Road to Valour Read online

  But Torello’s persistence did not produce a scholar. Gino failed the first grade, and in the years that followed, the only charitable remark his teachers could muster about him as a student was that he had good personal hygiene. Still his father insisted he complete la sesta, the equivalent of sixth grade. Ponte a Ema’s schoolhouse, however, only taught up to fifth grade—so Gino would have to travel to Florence to attend his final year. “To go to Florence you need a bicycle, and a bicycle costs money,” Torello told his son. “You will have to earn it.”

  Like so many men of his era, Torello Bartali was the primary breadwinner of his family. Although his name meant “young bull” in Italian, Torello moved with the quiet ease of an old workhorse. The features of his face betrayed little about him. He always wore a beret, and a thick mustache covered the edges of his mouth, from which normally dangled a cigar. His physique was more revealing. Short and sinewy, he had a body of considerable strength.

  Torello was used to hard work, but his job stability as a day laborer did little to inspire confidence. He worked principally in the fields, and when that type of job wasn’t available, he worked in a local quarry, which mined the bluish shale used to pave the neighboring streets of Florence. When quarry work couldn’t be found, Torello worked as a bricklayer, laying the foundation for countless Florentine homes. When both of those jobs were in short supply, he went down to the Arno River to collect sand that in turn was used for making cement. And as a last resort, he picked up work extinguishing the oil-fueled street lamps at dawn. For all his efforts, a laborer like Torello earned little more than the modern equivalent of about a dollar an hour.

  Necessity forced Giulia to work as well, even if a woman’s hourly wage in that era was often less than half a man’s. In fact, money was so scarce in the Bartali household that Giulia barely made it home in time to give birth to Gino because she had hiked to a hillside convent that same morning to inquire about a maid’s position. Like Torello, she toiled for long days in the fields, tending to the crops and the vines. Though she was small and sturdy, this heavy manual labor took its toll, and she was often plagued with severe leg pains. But Giulia was as ingenious as she was resilient. After particularly punishing days, she would soak a cloth in vinegar and salt, wring it out, and hold it against her legs for five minutes. For more severe pain, she rubbed a compress of wet cigar stubs over the sore areas until the pain subsided.

  Primitive as they were, such remedies allowed Giulia to endure a workday that continued well after the sun set. After the long hours in the fields, Giulia spent her evenings earning extra money by embroidering, creating the kind of fine lacework found in the bridal trousseau of any Florentine woman of means. The work of running her household and feeding her husband and four children was balanced precariously atop her other labors. All of this added up to a hardscrabble life that paused only on Sundays, but it was hardly a unique one in Ponte a Ema or even the rest of Tuscany. In the early part of the twentieth century, Tuscan peasants worked an average of fourteen hours per day and a third more of the calendar year than Italians today.

  Torello had already given Gino more than one dressing-down about the value of a lira. When Gino would meekly take his seat at the dinner table, hair tousled from his schoolyard scuffles, he knew he could expect the usual admonishment: “Money is necessary for food and certainly not for buying books for a boy who uses them to hit his friends over the head with.” La sesta was fast approaching, and with it the need for transportation. Twelve-year-old Gino had to find a job. Though he and Giulio had helped their mother and sisters make embroidery for as long as they could remember (Gino was particularly skilled at making lace), his father believed it was time his elder boy found work of his own. Gino was too weak to begin apprenticing as a day laborer or bricklayer with his father, so Giulia decided to ask around for a simple and minimally strenuous position for her son. After some time, she found some farmers in a nearby town looking for a boy to help unravel piles of raffia, the long fibers from the leaves of certain palm trees, whose threads could be used to make ties for grapevines and delicate nursery plants. The work was easy enough, but for an energetic boy who longed to be outside with his friends, it was also an exercise in excruciating boredom. Only the promise of his very own bicycle kept Gino focused on the task at hand.

