Road to Valour

by Aili McConnon

  If the Goldenbergs had hoped to live anonymously in this new locale, they soon realized that plan was not to be. In no time at all, the inhabitants of Fiesole had identified the Goldenbergs as outsiders and Giacomo Goldenberg as a foreign-born Jew. Yet in a striking example of the legal inconsistencies of the Fascist regime, he was not arrested by the local police and immediately sent off to an internment camp. Instead, like many other foreign-born Jews who weren’t interned, he was placed under a light house arrest that prohibited him from going to Florence and required him to check in with the local police station once a week.

  The relatively favorable terms of Goldenberg’s arrest would set the tone for the family’s quiet new life in Fiesole. Villagers, while curious about their new neighbors, would prove themselves free of any of the anti-Semitic vitriol that had become so common around Europe and some parts of Italy. Left to live their lives peacefully, the Goldenbergs adapted well to life in the small village. Giorgio started to attend a nearby school organized for Jewish children. When he wasn’t in the classroom, he passed the hours playing with local Gentile friends. His mother, Elvira, an Italian Jew, was free to go to Florence as she pleased. Goldenberg, although forbidden from going there himself, was free to host people from the city who came to see him. It was in this context that he began spending time again with his friend from Florence, Armando Sizzi.

  One of Sizzi’s visits to Fiesole stood out from all the rest, at least for young Giorgio. Talkative and good-natured, Sizzi would regularly bring other members of his family to visit the Goldenbergs, including his young son Marcello, with whom Giorgio had become fast friends. When Giorgio caught sight of Sizzi in the passenger seat of a car slowing down in front of his family’s home one day, he raced to see if Marcello had come along to play. As he peered through the windows of the car, however, he was surprised to recognize the driver from the countless magazine covers and sports papers he and his friends were always poring over. It was Gino Bartali.

  Giorgio’s father stood nearby. If he was taken aback for a moment when he saw the cyclist get out of the car, he could hardly be blamed. More than a decade had passed since Goldenberg had met Gino in Sizzi’s shop. Then Gino had been a shy boy who worked obsessively on broken bikes; now he was a confident man who appeared to cope effortlessly with being a national celebrity. In that same time, cruel Fascist laws had pushed Goldenberg from a prosperous life as a businessman in a cosmopolitan port city into the provincial world of a paesano or villager.

  Goldenberg greeted Gino and Sizzi warmly. The three men began speaking, but Goldenberg barely had enough time to update his guests with his news before they were interrupted by the arrival of a group of curious strangers. In a village where everyone knew everyone else, word had quickly spread among their neighbors that the famous sports hero had arrived. As they heard the news, village children and parents from nearby streets stopped what they were doing, poured out of their homes and the town piazza, and rushed toward the row of cream-colored houses where the Goldenbergs had rented their home.

  When they saw Gino smiling and chatting with Goldenberg and Sizzi, some stepped forward to ask for his autograph. Gino was happy to oblige them, and handed out signed postcards of himself that he always carried with him. After securing a memento with Gino’s signature, the village children clustered around Giorgio, in awe that his father knew the famous cyclist. They became even more envious of what happened next. Gino reached into his car and pulled out a small blue bicycle that he presented to Giorgio. The young boy was astounded and stared with admiration at the cyclist who towered over him, while his friends pounced immediately on the gift, eager to inspect every inch of the bicycle. “Bartali was a kind of demigod,” explained Giorgio.

  Of course, even special days like these could not mitigate the war or the restricted circumstances in which the Goldenbergs found themselves. Yet somehow the excitement of a friendly visit and the relative tranquillity of everyday life in Fiesole had helped open a small window of promise. If they could live the war out together in this peaceful little village, the family had a chance of realizing the best possible outcome in a difficult situation.

  Ultimately, however, the war extinguished this hope as well. Two years after he arrived in Fiesole, Goldenberg would be arrested and sent off to a distant internment camp.

