Road to Valour

by Aili McConnon

  On August 3, the Bartalis heard the news that terrified all Florentines. The German commander of Florence issued his final injunction, declaring a state of emergency for the city: “From this moment on, it is severely forbidden for anyone to leave their houses and walk along the streets and in the squares of the city of Florence … the patrols of the German Armed Forces have orders to shoot people who are found in the streets, or who show themselves at windows.” By nightfall, Florence was shrouded in darkness. The Germans had completely destroyed the city’s main electricity station, so the blackout was ubiquitous.

  Behind shuttered windows and closed doors, the Bartalis waited in tense anxiety. Soon after the clock struck ten, the silence was broken by a terrific, crashing explosion. “The sky toward the Palazzo Pitti was magnificently turned to crimson,” wrote one resident near the Arno. Gino could feel the house trembling. As the thunderclap of blasts continued, young Andrea awoke with a start. “What is it, Papà?” he asked his father. “Sleep, sleep,” comforted Gino. “It’s a thunderstorm.” For over seven hours the deafening clamor of detonating explosives ripped through the air as each of Florence’s beloved bridges was destroyed.

  All except one. A huge load of explosives had been placed in the houses at either end of Ponte Vecchio, the oldest bridge in Florence, and the only one lined with alcoved shops. During the middle of the night on August 3, they were detonated. Tiles, bricks, and shutters flew everywhere. Florence’s crown jewel survived, but was completely impassable as a result of the huge piles of rubble at either end. This disarray was deliberate. Hitler had reportedly ordered that all of Florence’s bridges be destroyed except “the most artistic one.”

  The wreckage rattled everyone, including Gino. “The spectacle of Florence was devastating,” he said. The area covered in rubble on either side of the Arno extended some two hundred yards. Gino knew there would be more violence along the river when the Allies finally arrived by land. So he decided to move his family again, this time to Adriana’s parents’ home on the northeastern outskirts of Florence. She needed a less tumultuous place to spend the final weeks of her pregnancy. Her parents would help calm her.

  But one night, shortly after they had arrived, Adriana began experiencing contractions. She and Gino were both frightened, as it was too early. He jumped onto his bike and began cycling to the heart of Florence to find a doctor. It was after curfew and getting dark, and the destruction was inescapable, particularly near the Arno, where the Florence of Dante and Petrarch lay in ruins. Somehow, despite all the damage and chaos, Gino found a doctor and they raced to Adriana’s bedside. The scene that met them would haunt Gino for the rest of his life.

  His second son was stillborn.

  Adriana’s condition was serious, and Gino spent the night terrified that he might lose his wife as well. The doctor did his best, and by the next morning Adriana had turned a corner. Gino was relieved, but his anguish over his dead child was overwhelming. In a daze, he visited a nearby friend, a carpenter, who built him a tiny coffin.

  Back home, he sat quietly with Adriana, then gently picked up the wooden coffin holding his stillborn son and carried it to his bike outside. Cradling the coffin under his arm, he pedaled south through battered Florence. He passed close to Campo di Marte, where thousands of Florentines, who had been evacuated from their homes near the Arno, were camped out. The houses in the neighborhood nearby lay in flattened ruins, bombed months earlier. He rode past groups of people huddled around makeshift fires and near handcarts overflowing with belongings that they had pushed through town. Every so often Gino would make eye contact with one of them, and as he stared at them, the tired and vacant defeat in their gaze was inescapable. Finally, Gino made it to the cemetery in Ponte a Ema. He biked up the winding, wisteria-lined path to the main white stone building, where he dismounted and carried his dead son, tenderly placing the small coffin in the family crypt next to his brother Giulio’s.

  When Gino returned home, the image of his young son remained seared in his memory. He had been a small baby, but his features were well formed. He and Adriana had planned to call him Giorgio to honor her brother lost at sea. Gino and Adriana consoled each other, but they would not speak of this to others for years.

  On the morning of August 4, 1944, the first Allied tanks neared the south bank of the Arno. In the heart of the city on the other side of the river, a small group of Florentines emerged from their hiding places. They made a rush for the southern bank, only to be killed by a series of mines planted by the Germans. Other Florentines would soon fall beside them, killed by Fascist snipers still roaming the city.

  Although it would be a full week before these last Fascist holdouts were expunged from the area, even they couldn’t stop the news of liberation from slowly starting to spread across the city. On Via del Bandino, it was announced by the hopeful shouting of local boys, “Gli inglesi son arrivati!”—“The English have arrived!” Sitting in the cellar with his parents and sister, Giorgio Goldenberg crept cautiously out to investigate. He was startled to see a British soldier standing right on the street beside his building. On the soldier’s shoulder, he saw a Star of David. Giorgio didn’t speak any English, but wanted desperately to communicate with this man whom he recognized as an ally. So he started singing, at first quietly and then loud enough so that the soldier could hear him. He sang the melody of the Hatikvah, a popular Hebrew song that would later become the national anthem of Israel.

