Fallen Angel

by William Fotheringham

  Coppi has moved way beyond his sport. He is now immortalised in opera, film, television docudrama, experimental works by classical composers, sculpture, painting, ceramics and T-shirts as well as in print. Memorials to his name stand on high Alpine passes and obscure climbs in distant parts of Italy. The writer Bruno Raschi called the obsession with il campionissimo ‘inexplicable … an irrational over-reaction to his memory and to his earthly image. No athlete is wept over in this way. No other has brought forth so many memories or has had a destiny of this kind. And no one has decided that it should be so.’

  No one decided that Coppi should be wept over, in the same way that no one quite knows why the obsession with Coppi has endured. The answer lies in the gulf between the letter and the photograph, between the world of Aunt Albina and the image snatched at the world championship in Lugano. In the four years and four months between the two, her Faustino, the boy from the tiny hamlet of Castellania, had become Fausto, the greatest cyclist in the world, a figure who dominated his sport. The photograph subverted and transformed the image of Italy’s greatest sports star of the post-war years. It marks the moment when the idol was shown to have feet of clay, when the simple country boy of the letter suddenly became a far more complex and controversial figure. Coppi’s mythical status, the tears that are still shed, stem from one essential question: how did the Faustino of the letter become the Fausto of the photograph?

  CHAPTER 2

  * * *

  TO RACE A BIKE, YOU NEED TO BE A POOR MAN

  Castellania is almost the end of the road. Only a few hamlets and farms lie beyond the village, where the foothills of the Apennines rise up, wave after wave, steep green valleys, wooded hilltops, pocket-handkerchief vineyards, lonely towers. Like the other villages in this part of north-west Italy, Castellania is not thriving. Not all the houses are lived in and there are few signs of active agriculture, although the Catholic organisation Opus Dei is investing in the village in a move which may well revitalise it. The population has declined as the small farms no longer support more than one or two people. At one time there were ten families called Coppi in the village; today there are only four. The population is now well below fifty, where once it was three hundred, and those who are left are ageing: only three children have been born here in the last twenty years. The school closed in the 1960s. The hills feel empty, silent but for birdsong.

  Armando Baselica is warming himself in the April sun, sitting in an old chair repaired with planks. Behind him, a maize field slopes away and the mountains rise up, their summits still flecked with snow. If there were anything of note happening in Castellania he would have a grandstand view, but the village is sleeping. At eighty-four, Baselica, wizened and bullet-headed, has earned the right to a little rest. He is the last man here whose life ran parallel with that of the village’s only famous son. He was born in 1922, went to the village school with Faustino Coppi in the late 1920s during the rise of fascism, left his studies to work in the fields, quit the hilltop to fight in Mussolini’s war, returned a changed man. Had cycling not intervened, had he not been successful, Coppi might well have ended his life like this old man: sitting in peace in the spring sun watching a very small world go gently by.

  Coppi and Baselica were part of the last generation who can bear witness to a lifestyle that has now all but disappeared from Italy. The world of subsistence farming by small peasant communities had changed little in its essence since medieval times, but it is now largely a memory, and even those who can recall it are dying out. This is the life from which Coppi escaped, as did so many, because the road out of the village was the only one offering any relief from hard labour and little reward. Baselica can describe life here in a single word: ‘miseria’. Poverty.

  The hills are attractively rounded and green as they rise from the plain. The vineyards stand in neat rows. The maize fields swish gently in the spring breeze. But the fields were not easily worked when the work was done by hand, ploughing with oxen, swinging the double-pronged spade known as the zappa to break the clods for planting. The fields are clay and turn to mud when the autumn rains come. ‘It takes the thighs of a horse to lift your feet out of the mud,’ said the journalist Gianni Brera.

  Up here, 1,000 feet above sea level, a living had to be scratched from the land, supplemented by selling wood, maize, and the relatively poor wine from the local grapes. The peasants kept chickens, rabbits, a pig or two – vital as the source of hams and salami that would last a year – and perhaps a cow. Once a week, they made bread in a wood-burning oven, bread that, says Baselica, improved over the eight days it was kept. The houses contained only the essentials: one book, perhaps, passed down from brother to sister, might have to last ten years.

