Part II
6
Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa with Gino and Adriana Bartali on their wedding day, November 14, 1940.
(photo credit 6.1)
AFTER WINNING CYCLING’S HIGHEST honor, Gino planned to round out his best season to date by capturing the 1938 World Championship title in Holland. The race started a few weeks after he finished in France, and should have been a final feather in his cap after his Tour victory. Instead he suffered an embarrassing loss. He blamed it on a bad team strategy and various bike problems, but the defeat was so humiliating that one secret spy report speculated that Gino had lost on purpose to deny the Fascists a victory and get back at them for their hostility toward Catholic Action.
The spy was wrong. Gino was too proud to cede victories, and he was furious that people could now contest his status as the best cyclist in the world. A few days later he returned home to Italy and encountered even more blowback from fans. Gino was competing in a one-day cycling event in Milan that consisted of several track events. When he rode out into the velodrome for the warm-up, he proudly wore the yellow Tour jersey he had fought so hard to win for his Italian countrymen. The spectators, however, booed him loudly and produced a deafening, shrill noise. Bianchi, the rival of the Legnano team (for whom Gino raced in Italian competitions), had handed out whistles, encouraging people to blow them at Gino for disgracing Italy at the World Championships. Gino bought his own whistle to blow back at his hecklers. “But the noise of them en masse was terrible,” he said.
In a fit of anger, Gino ripped off his yellow jersey and screamed at those sneering at him, “Milanese, you are not sportsmen!” He raced wearing his Legnano jersey and won every event in which he competed, even earning himself grudging applause by the end of the night. Despite the wins, however, this experience with fickle fans seared itself in Gino’s memory. “The pedestal of fame is neither very comfortable, nor is it very secure,” he concluded.
Gino kept competing, and the final races of the 1938 season drew big crowds as they always had of Italians who were enchanted by the “bronzed faces bent over handlebars grimacing with effort, legs that pedal at a dizzying loom … people eating while pedaling; a medley of shouts, calls and horns, photographers climbing on the roofs of cars [and] rapid motorcyclists with warriors’ helmets.”
Yet as normal life and the world of races continued in Italy, serious changes were afoot for the country’s minority Jewish community. In Fiume, where Gino’s friend Giacomo Goldenberg lived with his wife and two children, the first tremor was felt just after the last sun-kissed days of summer.
On a quiet morning in early September 1938, Goldenberg’s six-year-old son, Giorgio, set out for his first day of school. He had endured his mother’s fruitless attempts to tame his squirrel’s nest of curls for the big day, and his uniform was a starchy reminder that the carefree days of summer were over. After he left the spacious villa that his family shared with their cousins, the Kleins, he kept tugging at the itchy fabric as he trotted toward the schoolhouse. But the pleasant flutter of first-day anticipation made a little discomfort bearable. The classroom would be a disappointing change from the seaside resort where Giorgio and his family had spent their August holidays, but he would finally get to see many of his friends again.
When the schoolhouse came into view, Giorgio bounced a little on his feet and scanned the yard for the nearest classmate he could dart over to for a quick game of tag or hopscotch before the bell rang. Instead, he stopped short. Near the entryway, a teacher stood with a uniformed police officer and the school principal. Giorgio eyed the trio curiously as he headed toward the familiar faces of his schoolmates who were lining up to go inside. He was promptly distracted by the skinny arms of friends flung warmly over his shoulders and the excited jostling that ensued. His attention was not diverted for long. Smiling absentmindedly at the other boys’ jokes and laughter, he kept glancing back at the teacher, the policeman, and the principal by the door. He was alarmed and confused to find that as they quietly conferred with one another, they were looking unmistakably at him. Bewildered, Giorgio tucked himself behind the other kids and followed them toward the entrance. He saw the teacher move toward him and instinctively kept his head down, lifting it only when he felt her hand on his shoulder, separating him from his friends. One by one, the teacher pulled aside all the Jewish students who were registered to attend the school. When she had finished, the police officer addressed the small group that had formed. Speaking matter-of-factly, he announced that as a result of a new law, they had been permanently expelled. With that, he forbade them from ever entering the building again. Giorgio watched his friends file in for classes as he gripped his satchel tightly in his small hand and his face grew hot with shame. As he and the other Jewish children were ushered toward the gates, he blinked back prickly tears, stunned and utterly disoriented.