  The soldier recognized the song and burst forth in an excited flurry of English that Giorgio did not understand. Giorgio dashed downstairs to find his father and bring him to street level. His father and the soldier began to speak together in Yiddish. Giorgio watched them happily, a feeling of relief washing over him for the first time in years. “For me, this was the end of the war,” he said later.

  The Bartalis heard the news of liberation on August 11 with the ringing of the bells atop the Bargello, the “people’s palace” in central Florence. Once the partisan scouts were certain the streets were safe for civilians, they sent a courier, a young woman, to spread the good news to Florentines installed in the town hall and at a few other key locations. Sprinting through the city, the courier was seized by simultaneous joy and anguish, capturing the tense mood of the city:

  My heart seemed to want to burst, I felt desperate and happy, down and full of energy. In front of the lowered blinds of the Bizzarri Chemist I stopped, lost: the bell of the Bargello, silent for four years, had rung out once, and in that silence seemed to be magic; there it was again, a second time, I lifted my eyes up and another miracle happened: slowly on the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio the tricolor [Italian flag] rose. I knelt down crying on the pavement while one by one the shutters in the square opened wide, a woman from a low window shouted to ask me:

  “Have they gone?”

  “We’re free, free,” I answered, sobbing and opening my arms.

  In Assisi, the celebrations had started earlier, and its normally staid residents rejoiced with fervor. When the first Allied tanks rolled into the town on June 17, 1944, the bells of all the churches and monasteries started tolling. From the basilica of St. Francis, a monk started playing “God Save the King” on the organ, and the music wafted throughout the city. On Via San Paolo, an old Fascist poster displaying one of Mussolini’s slogans had been ripped down. In its place, a new banner, crafted by Luigi and Trento Brizi, had been lifted: “The Jews of Italy have Italian blood, Italian souls, and Italian genius.”

  As the wave of liberation slowly traveled toward the northern borders of the nation, the bittersweet legacy of the war started to become more fully apparent. Italian Jews and their foreign counterparts emerged from the shadows and began to understand just how much a small group of heroic Gentiles had helped them. In Florence and its environs, an estimated 330 Jews had been saved by the efforts of Cardinal Dalla Costa and his associates. Another estimated three hundred Jews had been saved in Assisi and Perugia. Gino Bartali had sheltered the Goldenberg f
amily and had transported critical documents between Tuscany and Umbria (if Gino or Dalla Costa kept a record of how many identity documents Gino carried, neither of them ever told anyone, so this figure remains unknown).

  The news of these rescues, however, was inevitably leavened by sadness as a fuller picture emerged of all those who had perished. By the end of the war, some fifteen percent of the Jewish community in Italy had been killed. Compared with other countries in Europe where the German occupation had started much earlier, the death toll was significantly smaller. Nevertheless, it couldn’t help but evoke uncomfortable questions for those willing to consider them. In little more than eighteen months, nearly seven thousand Jews had perished, including the Goldenbergs’ cousins, the Kleins. Although the primary architects of this murderous campaign had been German, they had been more than ably helped by a small group of committed Fascists and a larger segment of the population that was willing to abet the crime with its silence.

  The story of how it had all happened would remain untold for several decades. Instead, Italians in liberated Italy would try to put the past behind them and focus during those final months of the war in Europe on securing provisions and slowly starting their lives anew. Gino was no different. Hoping to restart his career, he tried to cobble together enough new bike supplies so that he could start racing again. Unfortunately, few in Tuscany had any of the necessary equipment to sell him. Frustrated, Gino resigned himself to making a trip all the way to Milan on an old bicycle.

  When he got to the city, Gino was startled to come across the corpses of Mussolini and one of his lovers, strung up by their ankles in a gas station in Piazzale Loreto. Below, thousands of Italians gawked at the executed leader who had ruled their nation for over twenty years. “It was an obscene spectacle, a savage testimony of the cruelty of the times,” Gino said later. In that moment he simply tried to avoid looking at the frozen gaze of the gruesome suspended cadavers. This is not the Italy I dreamed of for myself and for my family, Gino thought. Wearily, he soon made his way home to Florence. As the war in Europe drew to a close six weeks later, Gino would join his countrymen in the monumental task of rebuilding, ever haunted by all that had been lost.

  An autographed card given to Giorgio Goldenberg by Gino Bartali during one of his wartime visits to Fiesole. (photo credit i1)

  Gino, Adriana, and Andrea Bartali, circa spring 1943. (photo credit i2)

  Jean Robic wins the 1947 Tour de France. (photo credit i3)

  Louis Bobet. (photo credit i4)

  The Goldenberg family, saved by Gino Bartali: Elvira, Giorgio, Tea, and Giacomo.

