Fallen Angel

by William Fotheringham

  The detailed account of Coppi’s final days published in L’Ultimo Dicembre does not suggest a man who simply sat down for two weeks and waited to die. The theories have one thing in common: they are different ways of rationalising an event that was just grotesquely unlucky. As the writer Gianni Brera put it: ‘A tube of humble quinine would have been enough to prevent this man being killed.’

  * * *

  In his house outside Clermont Ferrand, Raphael Geminiani offers me another glass of champagne and reflects on the quirk of fate that ensured he survived where Coppi died. ‘When I had regained some of my strength, about a week after he died, my wife said, “OK, Raphael, you are strong enough to know now”, and they put the papers under my nose, explained everything to me. There I was in a coma, Fausto was dead, the papers were full of the funeral, all the front pages. I just couldn’t deal with it.’

  In a 1990 interview, Geminiani said he still could not believe that Coppi was dead. He felt that any day the campionissimo might turn up to drink a bottle of wine and eat a bowl of spaghetti with him. Even now, the normally ebullient ‘Big Gun’ cannot square the circle: Coppi died after a chain of events that he had instigated, yet he survived. ‘It was a pleasure trip and it ended in tragedy. I couldn’t imagine that you could die on a jaunt like that. My God … Fate is a strange thing. It was not an accident, but an illness that kills two million people a year.’

  He throws his hands in the air. ‘You cannot live off “ifs”. Fate was responsible. There is such a thing. Something happens to one person, not the next.’ He runs a finger across his palm. ‘I’m sure your life is written on your hand. Your identity card is there. Why did he die, and not me? I wondered whether I was guilty … I felt guilty for a long time. We are all guilty of something or other. But it has no sense. The doctors should feel the guilt. They could have taken a decision and didn’t. I was properly looked after … It was negligence that killed him. The thought destroyed me. It’s fate and you can do nothing to stop it.’

  CHAPTER 16

  * * *

  THE ICON AND THE MYTH

  ‘Today ends the mortal life of Fausto Coppi; and a sporting cult of his name and his exploits begins’ – Jacques Goddet

  Coppi was laid to rest in Castellania on 4 January 1960. The tiny village was swamped. Estimates of the attendance at the funeral begin at 20,000; they rise as high as 50,000. The lines of parked cars on both sides of the road ran back four miles to the bottom of the hill and beyond. The constant stream of vans from overwhelmed local florists was the only traffic allowed through the police roadblocks into the village. There they deposited their load, turned round and went down again. The special buses laid on by the local cycling club stopped at the bottom of the hill, and the tifosi climbed up on foot, as they might have climbed mountain passes in the Alps and Pyrenees to watch the Giro and the Tour.

  The mud was to remain Gino Bartali’s abiding memory of this day. In the weak midwinter sunshine on the old snow-drifts in the ditches, fans began walking up the hill to Castellania at 6 a.m. As more and more of them did so, cutting across the verges and the fields to save a few seconds here and there, their feet sank deeper and deeper into the ooze. ‘I remember it as the most solemn occasion: the people coming up on foot, straight up the hill to the cemetery, thousands of them,’ says Jean Bobet, who was at the funeral on behalf of L’Equipe. ‘The silence, the little bells of the church. It was fitting for the image of Fausto, a tragic person.’

  The day before, gravel had been laid up the 500-metre track to the church of San Biagio, which stands half a mile outside the village on a shoulder of the same hill. Among the cortege headed by Coppi’s old team-mates, gregari and rivals was the ammiraglia, the Bianchi team car, with its fantastic curved lines and vast headlights, festooned with racks to hold spare cycles and wheels. The journalist Bruno Raschi imagined he could see Tragella standing in it with a microphone calling encouragement to Coppi on his final journey.

  This was not merely a matter of saying farewell to Italy’s greatest sports star. ‘Even when dead he did not belong to himself. People appropriated him,’ says Jean Bobet. To whom did the dear departed belong? The formal Italian ceremonial of bidding farewell to the dead could not accommodate the bitterly divided camps that Coppi had left behind him. As soon as the cyclist had drawn his final breath, the question arose of who was to publish the death notice. In Italy, this remains a far more public matter than in Anglo-Saxon countries: today, as in those days, death notices are posted in public places throughout the home town of the deceased. Was it the right of the family who bore the name Coppi, of Bruna and Marina, or of the White Lady and Faustino, who had actually lived with Coppi when he died?