  On October 9, 1940, the war finally muscled its way into Gino’s life when he received a notice calling him to active military service. He and Adriana had feared it might happen, but she was still shaken. “Don’t worry, I won’t end up beneath the bombs,” Gino reassured her. His words did little to shore her up, for the situation was starting to feel terrifyingly familiar. Adriana’s older brother had also recently joined the Italian war effort. The night before he left, the family gathered for a special meal to send him off. The next day Adriana’s brother boarded a ship, along with a few hundred Florentine soldiers, bound for Albania, which Mussolini had invaded the previous year. Out at sea, the boat was bombed and the soldiers all perished. When the news reached Adriana’s family, she refused to acknowledge that her brother could be dead. For years she would hold out hope that he would one day appear at her door. Already in a fragile state, Adriana was ill-equipped to cope with losing Gino as well.

  As part of Gino’s mobilization, he was first required to undergo a routine medical checkup to determine his specific assignment. On the day of his test, he went to the local military office. The military doctor listened to his heart and found it was beating irregularly, a condition that Gino was aware of, but that had never seemed to impede his cycling. Still the doctor was puzzled, and called in a colonel for a second opinion. The colonel looked at the heart rate and rejected Gino as unfit for military service, unaware that he was evaluating one of the nation’s cycling stars. Unsettled, the doctor explained to the colonel that it might look like special treatment if Gino was excused from military service. The colonel relented, and Gino was assigned his post. He became an army messenger near an airplane factory on the shores of Lake Trasimeno, some seventy-five miles southeast of Florence. Compared with those sent to fight abroad, he was undeniably fortunate in his placement.

  Still, life in the army barracks was an adjustment for Gino. For one thing, he didn’t like carrying a gun. But he became creative and channeled his passions into his new profession. Soon after he started, one of his superiors, a cycling fan named Olesindo Salmi, agreed to allow him to use a bicycle instead of a motorized scooter so he could continue to train. He was also permitted to take frequent leaves to compete in those few races still being held. In his spare time when he wasn’t delivering army documents, Gino steered clear of the barracks, where the other soldiers talked anxiously about the fighting in Africa and the fact that Italy was losing in Ethiopia. Instead, Gino passed the hours with religious reading. “I plunged myself into reading the lives of the saints. I frequently read Saint Anthony, Saint Catherine, Saint Thérèse [of Lisieux].” In these books he found an inviting escape from the dreariness of military life and his growing frustration with Mussolini’s government. Speaking out in this context would almost certainly have been viewed as insubordination. So “Gino, the chatterbox, had his trap nailed shut,” as he explained.

  Gino would try to see Adriana whenever he secured leaves to train or compete, but with every visit she was growing more agitated. They both knew his assignment could change without explanation and he could be sent abroad with little notice. Gino grew frustrated because he wanted to protect and provide for her, but his military assignment kept him away. No one knows what will happen because of this cursed war, he thought. Gino resolved to remedy the situation by marrying her. His proposal was less a question than a statement of fact. “Better a widow than a girlfriend,” he said to Adriana. Though they had talked of marriage, Adriana was surprised. Gino’s proposal came sooner than they had discussed. Still, she had made her choice long ago and happily agreed.

  In peacetime, this decision would have unleashed a flurry of planning. Few events
, after all, can rival the scale of a lavish Italian wedding. A parade of antipasti including fine meats and pickled vegetables is followed by a dizzying number of courses featuring pastas, soups, fish, meats, fruits, and baked treats. After the food is served, fathers and uncles deliver long sentimental speeches over many glasses of wine, grappa, and Vin Santo, the special dessert wine used to toast a guest’s health.

  Adriana’s wedding day unfolded in quite a different manner. Gino secured a short leave from the military, and on a weekday morning in November 1940, Adriana and Gino gathered with Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa in his private chapel in the center of Florence. Adriana wore a modest long-sleeved white dress and floor-length veil, which covered soft chestnut waves of hair, draped over her shoulders. Gino donned a dark suit and tie, and the triangle of a smart white handkerchief peeked out of his breast pocket.