  Consumed by his new goal, Gino was mesmerized by bikes wherever he saw them. But Ponte a Ema was not a worldly place. No races ever passed through town. The only groups of men cycling together that Gino saw were bricklayers on their way to work in Florence. They would ride by on their bicycles, many of them without pedals, which were too expensive to replace once broken. “A lot of time was still to pass before I set eyes on a sports paper and before I knew about the existence of a world in which you could go racing in a pair of black shorts and a colored jersey.” Still, he kept working to earn money for his own bicycle, and in the meantime he snuck in rides on his father’s, slowly acquainting himself with the vehicle that would change his life.

  The bicycle had been born more than a century before Gino, but the earliest versions were little more than wooden horses mounted on wheels. In 1790 in Paris, a Frenchman rode one of these devices in a rudimentary race around the Champs-Élysées. In the late 1830s, a Scottish blacksmith named Kirkpatrick Macmillan experimented with building a hobbyhorse with pedals so that a rider did not need to push off the ground to propel the machine forward. This pricey new amusement quickly became popular in North America. Oliver Wendell Holmes describes the years before the Civil War in the United States when “some of the Harvard College students who boarded in my neighborhood had these machines they called velocipedes, on which they used to waddle along like so many ducks.”

  The next innovation came from France with the invention of a crank to power the front wheel. But this edition didn’t last long, and its nickname “the boneshaker” explains why: it was excruciating to ride for any great distance. The British followed the French with their own design, characterized by its ludicrously oversized front wheel and tiny back wheel. As one writer described the high-wheeler, “The rider was a stratospheric eight feet off the ground, making a first encounter distressingly akin to sitting atop a moving lamppost.” By the late 1800s, with the invention of the inflatable tire and its inner tube, which provided more cushioning and safety for the rider, the modern bicycle emerged. In 1885 the first Italian bicycle manufacturer, Bianchi, was founded in Milan, following the creation of the Touring Club Ciclistico Italiano a year earlier in the same city. Improved manufacturing methods and higher wages for factory workers in Italy and abroad would allow bicycles to become more widely accessible to the average laborer. In 1893 a French worker had to toil for the equivalent of about twenty-three weeks to earn enough to buy a new bike. By 1911, thanks to rising wages and falling prices, that number dropped to just five weeks of work. In Italy, Catholic and Socialist organizations made it even easier for people to start riding by founding cycling clubs and renting out bicycles to their working-class members.

  In next to no time, Europe’s busiest boulevards and avenues were invaded by bicycles. At a moment when most average workers had few options for efficient personal transit in cities, the bicycle opened up a new world of opportunity—and speed. H. G. Wells captured the simultaneous exhilaration and terror of riding a bike in his book The Wheels of Chance: “A memory of motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they seem to go. You ride through Dreamland on wonderful dream bicycles that change and grow; you ride down steeples and staircases and over precipices; you hover in horrible suspense over inhabited towns, vainly seeking for a brake your hand cannot find, to save you from a headlong fall; you plunge into weltering rivers, and rush helplessly at monstrous obstacles.”

  Not everyone was as enthusiastic as Wells, and several experts lambasted this new form of transit. A prominent French doctor and scientist claimed the bicycle posed serious health risks, especially if ridden after sexual intercourse. He was particularly conc
erned about women riding bikes because cycling could “procure genital satisfactions, voluptuous sensations” or even “sportive masturbations.” Other leading authorities, including a famous criminologist, fretted that the physical exertion required to propel a bike could “stimulate criminal and aggressive tendencies.”

  Ultimately, few paid any heed to such alarming health warnings. People of all walks of life became cyclists, and as they did, the bicycle itself rose to a golden age of cultural prominence that would last for nearly half a century. In doing so, it became such a part of everyday life that it was impossible to miss. Cyclists enjoyed jaunts around town and complained about the traffic and accidents. Expensive advertisements filled newspapers with pictures of the latest cycling accessories, and politicians instituted bicycle taxes to raise revenues. There were even reports of desperate sons who stole their mothers’ bicycles, and of notable figures assassinated while cycling. A once-newfangled apparatus had become a familiar staple, a convenient and economical mode of transport for adults the world over. And for young boys, a shiny new bike reigned supreme at the top of every wish list.