  Don Sparpaglione, Coppi’s confessor, suggested that, to fudge the question, neither Bruna’s name nor Giulia’s should appear on the announcement. Giulia Occhini was apparently told that she had no right to issue the notice, as she was not legally Coppi’s wife, but she put out the elaborately bordered sheets of paper all the same. ‘La Signora Giulia and il piccolo Fausto announce with profound pain the sudden loss of their much loved Fausto’ read the inscription, alongside a picture of Christ in his death agonies on the cross. Significantly, no surnames were printed, which might have left the casual reader with the impression that la Signora Giulia was Coppi’s wife. But in the Italy of 1960 any passer-by who glanced at the notice would have been aware of the background.

  The emotions Coppi had unleashed accompanied him to the edge of the grave in the cemetery in Castellania. Writing in the magazine Settimo Giorno, the journalist Carla Ravaioli said she felt that many of the crowd were there to watch the public confrontation between Coppi’s mistress and his misused wife. The press saw it in the same terms: while Coppi lay in state the day before in Tortona, one photographer was heard to say that a picture of the White Lady and Bruna alongside the body would be the shot of the year.

  For Giulia Occhini, meanwhile, this was the final, and most public, opportunity to lay claim to her Fausto. ‘Where is Bruna?’ the crowd had murmured when Giulia defied convention and followed Coppi’s body into his mother’s home. The two women’s paths crossed in the house; Bruna left by the back door. Clad in an elegant, diaphanous black lace veil, the White Lady followed the coffin, together with Coppi’s team-mates, his old rivals and the team car. Bruna was already in the church, senior family members having agreed beforehand that the woman who had supplanted her in Coppi’s heart and his bed would follow the cortege as far as the church, but would then not be present at the funeral service and burial.

  The mistress and the wife did not meet face to face, but, as Ravaioli saw it, the White Lady would not give in. ‘On the threshold of the church she collapsed into the arms of the people who tried to direct her away, went among the crowd and kneeled in a corner at the left, continually emitting an almost inhuman groaning.’ Her keening could then be heard over the Elevation of the Host and Bruna eventually withdrew from the main part of the church. The White Lady would not be moved.

  At the grave the first oration from Don Sparpaglione – in his round, rimless glasses and his Trotsky beard – included a clear reference to Coppi’s confession. As the priest saw it: ‘We know from the testimony of the hospital chaplain that [Coppi] found grace and eternal health in his soul when he declared that he was now removed from earthly temptations and was ready to renounce these.’

  Not surprisingly, given the tension of the occasion so soon after the trauma of the death, Giulia Occhini fainted and was carried out of the cemetery over the heads of the crowd. As the champions dispersed and returned down the hill into the vast traffic jam on the roads around Castellania, the crowd applauded them as they might have done after a track meeting or a criterium.

  * * *

  It would have been foolish to expect the principal players in Coppi’s turbulent life to fade quietly from the public gaze. Every Saturday Giulia Occhini made the trip to Castellania to put flowers on the grave, but she did not simply don widow�
��s weeds and disappear with her grief. She gave her first press interview a week after Coppi died and continued to make headlines over the next thirty-three years, right up to her death in 1993. Immediately after Coppi’s death, there were serious fears for her health.

  The newspapers made much of the controversies that marked her next few years. Giulia was involved in several court cases, one for threatening a legal official who authorised bailiffs to remove property from Villa Coppi in respect of unpaid lawyer’s fees. There was a dispute with a funeral parlour; she fell out with her lawyer. When she removed flowers put by fans on the tomb to make room for her own the result was an altercation with Uncle Giuseppe Fausto and the matter ended in the hands of the police. The press covered every last detail of her love life and progress in the custody cases involving the Locatelli children.

