Road to Valour

by Aili McConnon

  Many in the press took it as a confirmation of their early assessment of Gino. The Italian delegation, who were easily identified by their elegantly tailored suits and monocles, were particularly pleased. An Italian taking the lead before the Tour was even one-third finished offered them an almost limitless opportunity for baroque praise. The bartaliani, Gino’s most loyal fans, had their own reason to rejoice. A win in the Alps opened up the real possibility that their hero would carry the yellow jersey all the way to Paris. L’Auto, the principal French daily newspaper covering the race, summed up the feelings of both groups in the edition that was delivered to newsstands across France on July 8: “Bartali will never be caught.… on the contrary, he will increase his advantage in every mountain stage.”

  Just hours later, everything changed. About halfway into the day’s race, the German Otto Weckerling broke away. A group of some thirty racers chased after him, seemingly oblivious to the gentle rain that fell on them. Although it cut through the mountains, the road was wide enough that the men could ride with a few leaders at the front and a large group following behind. A few miles after Embrun, the road narrowed as it crossed a small bridge over the Colau River. Gino, who was riding closely behind his teammate Giulio Rossi, steeled himself for the overpass. The rest of the riders in the group closed ranks alongside him to cross it, each man adjusting a bike that was often just inches from the ones in front of it and behind it.

  Whether it was because of the rain or the shifting movement of the group, Rossi slipped and fell. Gino swerved instinctively to avoid riding into his friend. He hit the side of the bridge and was thrown some three meters high, “like a ball into space,” over the edge. Falling into a shallow Alpine river below, he was overcome by intense pain and soaked from head to toe by the frigid water that flowed from the mountains.

  Above, two of his other teammates swerved to avoid hitting his bike and fell as well. One of them quickly dusted himself off and scampered down to the river’s edge. Wading in, he lifted Gino’s pale and shivering arm around his shoulder and helped him back up to the roadside. Propping up Gino’s bicycle, he coaxed his captain back onto it.

  “Get on the bike, Bartali. Get on it. I’m here. We will do the route together, slowly. Don’t worry, we’re no more than thirty kilometers from the finish. It’s over.”

  And Gino, with his left hand clutching his kidneys, began to pedal. Rossi, whose legs and arms looked “like bloody steaks,” was rushed off to the local hospital. To no one’s surprise, he quit the Tour.

  In Briançon, Weckerling crossed the finish line first. Farther back, Gino did complete the stage, but lost nine minutes because of the accident. “I was mute, physically mute; I raced with my mind alone,” Gino explained later. By the evening, Gino seemed to have regained his composure. Although he suffered a painful cough at first, he felt strong enough to continue. The subsequent stages seemed to validate his assessment. His torso was “bound up tightly like a newborn baby,” as Gino put it, but he raced competitively through the Alps. He impressed the Tour founder enough for him to remark that he was in “full health and form.” Another Tour organizer even predicted a strong performance by Gino in the second mountain series, the Pyrenees.

  The Italian Cycling Federation, however, saw it differently. They announced Gino’s withdrawal from the Tour for health reasons. Gino would later maintain that the real reason was politically motivated—he was not a card-carrying Fascist. There might be a grain of truth to this. Members of the Cycling Federation may have taken the initiative to withdraw Gino to stave off the possibility of any new accidents that might further embarrass the Italian team and, by extension, themselves or the Fascist Party. Or perhaps their logic was simpler. Seeing the leader’s nearly seventeen-minute advantage, they might have dismissed Gino’s chances at victory as a hopeless waste of time.

  Gino would never forgive them for interfering in his career. “I was crying. I had such great dreams for that Tour and all of them went up in smoke.” Gino said. Then he elaborated: “When the doctor didn’t want me to race, ‘they’ made me race; when I should have withdrawn, they made me continue; when, after the four difficult stages, I was getting better, they sent me home.” This final indignity would rile him the most. In his autobiography, he would call it the “greatest injustice suffered in [his] career.”

