Curzio Malaparte
Coppi e Bartali

“In Italy, the bicycle fully belongs to the national artistic heritage, exactly like Leonardo's Mona Lisa, the dome of St. Peter's, or the Divine Comedy. It is surprising that it wasn't invented by Botticelli, Michelangelo, or Raphael.
In Italy, if you happen to say that the bicycle was not invented by an Italian, those around you will take on a gloomy look, and a mask of sadness will descend upon their faces. Ah, if in Italy you dare to say out loud, in a café or on the street, that the bicycle was not invented by an Italian, just like the horse, the dog, the eagle, the flowers, the trees, the clouds (because it was the Italians who invented the horse, the dog, the eagle, the flowers, the trees, the clouds), a long shiver will run down the spine of the peninsula, from the Alps to Etna.”
 
We speak of another Italy. Of a country that, if it ever existed, certainly no longer exists today. Today, no one gets sad about anything, let alone a bicycle. Those were different times, the bicycle was almost the only means for any movement - even from the past to the future, being a product of technology, but still requiring human sacrifice and sweat to activate it - so much so that in Italy in 1946 there were three million bicycles and 149,000 cars. Between 1947 and 1949, Malaparte lived in France, where he felt better, and it was precisely in 1949 that Le deux visages de l’Italie: Coppi et Bartali was published in the magazine “Sport Digest”.
 
“But look at it! Look at its slender, elegant, essential profile, its perfect line, as rigorous as a theorem of Euclid, simple and at the same time whimsical like the crack carved by lightning in the blue mirror of a serene sky. Look at the shape of the handlebars, curved like the antennas of an insect, and those two wheels that so much remind one of the famous circle drawn with a single stroke of charcoal, on a stone, by a little shepherd named Giotto. (Giotto was born near Florence, and thus was a compatriot of Bartali). What would it mean, the bicycle, if it were a hieroglyph carved into an Egyptian obelisk? Would it express movement or rest? The fleeing of time or eternity? I wouldn't be surprised if it meant love.”
 
It was a Sunday when all the inhabitants of Valsesia, in the cool of the early morning, set out. The young Curzio Malaparte followed that sea of people and after several hours of hard march, they reached the top of Cremosina, for a race that, being named “To the mountains, to the lakes, to the sea,” started from Turin to dive into the sea of Genoa. Around noon, upright on the pedals, a white plaster statue could be seen arriving... “Gerbi! Gerbi!”
The crowd was in delirium, everyone was shouting, the youngest threw themselves in pursuit of Gerbi and Petit-Breton to push them... the others embraced, punched each other in the stomach. Gerbi, from his bicycle, extended a hand and snatched the Italian straw hat that young Curzio Malaparte used to shield himself from the sun and pressed it onto his sweat-shining forehead. He was eight years old and along with the hat, he had lost his mind... like everyone of his generation.
 
“Gino Bartali is not like everyone else. At six years old he not only had, like others, dreams and visions: he also heard “voices”.
The good Gino gets angry if you talk to him about his good friendships, or perhaps I should define them as good neighbor relations, with the saints of heaven. Gino Bartali gets angry when you discreetly remind him of his kinship with the angels of heaven, something he always talks about, at every moment, with every pedal stroke.”
 
And Curzio Malaparte loves Gino Bartali very much, both natives of the same lands and the same Italy. He loves all the champions of cycling, since he was eight years old, but he loves Bartali more than Coppi. Bartali, like Malaparte, is human conservation, the moderate reaction to modernity - that is, experiencing modernity with brakes, values, anchors sunk in the past, in tradition, in the rehberghian prejudice and so Bartali can pedal a medium, the fruit of technique, thanking the Madonna without too much fear. Coppi is progress, he is the new, he is the engine. Coppi has no blood in his veins. No, he has gasoline. Coppi does not pray to the Madonna before races. No, before races Coppi oils his body-engine. Coppi is an unconscious Voltairian.
And there is something philosophical in this rivalry, which transcends victories and cycling, that something that can't escape the eye of Malaparte, a lively observer, a great man with heart and brain... not just skin.

"Coppi e Bartali", published by Adelphi, can be read in an hour, and it is a good way to remember those stories heard as children, those dusty Giro d’Italia that someone else had listened to years before from the radio of who knows who, placed on the ground, near the power outlet, in some workshop that smelled of grease and engine, just to be able to tell them to you. A good way to also question what we will never have again and what won't return.
 
“The bicycle is like a woman!” Serse Coppi once said, Fausto's brother. Yes, but for what reason should they hate each other? They're not riding the same bicycle.”