The full list of participating teams is: Numerous notable riders were present in the race peloton, though their reasons for attending varied slightly.

Top stage racers like Cadel Evans, Ivan Basso, Robert Gesink, Vincenzo Nibali, Joaquim Rodríguez, Andy Schleck, and Marco Pinotti were present.

[5] Schleck, Nibali, and Evans were named by one pre-race analysis as possible contenders, but not favorites, due to their plans to be at peak form later in the season.

Other riders named as contenders included Philippe Gilbert, Damiano Cunego, Thomas Löfkvist, David Millar, Italian national champion Giovanni Visconti and Edvald Boasson Hagen.

[6] Other notable riders present in the field included 2008 winner Fabian Cancellara, American time trial specialist David Zabriskie, Italian classics rider and former Tirreno–Adriatico podium finisher Alessandro Ballan, former Italian national champion Filippo Pozzato, 2010 Giro d'Italia runner-up David Arroyo, and Australian sprinter Robbie McEwen.

Tyler Farrar, Tom Boonen, Alessandro Petacchi, André Greipel, world champion Thor Hushovd, the aforementioned McEwen, and the last two Milan–San Remo winners Mark Cavendish and Óscar Freire all started the race.

[9] The race of the two seas began with a flat team time trial starting and ending in Marina di Carrara in Tuscany on the Tyrrhenian coast.

He rode the time trial with several bandages on his head, and abandoned the race before stage 2 with his left eye swollen completely shut.

The Leopard Trek team, driven by world time trial champion Fabian Cancellara, had trouble retaining the minimum of five riders.

Tom Stamsnijder fell off the group's pace outside the final kilometer and Cancellara, likely unaware, kept drilling his squad to get them to the line as fast as possible.

The squads of Michele Scarponi, Giovanni Visconti, and defending champion Stefano Garzelli all lost considerable time, finishing 37, 55, and 47 seconds off the pace respectively.

Lars Boom took the first blue jersey as race leader since he had been the first Rabobank rider to cross the finish line, but more significant was the time in hand the result meant for Robert Gesink against his rivals for the overall classification.

[12] Despite the stage being all but certain to end in a field sprint, Javier Aramendia, Leonardo Giordani, and Olivier Kaisen tried their luck with a breakaway after just 3 km (1.9 mi).

The three-man breakaway was caught 44 km (27 mi) from the finish line, leaving Kaisen's teammate Vicente Reynés to try a counter-move, but he was never allowed more than 30 seconds' advantage.

A large group sprint indeed took place, won by Tyler Farrar after a strong leadout from world champion Thor Hushovd.

Given the stage's flat profile and the limited power one rider can muster on his own, he was allowed an advantage of nearly ten minutes at one point, before the chase began.

When he was caught, at the 30 km (19 mi) to go mark, the Farnese Vini–Neri Sottoli team took to the front of the field to try to set up an attack by their leader Giovanni Visconti.

Visconti never had much of an advantage, but the work done by his team did put sprinters like Mark Cavendish into more difficulty than anticipated on the short climb that preceded the finish.

[17] The first of two very long stages began with a moment of silence in commemoration of the lives lost in the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, led by Team RadioShack's Fumiyuki Beppu, the only Japanese rider in the race.

As the climb began, Michele Scarponi, Philippe Gilbert, Danilo Di Luca, and Damiano Cunego went on the attack and gapped off some of their rivals.

That was Robert Gesink, still well-placed because of Rabobank's win in the team time trial, but he had had his advantage narrowed by finishing 12 seconds back on this stage.

After 100 km (62 mi), Andrey Amador, Davide Malacarne, Mathew Hayman, Fabian Wegmann and Jens Mouris had a lead of over 11 minutes.

Instead of working together to stay away and let a two-up sprint decide the stage winner, Amador and Malacarne sat on one another's wheels and let their rapidly falling advantage dwindle even further.

From the elite group of contenders, Pinotti put in an attack on an uphill section of the finishing circuit that effectively gapped off race leader Robert Gesink, who had used up all of his support riders at this point.

They were unaware that Wout Poels had come clear of the elite group of overall favorites and bridged up to them, and the Dutchman was in first position on the road with 200 m (660 ft) to go.

He was joined shortly thereafter by a bridging Bert Grabsch, and just 6 km (3.7 mi) after Božič's initial escape, the duo had five minutes on the main field.

On the final ascent, Scarponi and Vincenzo Nibali both got clear of the lead group of overall favorites, but both strangely sat up and stopped riding hard, eying one another, after a turn in the road.

San Benedetto del Tronto in the Marche region played host to a perfectly flat out-and-back ride right along the Adriatic coast.

Robert Gesink, generally regarded as a poor time trialist, put up his second very strong individual performance in as many races, after having won the ITT at the Tour of Oman.

Stage 5 breakaway man Davide Malacarne was the winner of the mountains classification, and Basso and Nibali's Liquigas–Cannondale squad won the team award.