Road to Valour

by Aili McConnon

  Even when manufacturing did recommence and major roads were repaired, cars were prohibitively expensive for everyone but the wealthiest. Three years after the war had ended, the cheapest car for sale in Italy still cost almost five times the annual salary of the average worker. (In modern terms, this would be equivalent to seeing compact cars with a price tag of nearly $150,000 instead of their actual cost of about $13,000.) In contrast, a new bicycle cost the average worker just a month’s wages and there was an extensive secondhand market where a used bike could be purchased for much less. With these economics, it comes as no surprise that in 1947 there were some 3.5 million bikes on the road in Italy and just 184,000 cars.

  One film, Vittorio De Sica’s Academy Award–winning Ladri di biciclette (released as The Bicycle Thief in the United States in 1949), best captured the centrality of the bike in postwar Italy. The film starts with the protagonist, Antonio, waiting in a long queue for jobs. When he finally gets to the front of the line, he is offered work on the condition that he has a bicycle. On his first day of employment—putting up posters around Rome for a movie that starred Rita Hayworth (herself a Bartali fan in real life, and vice versa)—his bicycle is stolen. After several fruitless efforts to recover it, Antonio makes a pathetic and failed attempt to steal a bicycle for himself.

  From the beginning to the end of the film, bicycles permeate life. They are the prerequisite for work and a way out of the endless queues of the unemployed. They are the subject of fantasy—Antonio’s son’s room is adorned with photos of the famous cyclists of the period. And they are also a spiritual symbol of the dignity to which man can aspire in his workaday life—hope and integrity fashioned from metal, gears, and rubber.

  In film and in real life, a bicycle in postwar Italy, far more than a simple means of transport, served as an anchor—a connection to the world—in the way that cars and mobile phones now unite people to one another. The bicycle was considered so integral to the lives of all Italians that stealing a bicycle was always viewed with particular severity by the judicial system, according to Oscar Scalfaro, a former Italian president and judge. Like stealing a horse in the United States or the United Kingdom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a crime punishable by imprisonment or, at times, death—stealing a bicycle in postwar Italy was not just theft; it was an act of forced isolation that stripped a man of his livelihood and exiled him from the world.

  If bicycles shaped the rhythm of everyday life in postwar Italy, it was poverty and endemic joblessness that defined its spirit. Economic coverage in the newspapers of the era was as optimistic as a retelling of the story about the plagues of Egypt. Headlines and articles were filled with jarring statistics. Six hundred thousand agricultural day laborers went on strike in the fall of 1947 in the Po Valley. Shortages made Italian gasoline three times as expensive as it was in France, and almost four times as expensive as in the United States. The unemployment rate for industrial workers in central Italy (including Tuscany) rocketed past sixty percent.

  The numbers told only part of the story. Gino and his teammates saw the face of poverty everywhere they raced. War had reduced entire city neighborhoods to rubble. Women tried to heat food over haphazard cooking fires set up in the streets. Grizzled, weary men stared somberly as they sipped coffee from old tin soup cans. In Ventimiglia, a small town in northern Italy, an American journalist was dumbfounded by the sight of a pizzeria destroyed during the war where “half-naked children crowded together on the dusty rim of the broken walls and in the holes that had been windows.”

  Florence lay in shambles. Along the Arno River, where Gino had swum as a child, sat piles of rubble, the remains of the many bridges bombed by the retreating Germans. Nearby buildings and medieval towers stood in various states of collapse and disrepair. The Jewish synagogue had also been disfigured; it was damaged while being used to store German trucks, and another part of the building was dynamited.

  In the face of such wreckage nationwide and with few opportunities for employment, some 750,000 Italians went to work temporarily in France, Belgium, and Switzerland. (Tens of thousands of other Italians would leave Italy permanently.) The work that awaited them in those countries was inevitably the most grueling—mining for coal, working in the fields or forests—and the wages tended to be low. Living in pitiable conditions and unable to speak the native languages of the countries in which they worked, many Italian workers quickly found themselves scorned by the locals—even if they had been officially invited and contracted to work by the same locals’ governments.