  Gino shared all of these thoughts when he could speak freely again after World War II. In 1937, however, he had to bite his tongue, swallow the tears, and pack his bags. The Italian Cycling Federation left him to make his own arrangements to get home, and with little money on hand, he had to borrow funds to buy his train ticket. After all the disappointments of France, he found some relief at the train station in Italy when onlookers who spotted him began to applaud him enthusiastically. Speaking to the press, he said he would take some time off to recuperate. And then, already planning the following year’s cycling season, he promised to try again to win the Giro and the Tour in the same year.

  In a few months, however, he would learn that prominent figures in the Fascist regime disagreed with his plans. In early 1938, Gino met with Mussolini’s national sports directors—who supervised all sports bodies, including the Italian Cycling Federation—to discuss the upcoming season. It was the type of stuffy gathering that Gino despised because he had to obtain approval for his training and race plans from government-appointed authorities who didn’t actually care about his well-being and “had as much to do with cycling as cabbage with snack time.” The authorities quickly made their intentions clear. An Italian had to win the 1938 Tour for the international glory of Italy. Though irritated by their pushiness, Gino started to explain how he would accomplish that goal. “I will do just what I did last year. I will only train for races in stages. I’ll do a few little races, more to honor commitments already made than anything else—even if I will try to win them—then the Giro d’Italia and—”

  “One moment,” the officials interrupted him. “The Giro is long, difficult and hard in and of itself. It’s a useless waste of effort and it could be damaging. You are not doing the Giro and you will prepare yourself only to race the Tour.”

  “What?” Gino sputtered. The Giro—the most important race in Italy? Had he misheard them? “I’m not doing the Giro? I’m perfectly healthy, I assure you; I’m in shape. Listen to me. I know my body and I know how far I can take it. You have always said that I’m a serious racer, right? So then give me this proof of faith.”

  “No, there’s nothing that can be done. We’re advising you against it.” Their tone left little doubt that this recommendation was an order. “The risk is also ours and we don’t feel like taking the risk.”

  Angry but powerless, Gino acquiesced again. “There was nothing else to say. I had to grin and bear it and be a good boy about it. And yet as the weeks passed, I felt myself unnerved.”

  The spring of 1938 brought political news that was destined to steal the headlines from sport: Mussolini would host Adolf Hitler for a series of meetings in Italy. The two had met once earlier in the decade, when they had a tense discussion about their conflicting interests in Austria. Time and the exigencies of politics, however, changed matters quickly. By 1938, bristling from the international criticism generated by his invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and impressed by Germany’s rapid military buildup, Mussolini was eager to start anew. He made plans to showcase the nation’s military and its resources in Naples and Rome to prove Italy’s strength to the Germans. Florence was set as the final stop of the visit. The home of Michelangelo and Botticelli, it was a perfect setting for the more personal task of fostering better relations with a failed artist like Hitler.

  Mussolini and his party officials were determined to make it a perfect trip. A committee comprising high-ranking public works officials, an architecture school, and some twenty architects and artists was formed and tasked with carrying out “Operation Florence Beautiful.” Buildings everywhere—even Ponte Vecchio—were restored, repainted, and revarnished. Nazi flag
s were raised in prominent locations, and Renaissance-style banners were hung all over the city, turning one central street into a long tunnel of blue. By the time the work was finished, it was said that many Florentines hardly recognized their own city.

  Members of the Jewish community in Italy had reason to be more skeptical about all the preparations. Although they had once been persecuted and marginalized, Hitler’s visit came during a golden era of liberties for Jews. After fighting alongside their Gentile countrymen to unite Italy in the nineteenth century, Italian Jews had become fully integrated members of national life in Italy; talented individuals in the community had risen to prominence in the arts, business, and politics. There was even a small group of Jewish Fascists, which underlined the reality that the rabid anti-Semitism that had played such an integral part in Nazism’s rise did not have a voice in the early years of Fascism’s reign. The fact that Italy was now hosting Hitler seemed to contradict all of this. It also flew in the face of Mussolini’s earlier public criticism of Nazi anti-Semitism. Even if it was just a short trip or a routine diplomatic gesture, it was hard to see it as anything but disconcerting.

