Road to Valour

by Aili McConnon

  (photo credit col1.1)

  Copyright © 2012 McConnon LLC

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  McConnon, Aili, 1980-

  The road to valour : a true story of a Tuscan cyclist and secret World War II hero / Aili and Andres McConnon.

  eISBN: 978-0-385-66949-8

  1. Bartali, Gino, 1914-2000. 2. Cyclists–Italy–Biography. 3. World War, 1939-1945–Underground movements–Italy– Biography. 4. Tuscany (Italy)–Biography. I. McConnon, Andres II. Title.

  GV1051.B37M33 2012 796.6092 C2011-908506-2

  Jacket photographs: Publifoto/Olycom (cover image and lower spine image),

  The Horton Collection (top spine image)

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website: www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For our mother and late father

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Authors’ Note

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  PART I

  Map of Tuscany and Umbria

  1. Across the Arno

  2. In the Saddle

  3. The First Test

  4. “Italy’s Number One Sportsman”

  5. Storm at the Summit

  PART II

  Map of World War II in Italy

  6. From the Stars to the Stables

  7. An Impossible Choice

  8. The Counterfeiters’ Ring

  9. Free Fall

  Photo Insert

  PART III

  Map of France

  10. Ginettaccio

  11. Les Macaroni

  12. Four Bullets

  13. A Frozen Hell

  14. The Road Home

  Epilogue

  Where They Are Now

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Photo and Illustration Credits

  About the Authors

  Authors’ Note

  THIS BOOK IS A work of nonfiction. All characters, events, and dialogue that we include come from a wide variety of historical sources, including Gino Bartali’s three autobiographies, declassified secret Fascist police reports, dozens of French and Italian newspapers and books, filmed interviews with Gino and his teammates, an extensive body of photographic and newsreel footage of cycling races, and more than two hundred hours of interviews with Gino’s widow, Adriana; son, Andrea; former teammates; friends; former Italian politicians; historians; Italian Jews; and others. We have also visited the locations of Gino’s key races and other life events in Italy and France, and conducted interviews in Israel with some of the people with whom he interacted during World War II.

  Where accounts conflicted, we tried wherever possible to consult multiple sources to arrive at the most likely version of an event. Whenever we indicate a character thought or felt something, that information comes directly from our interviews with the character depicted or material left in a published interview or memoir. We have not invented any dialogue. Conversations are drawn from records left by at least one of the direct participants. In the rare occasions where we describe an event from Gino’s life that he never wrote or spoke publicly about, we have relied on the memories of those events that he shared with family and friends, and their characterizations of his behavior in a variety of situations. In most cases the primary source material we consulted was in Italian or French. We have translated as accurately as possible to maintain the spirit and letter of the original.

  Gino Bartali moved through many different worlds throughout his life and consequently this book shines a light on different aspects of professional cycling, Fascist and Nazi-occupied Italy, the experience of Jews in Italy during World War II, and postwar Italian politics. While much more could be said about all of these subjects, we have limited the scope of our discussion to what fit into the context of the narrative.

  Let your virtues expand to fill this sad situation:

  Glory ascends the heights by a precipitous path.

  Who would have known of Hector, if Troy had been happy?

  The road to valor is built by adversity.

  —OVID, TRISTIA

  Prologue

  AT THE STEEP FOOT of the Vars, on a windswept slope high in the French Alps, Gino Bartali lost his temper. The two cyclists following him were drafting, riding so close to his back wheel that he was forced to be their shield against the icy wind and drag them along. They refused to take their turn at the front of the group, and this galled him to no end. Ahead of the trio, a lone figure was getting smaller as he cycled away along the muddy road, a coagulated laceration zigzagging its way up the barren escarpment, winding around craggy pinnacles, stunted fir trees, and piles of rock debris until it vanished into the cold mountain mist. Gino had to make his move now if he would have any chance of catching the leader disappearing into the fog before him.

  It was July 15, 1948, and L’Étape Reine—The Queen Stage—the most important day of the Tour de France. A rough swipe at his dirt-caked goggles revealed a sobering scene, even for a man who had won the Tour on the exact same terrain ten years earlier. In 1938, Gino had soared up the imperial snow-crowned Alps toward azure heavens above. Now he could barely see where mountain met sky as heavy clouds rolled in around him and the mud beneath his wheels became thick as glue.

  The dismal surroundings echoed the pain screaming inside his body. After pedaling more than seventeen hundred miles over the most challenging topography cycling had to offer, his throat and lungs were burning, his thighs felt heavy as bronze. Unable to see far beyond his handlebars, he had to depend on his other senses to fill in the details. He could feel the pitch under his wheels as the grade of the road steepened. He could taste the icy rain turning into jagged snowflakes as he gulped the thinning mountain air. And all he could hear, beyond his own body heaving atop the bike, was an eerie, forlorn silence.