  It was not merely a case of the papers dogging her every step. As Bobet said, even in death Coppi had to be ‘appropriated’, her claim to him confirmed in the face of public hostility. It was even claimed that she and Fausto had been secretly married by a friendly monk in a scene reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet. Giulia made persistent attempts to get her side of the story across: magazine interviews, the publication of what appears to be the later part of her correspondence with Fausto. She also adopted the role of protectress to her late lover’s memory, castigating any depiction of his life which might be remotely construed as disrespectful, be it the play Un uomo solo al comando (1980) or the television series Quando Coppi correva in Bicicletta (1981).

  Giulia’s death, on 6 January 1993, made headlines across Europe. It came after she had spent almost two years in a coma following a car accident. Not long before the incident, she told a journalist, ‘My life today is represented solely by the past because the present counts for absolutely nothing.’ Some ten years earlier, she had lost her daughter Lolli to cancer; her photographs joined those of the beloved Fausto on the walls of the villa by the Serravalle road.

  Coppi’s son also spent his early years in the media spotlight. The papers reported rumours of an attempt to kidnap him in April 1960, and even mundane events such as his marks on leaving middle school were considered newsworthy. Faustino was never really told about his father’s death, he said to me; with a child’s insight, he worked it out. ‘One day neither my mother nor my father was there any more. My father had died and my mother was not there. There was a period of solitude. Then my mother took me to the cemetery, said a few words, we saw the picture …’

  Due to the vexed issue of Faustino’s paternity, it took a while to settle his father’s estate. Coppi had made his property over to his son soon after his birth in 1955, including the estate at Incisa Scappaccino and the villa plus its contents. But the problem was that in strictly legal terms, when Coppi died, Dr Locatelli was still his father. The legal question of his paternity was not resolved until well into 1960, when a court ruled that Dr Locatelli was not carrying out his responsibilities as a parent.

  Bruna Coppi avoided media attention until her death, of a heart attack, in September 1979, but she too was unable to leave the past behind. Fiorenzo Magni described the one occasion they met, almost twenty years after Fausto had left her: ‘Bruna just talked about Fausto, Fausto, Fausto as if they were still together. She was still in love with him.’ She said next to nothing in public, and explained why only once: ‘I was his shadow, so I tried to remain discreet. I remained quiet when the papers announced that Fausto had left me. I never spoke out in spite of everything that happened, because I wanted to share in his love, not his fame.’

  * * *

  ‘Il Mito Coppi’, Coppi the myth, reads the graffiti on the wall below the cemetery in Castellania. But il campionissimo is a ubiquitous presence far beyond his birthplace. In 1987, on my first visit to an Italian bike shop, a single room full of dusty chainrings and fading tubular tyres in the Venice suburb of Mestre, run by a little old man in his seventies – presumably a contemporary – there Coppi was in a torn black and white photo pinned on the wall. Look hard enough in any Italian bike shop, and a similar image will be there somewhere. The same goes for the faded writing on the roadsides.

  Coppi has become an inspiration, to novelists, artists, fashion designers. The British designer Paul Smith has a picture of Coppi on his desk, and is a fan of the campionissimo. Speaking of his first experiences of cycling in the 1950s, he told me: ‘The aesthetics of the whole sport were very appealing … there were the clothes. Who could resist the modernity of white kid gloves with knitted backs, special shorts or black shoes that laced to the toe with big holes drilled in the leather to keep your feet cool?’ The image is that of Coppi, whose kit has inspired a retro revival in recent years with the British clothing company Rapha to the fore.

  As with all style icons, it is only partly because of what Coppi wears in the photographs – the perfectly cut suits, the Bianchi winter training tops with huge lettering on the chest, the turned-up wool collars, the simple designs of the jerseys with only one or two sponsors’ names, only on the chest and back, the elegant tropical shorts. It is also the fact that he is rarely seen without sunglasses (in fact due to his fears of conjunctivitis) which in turn adds to his detachment from the world. As a model should be, he is tall and has no jarring features that distract from the clothes (Bartali has that broken nose, Magni is bald with a leathery face). There is his distant, ambiguous Mona Lisa smile, the perfect white parting in the black Brylcreemed hair.

