Olympics-Flame begins Italian tour ahead of Milano Cortina Games

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By Giselda Vagnoni

ROME, Dec 6 (Reuters) – The Olympic flame started its journey through Italy from a sunlit Rome on Saturday, launching a two-month relay designed to stir excitement across the country ahead of the 2026 Winter Games.

After being lit last month in ancient Olympia, the Greek home of the ancient Games, and handed over to Italian Games organisers earlier this week, the torch set off from Rome’s historic Stadio dei Marmi on Saturday. 

Inaugurated in 1932 as part of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s monumental sports city project, the stadium is encircled by 60 Carrara marble statues of athletes.

Italy’s Olympic medal-winning swimmer Gregorio Paltrinieri was the first torchbearer to carry the Olympic flame as it began its 12,000-km (7,450-mile) Italian journey. 

Accompanying the torch out of the Stadio dei Marmi was basketball player Achille Polonara, who is battling leukaemia.

“It was a great emotion, just as it is a great emotion to be standing now, because until a week ago I was in a wheelchair,” Polonara told Italian state television RAI.

“My battle has been complicated and I hope I’m finally at the end of it. Being an athlete helped me a lot, and now I just hope a little luck will be on my side,” he added.

The torch will travel through all 110 Italian provinces and more than 300 municipalities, stopping in 60 cities for end-of-day celebrations before reaching Milan in time for the opening ceremony on February 6.

The Games will be co-hosted by Milan and the Dolomite resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo and run until February 22.

Unveiled in April, the Milano Cortina torch features an aerodynamic silhouette inspired by the curves of the Dolomites and the dynamic lines of ski tracks.

FIRE WAS SACRED IN ANCIENT GREECE

In ancient Greece, fire was considered divine, tied to the myth of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods to give humanity knowledge and progress.

An Olympic Truce was declared before and during the Games.

“Rome is welcoming (the flame) with the utmost splendour, with sunshine and blue skies, and we hope this is a good omen in these times, as it was in the past, so that hostilities may cease,” Michela Micori, an Italian bystander watching the relay told Reuters.

Some 10,001 torchbearers will carry the flame, wearing white uniforms with a red-and-yellow pattern recalling the Olympic flame.

Italy, a winter sports powerhouse, last hosted the Winter Olympics in 2006 in Turin.

The flame will pass landmarks such as the Colosseum, the Vatican, Venice’s Grand Canal and Siena’s Piazza del Campo and spend Christmas in Naples.

It will be in Cortina d’Ampezzo on January 26, exactly 70 years after the opening ceremony of the 1956 Games at the same venue, before ending up at Milan’s San Siro stadium.

(Reporting by Giselda Vagnoni; Additional reporting by Roberto Mignucci; Editing by Alex Richardson and Clare Fallon)