  Gino marshaled every last muscle and ounce of mental focus to silence the critics with this next climb. Il Vecchio they were calling him in the press, “The Old Man” at thirty-three years of age! He was fed up with being dismissed as an embarrassing has-been, defiant despite his humiliating twenty-one-minute disadvantage behind the Tour leader. He had even lashed out at the Italian journalists, yelling at them for doubting him. No matter—the reporters had already nicknamed him Ginettaccio, “Gino the Terrible,” and the newspapers would just chalk it up to another one of his outbursts. But what the press didn’t know was that Gino Bartali had a secret. He had much more bottled up inside him, beyond his frustration with being so far behind, and he had not sat idle during the war. Unlike some of the competitors he now raced against, his toughest moments came not on the steepest pitches of the Tour de France, but during the darkest hour of the Nazi occupation of Italy, risking his life for strangers.

  The memories of that chaotic era were still raw, and they were the reason the surprising phone call last night had unhinged him. Reports of large-scale protests and fighting in the streets back home had filled Gino’s mind, and his breath shortened as he thought of his wife and young sons. He had listened aghast as the prime minister of Italy, on the other end of the telephone, exp
lained how important a Tour victory would be to their homeland.

  As he rode toward the mountaintop town of Briançon, instinct told Gino to turn his head around. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw his competitors behind him cracking, their pale faces contorted, their drenched bodies swaying precariously atop their bikes. He had let them draft long enough. With a surge of raw power, he stood up out of his saddle and sped forward. Soon the French cyclist in the lead came back into sight.

  Sensing his foe, the French cyclist cast a worried look back. He was right to be alarmed; Gino cut an intimidating figure. His eyes invisible under his muddy goggles, he appeared almost supernaturally welded to his bike; his lithe racer’s body flexed forcefully, maneuvering his bicycle up the switchbacks.

  Closing in on his rival, Gino sat back down, letting the French cyclist regain some ground and some hope. When he found his rhythm again, Gino stood to attack once more. Again and again, they played this grueling game, all the way to the peak. By the time the French cyclist crossed the top of the mountain pass, he was utterly exhausted. Gino, in contrast, trembled with excitement as he neared the summit less than a minute behind. I am at one with the mountain, he thought as he flew over the top.

  As he faced the harrowing descent, Gino’s lips curled into a knowing smile beneath his grime-spattered face. It was time for the cat to catch his mouse. It was time to show the world that the war had not broken him. And his return to the Tour, he was beginning to understand, was about more than just a bike race in France.

  It was the final leg of a journey for a man and his country that had begun more than twenty years earlier on a dusty back road in Tuscany.

  Part I

  1

  Across the Arno

  The view of Florence and the Arno from near one of Gino Bartali’s favorite boyhood cycling routes.

  (photo credit 1.1)

  WHEN WE RACE TOGETHER, let’s each win a little! This time you, and the next time me,” Gino shouted ahead to his younger brother, Giulio, as they pedaled up the steep, sun-drenched hills surrounding Ponte a Ema. Their tires kicked up clouds of grit, and it was all Gino could do to avoid swallowing a mouthful. He rubbed a sweaty palm against his shorts, trying to brush off the stubborn rust flakes from his bike frame, and tucked his elbows in alongside his body, the way his idols did as they sprinted to victory, clutching their sleek curved handlebars. Gino leaned into the pedals and sped past Giulio. He turned and grinned at his younger brother as they started their descent toward home. They would race again tomorrow, and on that forgotten stretch of Tuscan road their tomorrows seemed endless.

  Cycling had become the Bartali boys’ passion, a flash of excitement and adventure in their tiny, workaday hometown. For Ponte a Ema in the 1920s was a sleepy place, just beyond the sophisticated world of Florence. Resting on the banks of the Ema, a tributary of the Arno River, Ponte a Ema brimmed with the vineyards, rolling hills, and waves of sweet lavender undulating out to the horizon, which have since made Tuscany world-renowned. Still, the village itself, located across a small bridge on the road from Florence to Bagno a Ripoli, looked like little more than an afterthought. One would be hard-pressed to find it on a map, hidden as it was some four miles southeast of Florence’s central square. And though it included a short litany of establishments common to any small Italian town of the time—a church; a bank; a bike mechanic’s shop; a simple barbershop; a grain mill; a small wine store; a five-room school set up in a farmer’s house—it lacked a town hall and a proper piazza, the pulsing heart of Italian life where nonni, or grandparents, gather to play cards and stray cats dart out of the way of running children and bouncing soccer balls. Without a nucleus, Ponte a Ema conveyed the impression of an accidentally inhabited byway between more important places. That more important places existed would not occur to Gino until much later. Back then, Ponte a Ema was all the world a boy could want.