In the evening, Giorgio recounted the day’s events to his father. It was a scene that would play out in many homes as Jewish children across the nation discovered that they had been banned from state schools. A good number of families would react to this new regulation with surprise; it represented such a sharp shift from past Fascist policy that it was hard to think of it as anything but a temporary aberration. Even in Nazi Germany, Jewish children were still permitted to attend public schools in September 1938. Other parents were more resigned, having anticipated that something like this would follow the Racial Manifesto, which had come out in July of that year. Still others reacted with angry confusion, astonished that a community that had made such sizable contributions to Italian government and culture was now being targeted.
In quick succession, the Fascist Grand Council, a quasi-legislative body that served under Mussolini, approved a series of laws that restricted Jews in almost every facet of their lives. Those like Giacomo Goldenberg, who were born elsewhere and had become citizens after 1919, were summarily stripped of their citizenship and declared foreigners. Italianborn Jews were expelled from a variety of professions and banned from owning real estate above a fixed value. Alongside these more dramatic restrictions, the Racial Laws unleashed scores of small humiliations that revealed themselves over the coming weeks and months. Signs declaring “No Entry to Jews and Dogs” started appearing in certain gathering spots throughout cities and towns, particularly in the north. Elsewhere, local parks, skating rinks, and cafés became off limits. Even those who died were targeted, as it became difficult to publish Jewish obituaries. The shock of these measures was overwhelming. One Italian Jew who lived through it described the experience succinctly: “We went from the stars to the stables.”
As chaos reigned in the Jewish community, little changed for most Italian Gentiles, who went about their daily lives as they always had. Gino was no different. He started the 1939 season with fierce determination and became fervid in his quest to reclaim his dominance in cycling. The first place to do so was the race that meant most to his countrymen: the Giro. But a string of unlucky tire punctures quashed that aspiration. His next conquest should have been the 1939 Tour de France. As a returning champion he was a prime contender. But Gino was dealt another blow by Mussolini’s regime when Italy abstained from participating in the 1939 Tour as a result of increasingly hostile relations with France. Gino was robbed of the chance to defend his title. He could scarcely accept it. The government had meddled in his career before, but taking the whole country out of contention was government interference on an altogether larger scale. After a quick rise to the top of the sport at such a young age, this string of losses and disappointments devastated Gino. He started scrambling to find someone or something that could help him win again.
He found who he was looking for at a regional race in 1939 in Piedmont, in northern Italy. His name was Fausto Coppi and he was a “reed-thin lad” who looked “more like a thin, starving goat than a cyclist,” according to his coach. There was something delicate, almost intellectual, about Coppi’s pointed features next to Gino’s boxer’s face, surprising given that Coppi had grown up in a family of poor farmers near Turin. A promising young cyclist, he raced under the auspices of a blind and obese coach who grabbed his charges by the scruffs of their necks to assess whether they had pushed themselves hard enough during their training. Coppi was but nineteen years old—five years younger than Gino.
The Tuscan had met Coppi at a small race in Arezzo, but it was in Piedmont that he first witnessed his strength. On the suggestion of his Tour coach, Girardengo, Gino had let Coppi attack first during the climb. During some point in that attack, Coppi’s chain fell off. Gino made a break and won the race. At the finish line, he discovered that Coppi had managed to beat back a strong field of competitors to place third. Impressed, Gino encouraged his team’s directors to sign the young cyclist. Coppi joined the team that night.
Confident in the group of riders supporting him, Gino dedicated the entire winter to preparing for the 1940 Giro. He pored over the route map and began hatching a strategy on how to win. When the weather improved, he was out on his bicycle targeting his weakest areas, such as his sprints. Soon after, he started scouting parts of the race. As he visited different parts of the course, he carried out his newest reconnaissance strategy of building a list of local restaurants and innkeepers that he could call up to get more accurate information about local weather and road conditions during the race. All this preparation quickly yielded results. In the spring of 1940, Gino launched a blistering sprint during the day-long race from Milan to San Remo and won it. A month later he won the Tour of Tuscany. By the time the Giro rolled around in May 1940, Gino seemed unbeatable. Indeed, the first stage could hardly have been smoother. After setting out from Milan, he was the picture of confidence and crossed the finish line in Turin right after the stage winner.
