and the riders will take a new approach from Ring Agrossa to the summit of Piano Provenzana: the 18.2 km ascent has an average gradient of 6.8%, with an 11% slope near the summit.

The fourth and final Sicilian stage is 138 km from Catania to Vilafranca Tirrena, with the 1125-meter-high Portella Mandrazzi climb in the middle of the stage, where sprinters are expected to have their first chance at the finish.

The Giro caravan will cross by ferry to Calabria before stage 5.

The revised 2020 Giro route is expected to be fully announced in the coming days, and Il Corriere della Sera reports that instead of the two road race stages originally scheduled for Hungary in May, a stage to the impressive city of Matera and Abruzzo's Apennines, the route will reportedly include a summit finish in the Apennines.

No changes are expected for the second half of the route, where most of the important stages will take place over the weekend. The final weekend of the Giro will feature a summit finish in Sestriere before the time trial in Milan on October 25, which could be a "super Sunday" as the Paris-Roubaix and Vuelta a España Col du Tourmalet summit finishes are scheduled for the same day could turn out to be something of a "super Sunday.

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