  Born July 18, 1914, Gino Giovanni Bartali was a wispy, blue-eyed boy with a moppish head of curly dark hair. He lived with his parents, Torello and Giulia, his older sisters, Anita and Natalina, and his brother, Giulio, in one of the cream-colored, three-story tenement buildings that lined Via Chiantigiana, Ponte a Ema’s main street, where all the hubbub of daily life played out. Like most of the apartments along Chiantigiana, the Bartalis’ consisted of one room and a small kitchen. Home reminded Gino of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio and the humble abode of Geppetto, the hot-headed Tuscan carpenter who was known for getting into scuffles with anyone who insulted him. “The furniture could not have been much simpler: a very old chair, a rickety old bed, and a tumble-down table,” wrote Collodi. “Little as Geppetto’s house was, it was neat and comfortable.”

  The Bartalis’ home possessed a similar modest charm. The children helped Giulia cart jugs of water from nearby springs. Together with several families, the Bartalis shared a privy at the end of the hall on their floor, which consisted of a hole in a bench through which refuse dropped into a small container on the ground floor. Running water, like electricity, would only come several decades later, after the end of the Second World War.

  These were cramped quarters to be sure, but Gino didn’t know any different. Besides, outdoors was where the action was. Along the road, the boys from town would huddle for hours around a game of marbles, keeping a stern eye on the rainbow array of tiny glass globes that already belonged to them, and hawkishly watching the ones that would soon join their collection if luck and skill were on their side that day. The game was serious business for Gino and his friends, and almost always ended in a violent brawl, broken up only by the clatter of a pair of dark green window shutters being flung open above to make way for somebody’s mother leaning out to deliver a strident scolding. Gino always got a particularly severe tongue-lashing when he came home for dinner covered in bruises. Thin and undersized, a cuff from another child was enough to topple him to the ground, but that did little to deter him from bounding up and swinging right back. Gino knew he was the weakest, but he hated being teased. “I would have liked to have friends who didn’t take advantage of being stronger than me so that they could beat me up after every game of marbles,” he said later. Already headstrong as a youngster, however, he was willing to stand up for himself, even if the outcome was rarely favorable. “I was an unlucky marbles player, and an even unluckier boxer.”

  When he and his friends would scatter into the surrounding fields for games of tag or cops and robbers, winning and losing was a more straightforward affair and fisticuffs could be kept to a minimum. The orchards outside town were ideal for any pastime that involved hiding and chasing, draped as they were with row upon row of rippling white washing hung out to dry. For Ponte a Ema was a laundry town; many of its villagers labored for small businesses charged with cleaning the linens and finery of Florence’s gentlemanly class. Men organized the transportation for this industry, picking up and delivering laundry with a mule pulling a dray. Women, predictably, bore the brunt of the dirty work. With brushes and lye ash soap, they scrubbed soft mountains until they were spotless. They cleaned shirts in large cement basins called viaios; they rinsed large bedsheets on the banks of the Ema River, by the ponte or bridge for which the town was named. Once each stain had been painstakingly removed, everything was carried out to the orchards and hung to dry in endless bay-scented fabric corridors, perfect for dodging potential jailers or for lying in wait to snatch a slippery thief and triumphantly march him back to town, where his punishment would be determined and duly meted out.

  “As children we had fun with little, in fact nothing,” Gino said. They played murielle, a game that involved tiles and smoothed stones, in the small rectangular schoolyard, and diecone in the Ponte a Ema cemetery; whoever knocked down the most graveside candles by rolling coins at them won the ten-cent piece. They would sneak off to the Arno for a forbidden swim—the river was known for claiming lives with its currents and sudden whirlpools, and Gino’s mother once had to resort to stealing her son’s clothes from its banks, f
orcing him to scurry home naked, to teach him a lesson. Most days, though, Gino and his friends would scamper out of the water, get dressed, and, when somebody had a spare coin or two, run over to a riverside cookie factory that sold broken pieces of biscotti, with flavors like fig and sambuca, at an end-of-day discount.

  Gino’s favorite pastime was one he had to keep completely secret or risk an encounter with his father’s leather belt. Torello’s bicycle had always fascinated Gino and one day he hatched a plan to learn to ride atop it. It was far too big for a boy his size, but he was determined to master it. Like a bullfighter closing in on a bull in an arena, he approached it. Standing one foot on the left pedal, he slid his right leg under the crossbar to reach the right pedal. Balancing precariously, and much too short to sit on the bike seat, he stretched up to grip the handlebars from below. Crooked and wobbling, he learned painstakingly to maneuver the unwieldy contraption and barely noticed the smirks and giggles his clumsy expeditions elicited. He was too busy keeping his balance as he pedaled along Ponte a Ema’s side streets.

  Gino would have spent all of his waking hours outdoors at play if he could. Unfortunately, school was a constant interference. “I had little will to study,” he said.

  Gino’s lack of discipline aggravated his father; his mother was irritated that her son had worn out more pairs of pants on the playground pavement than on the school benches where he was meant to be learning. Yet their lectures fell on deaf ears, and so a familiar scene began to play out regularly in the Bartali household.

  “I don’t like school, period,” Gino would say.

  “You are going and that’s that,” Torello would respond.