  Isolation and the shared need for survival meant the people in the village were closely knit, ‘like a big family’, as Baselica puts it: tasks such as harvesting maize were shared cooperatively; the maize would be ground with a handmill to make the flour for polenta, the staple form of carbohydrate. Miseria, Baselica may call it, but it was not unremittingly grim. The day dedicated to the village’s patron saint, San Biagio, was celebrated with two days of dancing and eating: ‘rice, meat, chickens, agnolotti on the second day’.

  In part of Love and War in the Apennines, a classic tale of life as an escaped prisoner of war in Italy between 1943 and 1944, Eric Newby documented daily life in a peasant house-hold further south along the mountain range from Castellania. By the midday meal Newby and his fellow workers on the farm are already sleeping over their food through physical exhaustion. ‘I had always thought of Italian contadini as a race of people who sat basking in the sun before the doors of their houses while the seed which they had inserted in the earth in the course of a couple of mornings’ work burgeoned without their having to do anything but watch this process take place. I now knew differently. These people were fighting to survive in an inhospitable terrain from which the larger part of the inhabitants had either emigrated to the cities or to the United States or South America.’

  * * *

  Casa Coppi, Fausto’s home until he left to seek his fortune on two wheels, is one of the biggest of the twenty-five or so houses in the village, a three-storey yellow building on the south side of the cluster of dwellings and barns. It follows what is clearly a typical local pattern: a long, thin house, along- side a two-storey open-fronted barn used to store hay, maize and piles of stakes for growing tomatoes. The house has barely changed since Coppi’s time: the cyclist’s mother Angiolina lived here until her death in 1962, after which it was shut up until it was turned into a museum in 2000.

  Today, the contents are a curious mix of traditional peasant fittings and slightly incongruous, highly polished furniture from the 1940s and 1950s, presumably bought as Fausto’s winnings accumulated. The large kitchen on the ground floor still has its sloping stone sink, but alongside is a new-looking wood-burning cooking range. Sadly, there is no sign of the fridge, which was Coppi’s first gift to his mother. She never knew exactly what it was for and kept her underwear in it, he said, while at other times she used it to store kindling for the fire. He would never have the heart to tell her its real purpose.

  The sitting room has the single-channel television Coppi bought for the family – the first in the village – but retains the myriad hooks in the ceiling for hanging hams, grapes and salami. Upstairs, both Fausto’s and Serse’s bedrooms contain ‘preti’ – priests – the sledge-like contraptions containing an earthenware pot, used for heating the beds with coals from the stove, which were the cause of many a house fire. The cot Coppi slept in as a child, with its uncomfortable looking metal frame, still stands in his parents’ room, a cord still attached to one side so it can be rocked from the bed.

  The Coppi family were small peasant farmers like the rest of the population, but they were slightly better off than many of their neighbours: a four-ox family where the norm was two, farming some thirteen hectares, some of it rented, but still well above the average fo
r a holding in rural Italy. It was not enough to feed everyone, however, and Fausto’s father, Domenico, had no choice but to hire his services out to other local farmers. Thin-faced, moustached, Domenico was a good-looking man, reputed to have had an eye for a pretty face. According to one biographer, Jean-Paul Ollivier, Domenico’s marriage to Angiolina Boveri, the niece of the local priest, was a shotgun affair. Their elder daughter Maria was born three months after the wedding.

  Angelo-Fausto was their second son, their fourth child after their daughters Maria and Dina and their eldest son Livio. He was born on the ground floor of the house at 5 p.m. on 15 September 1919 while Domenico was working in the fields. It was his father who wanted to christen him Fausto, the family name; his mother felt he should be named Angelo after his grandfather and he was always referred to in official documents by both names. From his father, he would inherit a long, thin neck and almost Slavic cheekbones; from his mother a prominent Roman nose in the middle of a roundish face. He soon acquired the nickname Faustino, the diminutive due partly to his slender physique but also to distinguish him from his uncle of the same name.