  On the day of Hitler’s arrival in early May, all the diplomatic stagecraft and theatrics came to a climactic finish. First, Mussolini arrived by train, showcasing a piece of Nazi military insignia on his uniform. Fifteen minutes later, Hitler arrived on a separate train, wearing the light brown Nazi uniform with an Italian Fascist dagger displayed prominently on his belt. Mussolini greeted Hitler and the two men shook hands vigorously. Later, Mussolini would privately speculate to his foreign minister that Hitler was wearing rouge on his cheeks to disguise his ghostly pallor.

  After the formal greetings, the leaders were seated in the lead car of a motorcade of convertibles and began a whirlwind tour of the city. They visited a Fascist shrine and viewed exhibitions of priceless Renaissance masterpieces. A fancy dinner followed, along with a trip to the Florence opera for Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra. On the streets, crowds were only too happy to yell out their roaring affirmations; preemptive arrests a few days earlier had removed people considered possible threats for protests, violence, or embarrassment to the regime.

  Others, notably many Jews in Florence, silenced themselves and steered clear of the celebrations for fear they would be prime targets for violence. One Jewish family, the Donatis, became fearful well in advance of Hitler’s visit. They had refused to put a swastika up alongside the Italian flag that usually hung on their porch. A chairman for their building, an official assigned by the Fascist government, intervened and insisted they hang the Nazi flag. On May 22, the day of Hitler’s visit, the Donati family fled their home, an impressive edifice built in the style of an old palazzo that stood near the train tracks where Hitler’s train passed by. The Donatis hid in the basement of their porter’s apartment until the event was over.

  Italian Jews could not speak up, but there was one voice of protest that refused to embrace the swastika and could get away with it because the speaker was too visible to arrest. He was Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa, the archbishop of Florence. The cardinal, who was also a friend of Gino Bartali’s, was determined to share his opinion on Hitler’s visit and decided to carry out a protest by himself. In a rebuke of the Fascists’ remodeling of Florence, he forbade any decoration of the city’s famous cathedral or diocesan office. Likewise, he had the front doors of another church locked before Hitler and Mussolini arrived to visit it, forcing them to enter through a humble service entry. Finally, he was conspicuously absent from all the official activities that day, choosing instead to spend time in the city’s prisons with his fellow dissidents.

  It’s possible that the Nazi officials picked up on these slights, because their Italian counterparts certainly did. In secret files maintained far away in Rome, Fascist spies duly noted Dalla Costa’s anti-Fascist affront in a report they compiled about him. The Fascists in Florence responded with more outright vitriol; they apparently wanted to set the cardinal’s office aflame, according to a priest who worked with Dalla Costa. They could take consolation, however, in the fact that the rest of the day went smoothly. At the end of his tour, Hitler evinced his full satisfaction, and there was little reason to doubt his sincerity. It was obvious that no expense had been spared in his honor. When all was said and done, some nineteen million lire had been spent sprucing up the city for his visit at a moment when most average working-class men could hope to earn but one thousand lire per month. It would take the city almost two years to pay off all the debt incurred for an event that lasted all of twelve hours.

  The highlight of the trip for someone as interested in architecture as Hitler may well have been the excursion up to Piazzale Michelangelo, the midpoint of one of Gino’s favorite boyhood bike rides. Up there, Hitler and Mussolini took in the whole city, with an art historian offering commentary about the city’s various buildings and monuments. When they were finished, they could enjoy the piazzale itself, whose “pavement had been temporarily relandscaped to incorporate plantings in the form of swastikas and fasci [Fascist emblems].”

