I take a swig of beer as my eyes adapt to the darkness. My ears are still adjusting to the pounding four-to-the-floor beats pulsing from the speakers.
Had I spawned here without any prior knowledge, I’d wager I was at a DIY electronic-music festival or some sort of illicit cycling-themed hilltop rave – I certainly wouldn’t guess I was at a Wednesday evening club ride.
But Basso, as I’m about to find out over the next few days, takes great pride in doing things differently.
We’re at the summit of a short, steep stretch of road just above Bassano del Grappa, Italy, waiting for the weekly ‘Carbo Ride’ peloton to complete a timed mid-course hill climb.
Basso flags flutter in the evening breeze. To my left, marketing and product manager Leonardo Basso leans against his Instagrammable company-branded Land Rover Defender, squinting into the night.
“Here they come!” he exclaims as the first riders rip through the darkness in a blur of red and white light.
Participants congregate at the top – many straddling Basso bikes – chatting and comparing segment times.
After this, it’s just a short cruise back into town for the hard-earned pay-off: refreshments and free pasta at Basso’s bustling community hub, Bassano Club House. It’s a fitting introduction, both to the brand and the town that fostered it.
Local knowledge
Basso was born in Bassano almost 50 years ago, but unlike most brands, which outsource production to Asia as they grow bigger, Basso has doubled down on keeping operations local.
After a short but restful night’s sleep in one of the Club House’s five rooms (the Italians don’t do early nights), I meet CEO Alessandro Basso to find out more.
As we drive the 10 minutes to the brand’s HQ, he talks me through the local riding in detail.
"There are lots of routes that go to Venice, to the seaside, to the beach,” he explains as we speed through emerald-green Italian countryside. “But Bassano is really the gateway to the mountains. When you go north, you have Monte Grappa and Asiago. Behind that, you can ride the Alps. Left and right, it’s all the wine country – smaller hills, rolling terrain. I mean, you don’t want a two-hour climb every day, do you?”
Crucially, Bassano and the surrounding areas have a bit of everything.
MTB trails, gravel tracks, iconic Giro d’Italia climbs – this makes it the ideal setting for a local brand developing and testing new bikes.
"There’s a big variety,” Alessandro agrees. “From a brand perspective, you can do everything from your doorstep when it comes to testing. There’s one particular MTB loop we use for this purpose. It’s a minute away from the office."
For Alessandro, building in Bassano is less about the perceived prestige of the ‘Made in Italy’ label and more about quality assurance.
“Made in Italy is important," he explains. “But the most important thing is that we manage the whole supply chain of our bicycles. This way, we know exactly who put their hands on each and every product.
“We know what time of the day it was, what the temperature was like, even the level of humidity. We know everything. This gives us complete control over the quality of every single bike we make, no matter what.”
Nerve centre
We pull up outside Basso’s head office and step inside. The brand already does everything locally, including carbon-fibre manufacture and painting. But the ultimate goal is to have everything housed under one roof.
To achieve this, Alessandro is in the process of expanding the facility I’m standing in right now.
There’s already a brand-new warehouse, where bikes are assembled on the production line before being carefully boxed up to be shipped all over the world.
“This one’s going to Canada,” Alessandro tells me, inspecting the shipping notes of one package. “And these are going to one of our distributors in Germany,” he says, scanning another.
“Each frame produced here is assigned a unique code,” Alessandro explains. “This allows it to be tracked through every stage of the production and pre-assembly process. It means we have complete traceability from start to finish.”
Past the towering stacks of boxes and rows of mechanics tinkering away lies a cavernous expanse of empty space. This, Alessandro tells me, will soon be home to Basso’s in-house carbon-fibre production unit, testing facility and paint room. “Like I said,” he reiterates, “the entire process from start to finish.”
The patriarch
To understand the Basso brothers’ vision for the future of the brand, it first helps to understand their father and company founder, Alcide Basso.
When he founded the brand in 1977, it was just him – a teenager in a garage with some tubes and a few tools. But even then, the focus on quality and attention to detail was there.
I meet Alcide in the Bassano Club House. Like me, he’s fresh from Basso HQ, where he can still be found on an almost daily basis.
When he’s not consulting on matters regarding the business, you might even catch him in the workshop, where he still builds the occasional Basso Viper frame – the only classic steel bicycle left in the company’s range.
I’ve spent the afternoon carefully preparing a set of questions for Alcide, but within seconds of him pulling up a chair and ordering a drink, it becomes apparent that this is going to be more of a strap-in-for-the-ride type of interview.