  The Coppis had lived in these parts since the seventeenth century, and were more than mere labourers, although Faustino’s family were not the best educated or the most ambitious of the clan. While Domenico worked the land, his brother Giuseppe Luigi was the mayor, his sister-in-law Albina the schoolteacher. The other brother, Giuseppe Fausto, had left to make his fortune as a sea captain, and appears to have ended up as the honorary head of the family. Initially Domenico and Angiolina lived in the house behind Casa Coppi, a smaller building which has recently been turned into the Grande Airone restaurant. Gradually they took over the larger property in front across the courtyard, and eventually its ten rooms were the home of an extended family of eleven people including various aunts, Fausto and, briefly, his wife Bruna.

  Later, much was made of the fact that Fausto Coppi was transformed from a physically unprepossessing youth into the greatest athlete of his generation. Writers speculated over the reasons for his scrawny physique. There was a theory that Faustino and his younger brother Serse, born in 1923, were both slightly stunted because their father’s genes had been affected by the strong liquor given to him when he was a soldier in the First World War before they were conceived. Another popular myth was that Coppi suffered more broken bones than the average cyclist because his frame was weakened by a vitamin deficiency similar to rickets. Small and skinny he may have been, but he was clearly strong, although Livio must have been exaggerating when he recalled ‘he could carry 100 kilos on his shoulders when he was eleven’.

  Faustino was not a brawny boy, but this was nothing exceptional. A photograph from the early 1930s shows Livio, Dina and Faustino with the outsized eyes and stick legs of undernourished children, looking old beyond their years in their heavy outdoor boots and oversize, handed-down shorts. All the local children were like that: as Baselica recalls, the youngsters in the single class of pupils from Castellania and three or four surrounding villages were ‘like organ pipes: thin and small, thin and medium sized, thin and tall, thin and bald, thin and hairy. All thin.’

  Faustino and Serse were already close in spite of the four-year difference between them, a relationship that lasted until the younger brother’s premature death in 1951. Faustino had begun Serse’s schooling for him by refusing to go to class unless his little sibling went as well. Despite their closeness, they were ‘like night and day’, Baselica recalls. Fausto was well behaved at home, ‘Serse was never still’, less obedient, merrier.

  Fausto worked hard at school, where their attendance would depend in part on whether they were needed in the fields; when they were there they were taught about Romulus and Remus, the River Po, Mont Blanc and the difference between animal and mineral by Faustino’s lively, tough little aunt, Albina. She maintained discipline with the help of a collection of sticks kept behind her desk: thin, thick, supple, knotty, ‘the right one for each infraction’. Put your hands out, she would order. But I’m your nephew, Serse, Faustino or their cousin Piero would reply. Put your hands out, you big ugly boy, she would repeat. At catechism in the church, an uncle Coppi presided with the help of a collection of sticks to match their aunt’s at school. Not surprisingly with the church connection on Angiolina’s side of the family, the Coppis were ‘gente di chiesa’, religious people: missing a service meant trouble, recalls Piero.

  When not at school or working alongside their parents on the farm, the boys played a version of hopscotch, and some-times stole fruit, which wasn’t mere mischief: they were always hungry. They played soccer with a ball made of rags until it split, or until one of the boys went to tell the owner of the field that they were ruining his grass; out would come the peasant brandishing a stick, and they would run away laughing fit to burst. Serse tended to be the prankster among the children; Fausto was as serious a child as he would be as an adult.

  Coppi’s first bike was a reject, picked up from a corner where it had been abandoned because it was virtually unusable. He had no money, so he restored it to working order as best he could. He remembered a frame with the chrome cracking off it, so big that he had trouble getting his leg over the crossbar. On 17 October 1927, Albina wrote the letter A, for absent, against the boy’s name in the school register. The eight-year-old Faustino had gone out on his bike that day and played truant, so she made him write out one hundred times: ‘I must go to school and not ride my bicycle.’ On their clunky old machines, the boys played at bike racing, running time trials where the lack of a stopwatch did not matter: one of them would count the seconds out loud. One such bike racing game was the Giro d’Italia.