In the second stage, catastrophe crept up on him. The peloton had set out for Genoa. As the riders wove their way along the mountain roads, a dog darted out onto the race course. Gino crashed into it and was thrown from his bike. When he landed, he was seized by a violent, throbbing pain in his leg. Still he managed to get back up and finish the stage. In the evening, a doctor revealed that he had severely strained his muscle and advised he withdraw from the Giro. Gino refused, but soon realized that he had no chance of winning. The race was wide open again. Coppi, Gino’s supporting rider and a first-time competitor at the Giro, rode brilliantly into this vacuum and won. Gino was dumbfounded. He had just recently risen to the top of the sport, only to be supplanted by a rider he had hand-picked for his team.
Years later, when Coppi and Gino were pitted against each other in the biggest sporting rivalry Italy had ever seen, this first match-up would be remembered and described in mythic terms. Among the coppiani—Coppi’s fans—it would be recalled as the archetypal moment when the brave apprentice first challenged his master. To the bartaliani, spurred on by Gino’s exaggerated accounts of how he had supported Coppi, it was a moment of nearly messianic sacrifice as the legendary champion forswore his own prospects to propel his younger teammate forward. In June 1940, however, neither Gino nor Coppi had much time to think about it. A day after the Giro finished, Benito Mussolini walked out onto a balcony overlooking the Piazza Venezia in central Rome and announced that Italy had entered the war against England and France. Gino was devastated: “A great tragedy was to befall us all.”
A few days after Mussolini’s declaration, a group of armed Italian policemen appeared at the home of the Goldenbergs and the Kleins in Fiume. As chance would have it, the Goldenbergs all happened to be out. The Kleins, however, were home when the officers knocked on the door. Signora Klein took one look at them from a window and immediately understood why they had come. In a flurry of panic, she instructed her older son, Aurelio, to escape before they saw him. He immediately jumped out of a second-floor window and slipped out the backyard. The police entered the house as he left and took his parents and younger brother into custody, as part of a nationwide initiative to arrest both Jewish and non-Jewish foreigners residing in Italy.
Upon arrest, people like the Kleins, who were classified as foreign nationals, were taken to the local police station. There they were held for several hours and questioned before they were transferred to a local prison. In the prisons, they were crowded into cells, often alongside common criminals. Many waited for weeks, coping with appalling sanitary conditions and vermin. Then, in small groups supervised by police, they were typically handcuffed and marched through city streets to trains and taken to internment camps.
It remains a mystery where the Kleins were sent. It’s possible that they were sent to Ferramonti di Tarsia in southern Italy. Built on a swampy, malaria-plagued site, it was Italy’s largest internment camp. It’s more plausible, however, that the Kleins ended up in one of the roughly forty smaller camps that were opened to accommodate newly arrested foreign prisoners. Most were located in central or southern Italy, but a few were in the north, in the province of Parma. Hastily set up by local authorities across Italy, these camps were established in large buildings that the authorities requisitioned, including hospices, movie theaters, and villas.
The Fascists set up one such impromptu camp near Gino’s hometown of Ponte a Ema in a grand mansion in the Tuscan hills called Villa La Selva. The internment camp was kept top secret. Gino and his neighbors never knew it existed; guards kept any outsiders from coming close. A prison for some 160 people, including a large number of foreign Jews, it was chronically overcrowded and under-supplied. Prisoners were forbidden from working and were given a daily allowance of 6.5 lire for food and other necessities. Most survived on a bowl of watery soup and 150 grams of bread per day. All of this added up to a meager existence, but it was wholly different from the experience of Jews in German-controlled camps elsewhere in Europe, where torture and mass murder became the norm. Jews interned in Italy would not be singled out for brutal cruelty for being Jewish, and they enjoyed the freedom within their camps to set up community institutions like synagogues and schools. None would be turned over for deportation before the Germans took control in the autumn of 1943, despite frequent pressure from Nazi officials.
Giacomo Goldenberg and his family would only discover what their cousins had to endure in the months and years that followed. On the day of the Kleins’ arrest in 1940, however, Goldenberg knew just one thing: he needed to get his own family out of Fiume. Packing what things they could carry, they left the next morning on a train for Florence. When they arrived, they made their way to Fiesole, a sunny village that was just a few miles northeast of the city, up on a hill with a scenic view of Florence. On a side street near the ruins of an old Roman theater, they found a landlord willing to rent them a small house.
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.’ ”
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.
Gino had his own reason to celebrate. Thinking that Italy’s involvement in the war was over, he joined thousands of young men across the country who submitted the paperwork to be discharged from the army. Thousands of others were less inclined to follow any procedures. They just discarded uniforms and arms and left military bases en masse. Many spoke about girlfriends, wives, jobs, and new aspirations, their minds struggling to imagine a world beyond their regiment. Gino was the same, thinking about Adriana, Andrea, and his hopes of seeing a full racing calendar restored. After three long years of hardship and a summer of uncertainty, nothing could weigh down the infectious air of possibility.
All this euphoria would prove cruelly brief. Unbeknownst to most in the jubilant crowds on September 8, 1943, the Allied forces had far less control of Italy than was understood. The German army seized power, and on September 12, a group of German paratroopers arrived by air in gliders and freed Mussolini from his imprisonment in a ski lodge that had been converted to a jail. He was whisked off to Berlin and made leader of a new puppet regime that would be based in northeastern Italy, near Bergamo. With Mussolini serving as the Italian face of the German occupation, Germany and Italy were declared allies once again.
Soldiers like Gino realized fortune’s wheel had abruptly turned once more. Under this new Fascist regime, a large number of the soldiers who had abandoned the army were pressed back into service. They were mobilized to help the German army repel the Allied forces. Many refused and became deserters. Some 640,000 of these men were captured and imprisoned in camps where an estimated 30,000 of them died. A small number became partisans—a group of guerrilla soldiers who helped the Allied forces wherever possible. A third group made the decision to hide from the authorities, moving to the countryside or distant villages.
With a wife and a young son to shield, Gino struggled with how to proceed. He turned to his older cousin, Armando Sizzi, a practical man with a talent for dispensing sage advice. Sizzi would only recommend one option. The Bartalis needed to disappear.
Gino gathered up his family and relocated to Nuvole, an isolated mountain village some seventy-five miles southeast of Florence in rural Perugia, where he believed few people would recognize him. He moved into the house of a farmer who had never heard of him before, and introduced himself as Armando Sizzi’s brother—Gino Sizzi. To be extra cautious, Gino avoided spending any time in the village except to attend weekly mass at the local church.
The farmer was a generous and unassuming man who asked few questions of his new visitors. He left them in peace as he tended the groves and small fields that surrounded his little house. Gino wanted to feel at ease in these new surroundings. He was far enough from Florence that he felt hidden, but still close enough that he could ride into the city as needed. As the days wore on, however, he realized that he was incapable of appreciating the idyllic serenity of the countryside. Instead, the tranquillity left his mind more time to wander and contemplate the dramatic turn of events under way in Italy:
In this little lost corner where I often refused to read the headlines of the newspapers, I passed some very sad days of idleness.… I hesitated from speaking because I believed they would double-cross me. I believed it to be terrible, unbearable, this war regime where one saw police everywhere. Events were turning worse and worse for Italy.… I felt all of this would end in a dramatic fashion, in particular for me, despite my strong reserve.
Nightfall brought him no solace. He spent long, restless hours in bed, doing little but churning over his thoughts.
During a tense moment in the village church, Gino realized that his relocation to Nuvole would be short-lived. The parish priest listened to Gino during confession and then watched him during mass. Afterward, he confronted him.
“Are you Gino Bartali?”
Instinctively, Gino started stuttering something and lied. The priest sensed his nervousness and refused to be deceived. Gino, likely realizing that the priest wasn’t the only one in the village who had recognized him in church, decided it was time for his family to leave.
They planned to travel to Siena and then Rome, but their progress was halted when one of their connecting trains was delayed and then canceled after an aerial attack. They were stranded out in rural Tuscany until a friend offered to house them. Within a few days they had returned home to Florence. Though they would continue to evacuate from time to time throughout the war, to friends’ homes elsewhere in Florence, and to nearby towns when particularly worried about bombings, they had come to a sobering realization: no place in occupied Italy was completely safe.