  Gino spent the summer before the sixth grade with his eye firmly on the prize. “From that pile of raffia that covered me up to my knees—my good father Torello would tell me—should come a solid bicycle with which to reach Florence every day as soon as autumn came.” And so it did. At the end of the summer, Torello added some of his own money to Gino’s earnings, and Anita and Natalina contributed from the nest eggs for their dowries. “I certainly wouldn’t have been able to buy a new bicycle, much less a racing bicycle,” Gino said, but he had scrounged up enough to get a rusty fourth-hand bicycle he could finally call his own. And once he did, it was all he could think about. “You can imagine my joy. The first nights I kept tossing and turning in my bed from the desire for it to be day so that I could ride it.”

  Day broke, and with it emerged a whole new world beyond the haphazard borders of Ponte a Ema. “The roads that led to us were all up-and-down, inviting routes for those who could pedal. My passion for the bike led me to use it to go to school every day with my friends from town and from other neighboring areas,” Gino explained. They would always choose the longest and most difficult roads, showing up for class with mottled faces “like a bunch of ripe apples.” In the evenings, Gino would occasionally lead his friends on adventures. As they watched him from afar, he would pedal quietly and sneak up on a member of the carabinieri or police. When he got close enough, Gino would startle the officer with a shout—and then race away laughing into the darkness before he could be caught.

  Gino’s favorite ride included a particularly steep hill nicknamed the Moccoli, Tuscan slang for “curses,” because most people couldn’t help but swear in anguish as they climbed up it. The route took Gino some six hundred yards above the south bank of the Arno River to the Piazzale Michelangelo, referred to by locals as the “balcony” of Florence. Completed in 1876, the Piazzale offered a breathtaking view of the city in all of its glory. There were the obvious landmarks like Ponte Vecchio, Florence’s most famous bridge, and the Duomo, the imposing cathedral that rises from the city’s red-roofed central area. There were also the lesser known treasures like the Jewish synagogue, built from ocher- and cream-colored stone and topped with a striking trio of cupolas, covered in copper that had turned sage green with age. All of these came together at Piazzale Michelangelo to form a panorama worthy of any museum.

  Once he arrived at the Piazzale, sweaty and with his heart heaving, Gino would savor the view as he caught his breath. Then he would hurl himself into the exhilarating ride downhill toward Florence. “When I descended into Florence the air was clear, one could smell the fresh perfume of the green from the trees and from the meadows. The water from the Arno was limpid, like the pure water of the creek in my native village, the Ema,” Gino said. After so many childhood days spent in quiet Ponte a Ema, Florence was a tantalizing hive of activity, buzzing with strange new sounds, colors, and tastes. To start, there were the men plying trades that Gino had never seen before: rag men who sold used strips of cloth for cleaning, men who mended broken umbrellas, rod men who offered to fix broken terra-cotta bowls with iron thread. In the late spring there were even men selling crickets to anyone planning to attend the popular Cricket Festival in Le Cascine park.

  On Florence’s busy streets, Gino found the city’s legendary food vendors. Pumpkin-seed sellers offered up their ever-popular treat near public gardens; other men cooked pattone, sweet loaves made from chestnut flour, and asked passersby to feel how hot their bread was. Butchers sold roventini, a mixture of fried pig’s blood and Parmesan cheese, and advertised it with an image of a pig exclaiming, “I was killed for you.” Elsewhere, farmers rode around the city on bicycles, selling lettuce and radishes, while tripe vendors built small stations on streetcorners, only to find themselves surrounded by legions of mewing cats. And perhaps most alluring for an inveterate sweet tooth like Gino’s were the perecottari, who set up stands near many of the city’s schools and sold cooked pears and apples flavored with syrup.

  For all the excitement of the city streets, nothing beckoned more than the Florentine bike mechanic’s shop where Gino’s older cousin Armando Sizzi worked. With bike frames hanging on hooks across the ceiling in various states of disrepair, it looked like a butcher’s store. But the ambience, a heady mix of bike grease, cigarette smoke, and men’s laughter, suggested something more akin to a barbershop. Although it was difficult to tell from its unassuming storefront, the shop was a veritable neighborhood institution. On a busy afternoon, it hummed with life. Serious racers, both amateurs and aspiring professionals, came in to purchase new tires and swap stories about training rides and local races. They mingled with more everyday riders, waiting for repairs, and interested locals who just stopped by to chat. With a wrench in hand, Sizzi tended to them all, exchanging jokes as he repaired broken chains and replaced damaged wheels.