  Coppi’s iconic status is a product of his time: before a multiplicity of sponsors made cycling jerseys a mish-mash of logos; when a cyclist’s value was dictated not by how often his jersey appeared on the television screen, but how he looked and performed for the crowds at a track meeting or a circuit race. The mythology is not merely visual; before blanket television coverage of races, the mystery of what actually happened on the road enabled writers such as Orio Vergani and Dino Buzzati to give full vent to their imaginations. Vergani defined Coppi as a heron, awkward on the ground, graceful in flight. He coined a phrase now synonymous with his death, ‘the great heron closing his wings’.

  No cyclist has inspired so many writers. Gianni Brera’s Coppi and the Devil is a fictionalised version of Coppi’s life, intermingled with Brera’s accounts of how he met Coppi later in life. It is never made clear what the devil is: fate? Cavanna? The act of bike racing? Or a malignant force that presents temptation in the form of Giulia? Brera also makes the parallel between Dr Enrico Locatelli and Gustave Flaubert’s cuckolded country doctor, Charles Bovary, in the classic French love triangle.

  Coppi’s Angel, recently translated into English by Michael McDermott, is a short story by Ugo Riccarelli, in essence a description of Coppi’s realisation that he is past his best, with forewarnings of his death, prompted by his meetings on a hill (symbolically named il Padre, the Priest) with a mysterious blond youth who could be guardian angel or nemesis. Mauro Gorrino’s Serse and the Beast is similar – it traces a fictional breakaway made by Coppi’s brother in Milan–Turin. The ‘beast’ may be the peloton unleashed in pursuit, or the Grim Reaper, waiting for Serse at the end of the race. For some, Coppi simply riding his bike was an artistic act in itself. ‘From this fastidious act, which consists of turning the pedals at a regular rhythm, he manages to create an artistic spectacle,’ wrote the Frenchman Louis Nucera in Mes Rayons de Soleil.

  As Nucera says, Coppi has been ‘deified’. There are places of pilgrimage, including memorials on some of the greatest Alpine climbs used by the Giro and the Tour: the Stelvio, the Col de l’Izoard, and the Sella Pass, between Val Gardena and Canazei. More obscurely, there are stones commemorating Coppi on the Bocchetta Pass between Genoa and the town of Gavi, a key point in the Giro dell’Appennino, and on the Agerola climb (between Castellamare and Amalfi), as well as outside the chapel of the Madonna del Ghisallo. In Turin, not far from the Autovelodromo, an elaborate memorial incorporates stones from cycling’s most celebrated roads: the cobbles of Paris–Roubaix and the Crespera climb f
rom the 1953 world championship circuit at Lugano as well as the great climbs of the Alps and Pyrenees.

  There are also religious overtones in the fans’ and writers’ devotion. At his greatest triumphs, the Lugano world championship and the Cuneo–Pinerolo stage win in the 1949 Giro, there are reports of tifosi crossing themselves as he passed, while at Lugano they were kissing the tarmac, kissing pictures of the campionissimo torn from newspapers. The writers depicted him as they might an Italian saint. For Gian-Paolo Ormezzano, he was a champion ‘with a cross on his back’. For Pierre Chany his eyes were ‘fixed, staring out of their sockets as Piero della Francesca liked to paint them’. To Roger Bastide, Coppi was ‘like a church window, all length and thin-ness; the lines on his face, drawn by suffering and effort, were like those of an ecstatic monk. When he was suffering one thought of the road of the cross.’ And to his gregari, of course, he was God. As the obscure Valerio Bonini said: ‘[Being near Coppi] was like being next to Jesus Christ. I don’t want to speak ill of Jesus Christ but Fausto was a bit like him: a being outside the norm, a saint in flesh and blood.’

  * * *

  The White Lady and Bruna are long dead, but the polemica about Coppi’s relationships never seems to stop. In 1995, nine million viewers watched the two-part television biopic Il Grande Fausto starring Ornella Muti as a pouting, sensual Giulia. It was as controversial as could have been expected – Faustino Coppi attacked the film as poorly researched and inaccurate. Bartali was ‘furious’.