  Collectively, these enduring miseries, the everyday hardships and indignities suffered at home and abroad, made an already strained political situation downright volatile. Complex, emotionally charged questions shadowed every aspect of public life. What to do with the monarchy? How to craft a new constitution? What to do about individuals who had been involved in the previous Fascist government? What course would Italy take in the postwar era?

  And—perhaps most important of all—who would lead it?

  Two men emerged as viable candidates for the task. The first was Alcide De Gasperi, a severe sixty-seven-year-old former librarian whom one journalist described as “utterly honest and sincere, painfully humorless and uninspiring.” He was the leader of the Christian Democrats, a large centrist party that was allied closely with the Roman Catholic Church. He was also friends with Gino, whom he had met through mutual Catholic acquaintances in the 1930s. De Gasperi’s rival for the job was Palmiro Togliatti, the heavyset leader of the Italian Communist Party, who was so charismatic that even an otherwise unsympathetic, right-wing American magazine acknowledged him as “Italy’s most brilliant politician.”

  In the months that followed the war’s end, both men promised the public that they would restart Italian industry and put the nation back to work. While their immediate aims were similar, their international alliances stood in stark contrast. Along with the Catholic Church, the Christian Democrats were closely allied with the United States. The Communist Party, although officially not antireligious, was more closely aligned with the Soviet Union. With these associations as a backdrop, perhaps the biggest question of all facing Italy was not about domestic policy, but which side the country would pick in the emerging Cold War. The decision taken would “influence the course of European history for perhaps a hundred years,” in the words of one prominent American reporter.

  All of this would come to a head as Italians prepared for their first free parliamentary elections in a quarter of a century. They would endure a bitter political campaign that lasted almost half a year, and on April 18, 1948, they would make their choice.

  Gino’s appetite for politics had only decreased during the war, and as competitive cycling started up again, he was relieved that government officials no longer questioned his every decision. “Now I didn’t have to worry about the authorities,” he said. “I could train and follow the methods that I judged to be the most opportune, based on my experience and the advice of my doctors and coach.”

  The 1946 season kicked off with the traditional season-opener, the Milan–San Remo classic. Despite racing over treacherous war-damaged roads and riding through a critical mountain pass in complete darkness because electricity had not yet been reconnected, the race was declared a success. A few months later the Giro was resurrected after its six-year hiatus (few counted the Fascist version of several one-day races during the war as a real Giro). Nicknamed Il Giro della Rinascita, or “the Giro of Rebirth,” the race also reignited the rivalry between Gino and his former teammate Fausto Coppi. Gino headed into the race, buoyed by the happy personal news of the birth of his second son, Luigi.

  Fans hoping to see a suspenseful battle of the cycling titans were not disappointed. The pink leader’s jersey changed shoulders many times, and Coppi wore it heading into the final stage. The winner did not emerge until the final minutes, when, in an upset of sorts, Gino managed to beat Coppi by a scarce forty-seven seconds. He felt indomitable. “Y
es, I had become Ginettaccio,” he said, “but ‘Giant of the Mountains’ was a nickname no one would yet take away.”

  But by the end of the second postwar season and the beginning of the third, Gino was coming up short more and more often. Journalists and fans took note. The inconsistency in his performance couldn’t easily be explained by a fluke injury here or a bad race there. Instead, it was something far more perplexing. His imminent decline as an athlete seemed manifestly obvious when he would wheeze in at the end of one race. But then he would suddenly find his stride again in the next competition, and muster up a measure of the old fire.