  A warm-hearted and voluble man, Sizzi frequently introduced his clients and friends to his shy cousin. None of these individuals appears to have had a lasting impact on Gino—except one, a man named Giacomo Goldenberg. Goldenberg had come to Florence from Eastern Europe and he had brought with him a life story dramatically different from any Gino had encountered before.

  Giacomo Goldenberg was a hazel-eyed, bespectacled young man with hair the color of charcoal. He was born near the city of Kishinev, then a part of the Russian empire, and today a part of Moldova. Goldenberg’s family came to Italy around 1912, part of a wave of immigrants who left Eastern Europe in the wake of several attacks that scourged the Jewish communities. Although Italy was a place where Jews were fully integrated into daily life, the change in lifestyle that came with the relocation was considerable. After years of being immersed in Yiddish and Russian, they had to learn Italian from scratch and then navigate the tricky world of dialetto, or regional Italian dialects. Older immigrants had to find new jobs; children had to enroll in Italian schools and make new friends. Even food and music, the creature comforts of everyday life, changed in the land of pasta and Puccini. It all added up to a dramatic shift that left many feeling disoriented as they tried to find a place in their new country.

  Few young men rose to the challenge of building a new life in Italy as well as Goldenberg. By all accounts he embraced his adopted homeland with zeal. Within a short time after his arrival, he was fluent in Italian. He then enrolled in a course of study at an Italian university, an accomplishment out of reach even for many native Italians. When he graduated, he started working in a shop in Florence that sold textiles. Along the way, he befriended many Italian Gentiles like Armando Sizzi, who had little experience with or patience for the kind of anti-Semitism Goldenberg had witnessed in Kishinev.

  When Sizzi introduced Gino to Goldenberg around 1925, something clicked. At a time when Gino was just starting to uncover a powerful feeling of wanderlust within himself, Goldenberg was sixteen years older and perhaps the worldliest young man
Gino had ever met. He was educated, spoke multiple languages, and had traveled across the European continent in an era when most Italians of Gino’s class lived their whole lives within the city or town where they were born. Goldenberg in turn saw something appealing about Sizzi and Gino—they were the kind of welcoming spirits that turn a foreign place into a friendly one. Over an occasional chat in the shop or perhaps a bowl of pappardelle or risotto, this shared curiosity was forged into a common bond of friendship and mutual esteem.

  After a couple of years, Goldenberg would leave Florence and move to Fiume, a port town in northeastern Italy, where he would marry a baker’s daughter and start a prosperous trade importing lumber. Still it was undeniable that a solid foundation of friendship had been formed.

  Neither Goldenberg nor Sizzi nor Gino knew it yet, but time would reveal it as one of the most important relationships of their lives.

  Beneath the enticing, cosmopolitan bustle of this adult world that Gino was just beginning to discover, ominous forces lurked. On an autumn night in 1925, Gino listened carefully as his father, Torello, handed him various Socialist papers and books and gave him a stern warning: “Politics is a trap. Remember that. Keep your distance.”

  Torello Bartali urged the boy to go and hide the pile of materials in the attic. “Put it in a corner where no one will find it,” his father commanded. From the somber expression in Torello’s eyes and the strain in his voice, Gino knew he was being entrusted with an important task.

  Torello had reason enough to feel anxious. Though he was a day laborer and hardly prominent in political circles, he had been involved with the Italian Socialist Party and campaigned locally for laborers’ rights at a time when Mussolini’s Italy was becoming a frightening place for anyone who dared to speak out against him. Soon after he came to power in 1922, Il Duce, as Mussolini was known, moved quickly to shut down the opposition, particularly those who were vocal about their dissent in the press. In short order, he issued various decrees that made it dangerous for journalists to write freely, and created a daunting atmosphere for any who questioned Fascism more broadly. Midway through 1924, a prominent Socialist named Giacomo Matteotti suggested in Parliament that the Fascists had rigged a recent election. Days later, Matteotti was kidnapped and killed. His death shocked Italians throughout the country.