“This is the bible!” Alcide proclaims as he proudly flicks through a carefully preserved copy of the first-ever Basso catalogue.
He stops at a page filled with complex diagrams detailing his own personal research into how different tube thicknesses react to varying levels of heat.
“I wasn’t an engineer. I learned by making mistakes. I studied the materials, the welding, the microstructure. I had to understand what happened when you changed the thickness or temperature. That was the foundation of Basso – that’s what set us apart from the other Italian brands.”
Bicycles are in Alcide’s blood. His brother, Marino, was a world champion road racer, and he remembers growing up surrounded by cycling paraphernalia.
“I liked working with the mechanical side of things, so when I was 18, I began welding frames.”
Business was slow at first, but Alcide remembers the sale that started it all in 1978 – Harry Hall Cycles in Manchester.
Alcide met the man himself at Milano Bike Show, and before he knew what was happening, Hall had taken it upon himself to visit Alcide’s garage in Bassano and watch a Basso frame being built. A week later, Alcide received an order for 35 bicycles.
“It’s just me! I can’t possibly make that many bicycles! But he told me he would wait for them, and he did.”
That order helped take Basso to the next level, but it was when Alcide travelled to Germany to visit his other brother at university that things really kicked off.
He knew there were plenty of high-end automotive marques headquartered nearby in Stuttgart. If German consumers appreciated a well-engineered car, perhaps they would also value a well-engineered bicycle.
So, Alcide embarked on a full-blown German sales mission armed with his catalogue and a frame, determined to speak with anyone and everyone who might be interested.
Eventually, it paid off when two colossal German sporting goods suppliers, Brügelmann and Stier, took an interest.
“We expanded operations, and after eight years, we were selling 5,000 frames a year in the UK and Germany alone,” Alcide says.
Core values continue
No matter how big Basso gets, Alcide’s core values remain central. “Basso is a unique company,” he says. “Almost 50 years as a family business. Many other Italian companies have stopped or been sold to investors – we are still here.
“Now it is the second generation – my sons and my daughter – but the most important thing we transfer is attention to detail. Growth is one thing, but controlling quality alongside it is harder. We don’t just want to make more, more, more. We want to make better. That is why we control every detail ourselves.”
‘You can’t ride fast if you’re not comfortable’
Basso has evolved with the times, without losing sight of its founding principles. The same is true of its bikes.
The brand’s latest creation, the SV, is a prime example, fusing cutting-edge technology with a methodical approach to geometry, speed and comfort.
After wrapping up with Alcide in the Club House, I’ve got about five minutes to throw some kit on and take one out for an evening spin with his other son, Leonardo.
As we cruise out of Bassano and into the rolling hills to the west, Leonardo gives me the lowdown on the bike I’m riding.
“With high-end road bikes, you usually had two options – a bike designed for the pros, or an all-road bike,” he explains. “The middle ground wasn’t really developed. That’s where the SV comes in.
“We tried to understand who is buying these very expensive pro-level bikes. Naturally, most are not professional racers. So, the focus with Sempre Veloce was simple – you can’t ride fast if you’re not comfortable on the bike. We call the concept ‘performance comfort.’”
This is the first Basso road bike with a significantly sloping top tube.
The stack is higher, the reach a little shorter, the tyre clearance a generous 35mm, and the wheelbase slightly longer, which gives more stability without losing responsiveness.
As someone who rides a slammed road bike at home, my spine is grateful for the more practical geometry, but aesthetically, it still looks like a real race weapon.
Angular lines, raw-carbon finish, narrow bars – proof that ‘comfortable’ isn’t always a synonym for ‘boring’.
Community matters
As we coast back into town, I can see the famous Bassano del Grappa nightlife beginning to bloom. Under the warm glow of streetlights, Bassano Club House and its neighbouring bars are all bustling with activity. We grab the two remaining seats outside and order ourselves a well-earned beer.
We’re not the only people who’ve popped in for a post-ride pint. The tables out front are occupied in equal parts by casual diners and sweat-streaked cyclists, helmet straps dangling freely. Inside, cleats clatter across tiled floors, and various Basso bikes hang resplendent on the walls.
“People can come, they can stay here, they can hire a bike,” Leonardo says. “We also have a workshop, a kitchen and a retail space too.”
It’s a living extension of the Basso brand and a place for Bassano’s cycling community to come together.
From Alcide’s garage in 1977 to the bustling Bassano Club House today, Basso has always been about more than bicycles.
The frames may be lighter, faster and more advanced, but the spirit is unchanged: a family business rooted in its hometown, fuelled by community, and driven forward by the firm belief that the best bikes are built close to home.