  The most obvious culprit for this erraticism seemed to be some rather dubious medical advice from his physician at the time. In 1946, Gino began to notice a change in how his heart was behaving at the beginning of races. Specifically, he felt that it was beating more regularly but less frequently than it had before the war. “I was slow to get in gear, my body was numb,” Gino explained, like a “racing car” with a cold motor. Although the change in the regularity of his heart rate is still puzzling, we now know that a low resting heart rate is a perfectly normal side effect of prolonged cardiovascular endurance training, and starting more slowly comes naturally for many cyclists with aging. Nevertheless, Gino was worried about how it was affecting his ability to race, and so he visited his doctor. Amazingly, the doctor shared his concern and encouraged him to have a couple of cups of coffee and a few cigarettes before every race to speed up his heart. With such official sanction, Gino was soon drinking as many as twenty espresso coffees a day. Smoking in turn evolved from being a pre-race pick-me-up to a reliable salve for all his anxieties. “The cigarette that I had avoided for so many years ended up being my most faithful companion in certain moments. For racers like me, a mouthful of smoke offers a brief and modest consolation during the difficulties of a race or during moments of melancholy in our solitary life as vagabonds of the street—surrounded always by an immense crowd, but always essentially alone with our thoughts and with our worries,” he said later. Along with an emerging penchant for staying out long into the night with friends, consuming copious amounts of Chianti, Gino was slowly abandoning his prewar asceticism, and was living “more of a life of a normal person than of a cyclist,” as one teammate described it.

  Another possible explanation for his poor results was his training. After the war, Gino was toying with a few new ideas in his preparation. On at least one occasion he tried training at night, riding in front of the family car while his wife drove behind him and illuminated the roads with the car headlights. He also began experimenting with another novel tactic—rearranging his bedroom furniture so that his bed was aligned exactly on the north-south axis. He was convinced this would better protect him from what he believed were the pernicious effects of magnetic waves.

  By and large, however, he followed essentially the same strategy he had used in his twenties. He built up the length of his training rides over the season until he was out riding nearly every day, and covering as many as 250 miles per training session. In contrast, modern training theory suggests that adding recovery days into the mix would have served an older athlete such as himself much better. An older racer is affected most by a loss in his explosive, top-end ability for hard accelerations rather than by any decrease in his overall endurance. In fact, some evidence suggests that muscular endurance improves to an extent with age as the muscles become more efficient at processing lactic acid and long years of training increase the number, size, and kinematic activity of the mitochondria, the energy plants in muscle fibers. Thus, Gino was right to build up some level of distance in his regimen, but then a focus on shorter and more intensive rides would have better rebuilt his lost sprinting strength, that instinctual hard push that gave his attacks their teeth during climbs.

  In any case, Gino was losing—and taking the losses personally. The booing and heckling that every rider encounters began to cut him more deeply. Speaking with a journalist, he lamented how ignorant the spectators were of all the training that a cyclist undergoes to compete with the best, regardless of how he places. He called the crowds ungrateful and temperamental, offering “total glory for the winner, total indifference for the one who loses.” All of this seemed a seismic shift for the rider who had avoided criticizing spectators in the press because his popularity among them directly affected his livelihood.

  At the 1947 Giro d’Italia, the situation turned from bad to dismal. During a stage in the second half of the race, Gino zeroed in on a fan at the sidelines who taunted him with an anti-Catholic slur. Although he was the leader in the general classification at this point, on course for winning the whole competition, Gino hopped off his bike mid-race. He walked over to the fan and struck him, and then calmly mounted his bike again and rode off. He still managed to win the stage, but it would be his last day at the top. Fausto Coppi overtook him in the rankings in the next stage, and, a few days later, won the race altogether.