  All the diplomatic pageantry came to a close around midnight at Florence’s main train station. Mussolini exchanged warm farewells with Hitler as he prepared to board his train and return to Germany. No doubt speaking in his characteristically emphatic voice, Mussolini made a bold declaration:

  “Now no force can ever separate us!”

  At this, Hitler’s eyes were said to have moistened a little with tears.

  In June, the Italian soccer team brought sports back to the front pages of newspapers. At the beginning of the month, they went off to the World Cup in Paris with the highest of hopes. Four years earlier, in what was perhaps Italy’s last great international sports victory, they had won the World Cup on their home turf. Described as a precursor to Berlin’s infamous 1936 Olympics, the 1934 World Cup had been exploited to the maximum for propaganda purposes. The players saluted Mussolini from the field, and their ultimate victory in the event was trumpeted in the press as a triumph of Fascist policy.

  In centrist France, however, such heavy-handed politicking played poorly among spectators. Although the Italians would win the World Cup again in 1938, anti-Fascist fans booed them mercilessly when they played part of a match in Fascist black shirts. They were even more aggressive with the German soccer team, pelting them with broken bottles. Predictably, the press in Italy reacted negatively to this treatment. One Italian magazine accused the French of being led by nefarious Bolshevists and suggested that the Italian team hadn’t just vanquished another team, but rather a whole “city, a prejudice, a violent injustice.”

  The antagonism in France could do little to diminish the excitement of the victory celebrations awaiting the players in Italy. A lavish event was carried out in Rome, where Mussolini praised the players during a two-day ceremony attended by several thousand athletes and Fascist party members from across the country. The militant undertones of the proceedings were always readily apparent, with the players wearing full army and navy uniforms as they were photographed with Mussolini for newspaper cover pages.

  After the victory at the World Cup, the focus immediately turned to the fast-approaching Tour de France and Italy’s highest hope: Gino Bartali. Some days later, in deference to the excitement bubbling around the country, the bridge between the two competitions was made more concrete. In a well-publicized gesture, the soccer players’ jerseys were gathered up and given to Gino and the Italian cyclists to carry as good-luck charms to France.

  Few gifts could have carried with them a heavier burden of expectations.

  The final days before the departure for the Tour were a whirlwind of activity in Italy. The Italian Cycling Federation helped coordinate support staff and organized the team’s travel, booking a full first-class sleeper carriage for the racers’ journey to France. The coach, Costante Girardengo, met his cyclists and discussed elements of the racing strategy that he had refined over the last few months. Several of the less experien
ced team members did final training runs in Voltaggio, a small city in the north of Italy. Others, who had just spent three weeks racing around Italy in the Giro d’Italia, made final arrangements before a trip that would take them out of the country for at least four weeks if not longer.

  Gino spent his days more quietly. Having been forced to sit out the Giro, he had found himself with more free time than usual over the last few months. But if those long hours should have given him time for rest, they yielded him nothing but anxiety. Agitated and restless, he felt the loss of his brother, Giulio, even more acutely. The only salve was the calm of the Ponte a Ema cemetery, especially at twilight, when few others were around. “It was my most intense period for cemetery visits,” he said later. “I was talking with Giulio in order to vent and to free myself from the nervousness that was suffocating me.” Again and again, these conversations jumped from the recent past to the present. His last attempt in France had felt rushed and haphazard. With all its frustrations, however, he could take some solace in being sabotaged by forces outside his control. This year, the weight of it all stood on his shoulders alone. Seven years of racing, and thousands of miles in the saddle. A whole nation expecting him to win; several others hoping that he would not. Everything, every thought, concern, and anxiety, led back to one predictable place.

  The Tour.

  On his final evening in Florence, Gino felt himself drawn again to the cemetery and its cool white stone tombs. It was a balmy night, but the cypress trees were a bit gloomy at that hour. Along the streets, the purple blossoms on the wisteria trees moved slowly in the gentle breeze. Standing in front of Giulio’s tomb, with its familiar photo of Giulio atop his bicycle looking back at him, Gino began to say the words spoken so many times before: