Olympic flame for Milan Cortina Winter Games arrives in Italy following handover in Greece

ROME (AP) – The Olympic flame for the Milan Cortina Winter Games landed in Rome on Thursday following a handover in Greece.

The flame was carried in a small lantern aboard an ITA Airways flight between the Greek and Italian capitals.

Tennis player Jasmine Paolini – an Olympic gold medalist – and local organizing committee president Giovanni Malagò carried the flame off the plane.

A 63-day torch relay covering 12,000 kilometers (nearly 7,500 miles) will start in Rome on Saturday and wind its way through all 110 Italian provinces before reaching Milan’s San Siro Stadium for the opening ceremony on Feb. 6.

It’s the first time in nearly 20 years – since the 2006 Turin Games – that Italy has hosted the flame.

On Friday, the flame will be used to light a cauldron at the Quirinale Palace where Italy President Sergio Mattarella resides, with International Olympic Committee president Kirsty Coventry expected to be in attendance.

Then the torch relay – featuring 10,001 torch bearers – will start a day later from the statue-lined Stadio dei Marmi.

The flame was formally handed to Italian organizers earlier Thursday in the all-marble stadium in central Athens where the first modern Olympics were held nearly 130 years ago.

“To stand here in this historic stadium provides an inspiring reminder of the honor we have been granted and the precious treasure we will carry home with us,” Malagò said before receiving the flame.

After spending the night burning in a cauldron outside the 5th century B.C. Parthenon temple atop the Acropolis, Greece’s most famous landmark, the flame was carried into the Panathenaic stadium by Greek water polo player Elena Xenaki, who lit another cauldron in the stadium along with Greece’s women’s national water polo team.

The flame was lit on Nov. 26 in Ancient Olympia, the site of the ancient games that inspired the modern Olympic movement, using a concave mirror to focus the sun’s rays on a torch in a highly ceremonial performance.

The torch relay, which includes 60 city celebrations, will be in Naples for Christmas and in Bari for New Year’s Eve. It will reach 2006 host Turin on Jan 11.

The torch will arrive in Verona on Jan. 18 and pass through Cortina d’Ampezzo on Jan. 26 – on the 70th anniversary of the opening ceremony of the 1956 Winter Olympics held at the resort in the Dolomites.

There will also be a cauldron lit in Cortina on the night of the opening ceremony.

These games will be held across a large swath of northern Italy and the ceremony will be observed in four different locations, including Livigno (where snowboarding and freestyle skiing will be contested) and Predazzo (ski jumping).

Skating sports will be held in Milan; men’s Alpine skiing and ski mountaineering in Bormio; and women’s Alpine skiing, sliding sports and curling in Cortina.

The idea of the Olympic flame and torch relay was the result of Greek-German cooperation and began ahead of the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. The tradition has been followed ever since.

A separate flame for the March 6-15 Winter Paralympics will be lit on Feb. 24 at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in England, the birthplace of the Paralympic movement.

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Becatoros reported from Athens, Greece.