  Gino’s career was clearly sputtering, but that did not stop the Christian Democrats from using his name to mobilize support for their candidate, Alcide De Gasperi, as they revved up a fierce political campaign ahead of the 1948 national election. There was a certain logic to their rationale. Beyond the two men’s friendship or the promotional value of Gino’s popularity, the men had much in common. Both were devout Catholics and both were fighting very public battles against more charismatic younger opponents—a parallel so powerful that it would lead one journalist to memorably describe Gino as “De Gasperi on a bike.” He elaborated, “With a crushed face and not at all handsome, without lyrical flights or rhetoric, [Bartali] shows in pedaling, the calculated patience and tenacity that De Gasperi inspires in governing.” As the election neared, the Christian Democrats went even further and asked Gino if they could add him to the Christian Democrats’ electoral list, which meant that if they won, he would likely hold office in Rome as a deputy. Gino politely declined.

  The Catholic Church also drew on Gino’s fame as it outlined what it believed was at stake in the election. In the fall of 1947, Pope Pius XII addressed Italian Catholics gathered in St. Peter’s Square with an appeal that linked themes from Gino’s life to the Bible:

  It is time to put ourselves to the test. This difficult competition, which Saint Paul spoke about, has begun. It is a time for intense effort. The winner can be decided in an instant. Look at Gino Bartali, member of Catholic Action. Often he has earned the right to wear the much-sought-after “jersey.” You should also participate in a championship of ideas, so you can achieve a much more noble form of victory.

  The meaning of the Pope’s message was “unmistakable,” according to one Italian cultural historian. The Catholic faithful were being warned to stand guard, and be “ready to struggle for their faith against the menace of Communism just as Bartali battled his way to victory.”

  Closer to the elections, tens of thousands of lay members of Catholic Action were mobilized to get out the vote for the Christian Democrats. In cities they walked from apartment to apartment, and in the country they rode by bicycle from one isolated hamlet to the next, knocking on doors to plead with people to support their cause. A small group of clergy complemented this work by directing a moral suasion campaign.

  Dramatic films warning about a Communist victory were screened around southern Italy by trucks carrying film projectors. They offered alarming—and likely staged—scenes of what might happen if the Communists won, including images of them ransacking churches and pushing bells down from belfries. In places where few residents had ever seen a film, the production was mesmerizing.

  Some four thousand miles away, in the United States, one small group of people was watching the Italian campaign even more closely than most Italians—a new outfit called the Central Intelligence Agency. In late 1947 the CIA received its first orders from the National Security Council to carry out “covert psychological operations designed to counter Soviet and Soviet-inspired activities.” With the battle br
ewing between the Christian Democrats and the Communists, Italy represented a very high-value target in the escalating conflict that came to be known as the Cold War.

  Geography explained much of its importance to the United States. Italy was in the heart of Europe, and when it came to the flight path of a plane or a missile, Turin (in the northwest of Italy) was closer to London than it was to Brindisi (in the heel of the boot of Italy). Whoever controlled Italy had all of Western Europe at its doorstep. Naturally, members of the Italian Communist Party rejected the suggestion that they would immediately hand over all power to Stalin and the Soviet Union if they won. The Americans, however, didn’t trust them. They believed that an Italian Communist electoral victory might set up another opportunity for a Soviet coup, as had happened just months earlier in Czechoslovakia.

  Yet the task of actively influencing the outcome of a foreign nation’s elections seemed like a dangerous one, especially to the American field officers charged with carrying it out. Nevertheless, secret authorization was given for an Italian campaign that would represent the CIA’s first-ever mission. Tellingly, it was never approved by Congress and it was “illegal from the start,” according to Mark Wyatt, one of the CIA agents assigned to the task.

  Covert field operations in Italy ran a gamut of activities. The agency created forged documents, books, and leaflets, all aimed at sabotaging the Communist Party. Above all, there was cash—an estimated ten million dollars of it. Millions were funneled “into the bank accounts of wealthy American citizens, many of them Italian-Americans, who then sent the money to newly formed political fronts created by the CIA,” according to one leading American journalist. There were even provisions to prevent the IRS from raising its eyebrows about the flow of cash: “Donors were instructed to place a special code on their income tax forms alongside their ‘charitable’ donation.”