  Gino stood straight and confident, and Adriana faced him, holding her simple bouquet firmly. Cardinal Dalla Costa watched solemnly as the couple embraced one of the most sacred sacraments in the Catholic faith. At twenty-six and twenty, Gino and Adriana were still young, but as they looked at each other, they couldn’t help but marvel at how far they had come since the days when Gino struggled to introduce himself. In front of Cardinal Dalla Costa and a dozen guests, Gino and Adriana declared their love and commitment to each other. And for that moment they lost themselves in the spell of the momentous step they had taken together, oblivious of the world outside the chapel. “My dream from boyhood, for my future, was to have at my side a humble and intelligent woman. God granted me this wish,” Gino said.

  But the war could not be forgotten for very long. Their wedding guests provided the most obvious clue. Few men were present other than Adriana’s and Gino’s fathers. Similarly, neither Adriana’s mother nor Gino’s mother attended. For Adriana’s mother, the loss of her son was too fresh, and Giulia was still mourning the death of Giulio, four years later. After the ceremony, the group moved to Adriana’s older sister’s home, where she hosted a simple reception, serving what small cakes and refreshments they had been able to procure with wartime rationing. The bride was radiant though “the moment was a bit peculiar,” Adriana acknowledged later. “We did things very simply.”

  In the early afternoon the young couple boarded a train for their honeymoon in Rome. The next day the newlyweds were treated to a meeting with Pope Pius XII, a fan of Gino’s. Adriana was thrilled, but also exhausted: “It was all racing around. My husband was used to racing, but I wasn’t.” Afterward they boarded a train for Ferrara, where Gino had a one-day cycling event. While their honeymoon was brief, curtailed by the length of the leave Gino had been able to secure, they added a few extra days the following February in Alassio on the Italian Riviera, ahead of Gino’s training in the region. There they had a painting done of the two of them riding a tandem bicycle by the sea, Adriana beaming behind her husband, who for once has forgone his usual muddy racing gear for dapper plus-fours and a jacket. The carefree mood of the painting belies the wartime setting. When they returned home, Gino headed back to the army barracks.

  Adriana’s first year of married life was shaped by the same austerity that gripped other Florentines on the home front. With the war being fought outside of Italy, and Allied aerial bombings largely confined to northern industrial areas like Milan, Turin, and Genoa, food shortages were the most enduring daily reminder that the nation was in conflict. In beefsteak-loving Florence, meat was the most conspicuously absent item. Where it was available, people learned to make do with much less of it and eat parts of the cow, like the udder and lungs, that they had once discarded. Other staples prone to shortages were similarly replaced with substitutes. Imported coffee was replaced by varying blends of indigenous plants like chicory or barley; eggs were replaced by a powder called ovocrema; cigarettes were replaced by rice-paper cylinders filled with dried chamomile flowers.

  Despite the shortages and living apart, the Bartalis went on to start a family. Their first child, a son named Andrea, was born on October 3, 1941, nearly a year after their wedding, and was baptized by Cardinal Dalla Costa. This event heralded much joy during a strange period in Gino’s life. His day-to-day existence at that time was an unusual hybrid of working as a military bicycle messenger and competing in cycling races around the country. The Italian racing calendar had been significantly reduced, but there were still more than a dozen races in 1941 and 1942. Most significantly, professionals no longer earned any money—their prizes were automatically donated to the war effort.

  Gino harbored mixed feelings about these wartime races. On the one hand, they provided an escape from his military duties and they allowed him to hold his tenuous spot in the public eye as a top-flight cyclist. They also allowed him to squeeze in visits with his family after the competitions. But there were trade-offs for participating in these events. Losses had begun to rankle Gino much more than before. After one race where Coppi came from behind to win, Gino found himself in a state of shock. He “went gray as ash. He shook, as if the news weighed more heavily on his legs than the kilometers he had just ridden,” described Coppi. Another wartime race crystallized why the sport he loved had become so frustrating. It was the 1941 Giro of Tuscany, raced along the familiar dirt-packed roads and rolling hills near Gino’s hometown. Gino eagerly anticipated this race because he was sure to see Adriana afterward and he was primed to win in front of a local crowd for the third year in a row. He started strong and secured the lead early. But at the beginning of the penultimate climb before the finish in Florence, he blew a tire and was forced to stop and replace it. He pedaled furiously to catch up with the others. He came within striking distance when he was stymied again. His chain came off, and by the time he fixed it, all hope of a victory had vanished.