  That reflected the fact that in the time before the rise of football, cycling was Italy’s most popular sport. Although cycle ownership was lower than in France or Britain, the bike was the main means of transport for most of the population. Since its foundation in 1909, the Giro had drawn the country together, bringing its glamour and festival atmosphere to the most far-flung areas. As well as the great one-day Classics such as Milan–San Remo and the Giro di Lombardia, monuments of the sport even today, a host of regional one-day races such as the Giro del Veneto, Tre Valli Varesine, Milan–Turin and the Giro del Piemonte drew massive crowds. The tifosi thronged to watch the stars at exhibition events on short circuits and banked velodromes, and the start contracts for the cyclists were correspondingly fat.

  The first great national rivalry of Italian cycling, between the campionissimi – champions of champions – Alfredo Binda and Learco Guerra, had caught the popular imagination. Internationally, Italy could boast the first world road champion in Binda (1927) and a brace of Tour de France wins for Ottavio Bottecchia in 1924 and 1925. Together with Tuscany to the south and Lombardy to the east, the Piedmont of Coppi’s childhood was a hotbed of the sport, producing champions such as Gerbi, Brunero and Costante Girardengo, whose home was in Novi Ligure, on the plain below Castellania. As well as the campioni and campionissimi, the men who made the serious money, there were decent pickings to be had for the gregari, the lesser lights who helped the great men in the big races and made up the numbers in the exhibition races.

  When a journalist went to Castellania with Coppi in the 1940s, the cyclist said simply: ‘Do you understand now why I became a cyclist? What could I do other than go off on my bike?’ The parallels between subsistence farming and the life of a professional cyclist are surprisingly close: both entail hours of repetitive physical labour in the open air, in all weathers, with no certainty that all the effort will have its due reward. For all the drama of the breakaway or the sprint, the podium girls and the chance of prize money, there was a distinctly unglamorous side to cycling in those days: saddle boils from the poor roads, sickness from an uncertain diet, the bizarre remedies peddled by team helpers. The professional cyclist had to accept adversity – punctures, crashes, stronger rivals, capricious team managers, poor wages – with the stoicism with which a peasant views the weather.


  Cycling was physically demanding, but it was better than the unremitting drudgery of working the land. As the Irish farmer turned racer Sean Kelly said two generations later, at least when you were on your bike you got paid more for being out in the rain all day. That was ever the case for professional cyclists who were not campionissimi or even campioni. Coppi’s contemporary Alfredo Martini explained: ‘When I left to go training early in the morning, the peasants were already in the fields; my father, my brother, bent over the spades thinking only of work and fatigue. I would ride two hundred kilometres in training and when I came back in the evening, tired but happy from the long trip, I would see the same people still thinking only of the same tiring and repetitive work.’

  ‘Cycle racing opened the doors to a world forbidden to mere mortals,’ writes the historian Daniele Marchesini. As well as the financial rewards and the chance to eat foodstuffs never seen on peasant farmers’ tables, cycle racing offered the chance to travel, a glamorous business at a time when the nearest market town was a major excursion for many. Martini told of the pride he felt on returning home with the labels of the best hotels in Paris and Brussels stuck on his suitcase. ‘Cycling meant leaving the status of peasant behind and travelling the world, getting to know other people, other languages, meeting famous people and – not the last thing on our minds – earning more than normal.’

  * * *

  At twelve, Coppi was out of school and working alongside his father on the farm; a year later, however, in 1932, he moved away from home to work at a butcher’s shop, Ettore’s, in Novi Ligure, twenty kilometres away on the plain. Such a move was common among the children of peasants: the land could only support the parents. The seagoing uncle Fausto, il comandante, was the man who found him the job. Coppi recalled the day he left: a cool spring morning, walking alongside his father who was on his way to the fields, pushing his bike, this one lent to him by his brother Livio, ‘an enormous heavy machine with regal handlebars and tyres like lifebelts’, carrying his lunch in a checked handkerchief. Domenico said goodbye to his son at the foot of the first hill.