  The Goldenberg family in 2011: Giorgio (top center) and his wife, with their married children, his late sister Tea’s married children, and all their respective grandchildren. (photo credit i5)

  Gino Bartali on the cover of an Argentinean sports magazine after his 1938 Tour de France victory. (photo credit i6)

  Father Pier Damiano stands by the monastery door where he saw Gino Bartali enter to meet with Father Rufino Niccacci during World War II. (photo credit i7)

  In the family print shop in Assisi where he once manufactured false identity documents, Trento Brizi showcases some of his printing equipment to Dave Catarious and Harry Waldman of the Graphic Arts Association. (photo credit i8)

  Gino Bartali during a trip to Argentina, circa December 1951. (photo credit i9)

  Gino Bartali in his eighties. (photo credit i10)

  Part III

  10

  Ginettaccio

  Gino Bartali and another cyclist enjoy a smoke.

  (photo credit 10.1)

  IN THE MONTHS FOLLOWING the liberation of Florence in August 1944, Gino finally started to sift through the rubble of his life. Thirty years old, he had a wife and a three-year-old son to support, not to mention two aging parents. Like many of his fellow cyclists, Gino had burned through his savings during the war, when there was no chance of drawing income from the sport. “What we had earned from ’35 to ’40 had gone up in smoke,” he explained. On a deeper level, the physical hardship of this era had changed him. It was not just the prizes he might have won during his prime years as an athlete—the Tour was canceled between 1940 and 1946, and the Giro between 1941 and 1945—but the war itself had scarred Gino. “I think that all that time, more than just lost, is to be thought of as a negative force,” he explained. “You feel like you have gotten much older than if you could have led a normal life.”

  If Gino felt old, he looked even older. His thick, wavy hair had thinned and receded well beyond his temples, and his forehead had become permanently creased with leathery furrows. His eyes were sunken, emphasizing his nose, which seemed chiseled out of rock with rough strokes. He was just easing into his thirties, but could have passed for a man at least a decade older.

  Although Gino had not earned anything from cycling for years, he knew that he couldn’t start over in a new job. He had no trade or education, and he feared the financial hardship that his father had endured as a day laborer. “He taught me that poverty tastes bitter when you’re twenty, and feels like salt in an open wound when you’re forty,” Gino said. If he was to build a new life for himself and his family, he had to race.

  Banding together with a small group of fellow cyclists, he started traveling around the country contacting other racers and staging small races. Few had cars or trailers to carry their equipment, so they made their way “like clowns in a traveling circus,” in one cyclist’s banged-up old truck that could hold ten riders and their bikes. The scenes that awaited them on the road were heartrending. In villages, locals wore the remnants of discarded military khakis; nearby cemeteries brimmed with the freshly dug graves of the war dead.

  Gino and his fellow racers traveled from sports club to sports club looking for any and all cyclists willing to race against them. But as the country reeled from the physical destruction of World War II and debilitating postwar inflation, it was a challenge to find the tifosi, those fervent Italian fans who had grown up following the races. “The triumphant years of the prewar period—the championships, the Giro d’Italias, the hard-earned wins—were far away. It seemed like they had been lost in that deafening uproar that had shattered nature and souls,” said Gino. “People had forgotten about us. They had other things on their minds, and those who still followed sports considered our generation already ‘old.’ So we had to struggle a great deal to make our comeback.”

  They survived on prizes that were as ad hoc as the races themselves. The victors won chickens, pigs, furniture, wine, and—most useful of all—cash, gathered in a hat from fans along the route. Racers often shared the spoils of their victories with their teammates, families, or even hometowns. During one competition, Gino arranged to be paid with gas pipes. Bombs had destroyed many of the gas lines in Florence, so Gino asked for pipes if they won to donate to a gas company in Florence. “We were all really hard up,” he said.

  In the rush to start competing again, however, he greatly underestimated how much racing fitness he had lost. During the first event after the war, a medium-length race in a small industrial town near Florence called Prato, Gino had to make a humiliating withdrawal, because he was physically unable to complete the course.

  This disappointment and others that followed it wounded Gino, cementing his deeply felt sense of injustice that the war had deprived him of his best racing years. This latent feeling of indignation started transforming Gino, already prone to a lack of diplomacy, into an acerbic personality who complained and criticized, and was liable to flare up over any slight, perceived or real. In short order, this testy temperament earned him his most lasting sobriquet—Ginettaccio, or “Gino the Terrible”—from reporters and fans who would learn to expect his barbs.

  But in that moment, after the race in Prato, Gino was stung by paralyzing frustration. “I ended up completely demoralized. Any kind of dignified resumption of our activity seemed impossible,” he said. When he returned home, he pedaled back up the familiar road to
the cemetery in Ponte a Ema to visit Giulio’s grave. As he sat there for a long while, he was reminded of the promise he had made soon after Giulio died—to honor his memory by becoming a champion. “Then I found my strength again,” he said. “I had a wife, a baby, and parents. I had to keep going for them.”

  While competitive cyclists like Gino were grappling to find their legs after the war, the bicycle had become more important to everyday life than ever before. People biked to get food, share news, and find work. In the early months, when civilian manufacturing was still nearly nonexistent and public transit was in disarray, bicycles were often the only way to travel significant distances on roads that had been pulverized by the violence of war. They were ubiquitous, “the inseparable companion of the peasant, the worker, the professional, the clerk, the student, the housewife, and our rosy-cheeked girls,” as one journalist described them.