  The loss crushed him, but that didn’t entirely explain the depth of his unease. Then it hit him. He was “surrounded by people who are thinking only about races, as though nothing were going on, as if the war affected someone else and not the racers,” he said. Gino realized that he was part of a charade perpetrated by the regime. Mussolini had recognized that these wartime races were effective propaganda for boosting public morale in Italy during the war. So while the Giro d’Italia had been canceled in 1941, the Fascist regime resurrected the race in 1942. It was still called the Giro, even though the multiweek race had been reduced to a series of six one-day races.

  Elsewhere in Europe, the world of racing had slowed down considerably. In bicycle-loving France, the Tour had been canceled since 1940, though the Vichy regime, like the Fascists in Italy, would also organize a faux Tour for propaganda purposes. In Paris, the cavernous Vélodrome d’Hiver, a popular cycling stadium where Gino and his fellow competitors had officially registered for the 1938 Tour, was marshaled for altogether different purposes. In the summer of 1942 the French police used it as a giant holding cell for seven thousand Jews (including four thousand children) arrested in Paris. They held the internees there for five days without sufficient food or water before deporting them to Auschwitz.

  In the spring of 1943, Gino and his countrymen felt Italy’s path change course once more. Mussolini made a last-ditch effort in North Africa by sending yet another contingent of troops to Tunisia in March. This group included Fausto Coppi, whose regiment was captured quickly by the British. Coppi would spend the rest of World War II in prisoner-of-war camps, first in northern Tunisia and then near Naples.

  In early July, the Allies landed in Sicily. At the end of the month, on July 25, 1943, a day after the Fascist Grand Council made a vote of no confidence in Mussolini, the King of Italy declared during a radio broadcast that he had arrested Il Duce. Spontaneous celebrations broke out around the nation as the news spread. Italians took to the streets en masse, and crowds that had once lauded Mussolini’s every pronouncement now cheered his arrest. “It was beautiful,” recalled one Italian Jewish woman, an eyewitness and an ardent Bartali fan. “We were thrilled. We said, ‘At least this nightmare is over.’ ”
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  News of Mussolini’s overthrow took longer to reach other Italians. Such was the case for Ubaldo Pugnaloni, an acquaintance of Gino’s from the cycling world. On the morning of July 25, he was scheduled to compete in the national cycling championship for amateurs. The race began and he left the starting line wearing a jersey with Fascist insignia (mandated by the government in certain competitions). Pugnaloni raced splendidly and crossed the finish line ahead of all his rivals. When he went to the winner’s podium to receive his trophy, he was surprised to find not a single Fascist official left to present him his prize. When Pugnaloni finally realized what had happened during the hours he had been racing, he ripped off the Fascist insignia and joined the festivities.

  The official announcements said that the war would continue, but hopeful signs began appearing over the next six weeks that suggested it might soon end. Portraits of Mussolini were removed from public buildings. Streets and schools named after famous Fascists were renamed. A prominent anti-Semitic newspaper editor was arrested along with one of the officials who had been charged with the enforcement of the Racial Laws. The man who had killed the popular Socialist leader Matteotti was found and arrested. Finally, on September 8, 1943, Italians heard the news for which so many of them had longed: Italy had surrendered to the Allied Forces.

  Just as they had done some six weeks earlier upon hearing of Mussolini’s overthrow, Italians poured out into the streets to celebrate the cease-fire. In Florence, crowds gathered in the city center. Children fluttered little Italian flags as their parents chattered about their plans for the future. Across Italy, many (though not all) prisoners in internment camps were freed. At the camp where Giacomo Goldenberg was being held, the commandant called all the prisoners together and instructed them to leave. Goldenberg returned to Fiesole immediately to find his family.