LITMIR.BIZ

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6

      I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

      —Alan Watts

      My father met the heart of historic Florence like a child walking into kindergarten for the first time. He was cautious but curious. We took a right out of the hostel courtyard and joined the stream of people surging down the street. A neatly dressed man wearing a skinny tie pedaled a rickety antique cruiser that clinked over the cobbles like a ring of keys. A church bell tolled hollowly in the distance while an ambulance screamed down a nearby side street. We glimpsed into gelato bars, cafes, and leather shops that smelled like freshly oiled baseball mitts. Just ahead, through the telescoping buildings, we could make out the hulking archway of the Piazza della Repubblica.

      “When was the last time you were in Europe?” I asked.

      “Guess it must’ve been before you were born,” he said. “So what’s that, thirty-one years ago? Mom and I went to Paris and London back in the eighties for a couple weeks. I loved Paris.”

      “Why didn’t you ever go back?”

      “Once you came along . . . everything changed.”

      We entered the piazza, where the crowd swirled in a giant eddy. Panhandlers pinballed from person to person, begging for money. Tourists trailed closely behind their guides with cameras swinging from their necks. Artists sketched caricatures under umbrellas while onlookers lingered behind their easels. A musician plucked at a guitar. At the center of it all was a carousel, spinning this pulsing scene into a mesmerizing frenzy that shook me out of my jet lag.

      A decade earlier I traveled here during college. Back then, I was utterly green to backpacking and rarely strayed from the well-worn tourist trail. I clung desperately to my Lonely Planet guidebook. I once spent an entire day in a stiflingly hot bus in search of a fabled nude beach that I’d read about in Lonely Planet. When I arrived with visions of bare naked beauties dancing in my head, the closest thing I found to a nude beach was a homeless man crapping in the sand. Alas, I hadn’t yet discovered that the most memorable moments while traveling are stumbled upon when you’re not looking for them.

      We continued across the piazza until the Duomo stopped Dad dead in his tracks. “Wow . . . what’s that?”

      The Duomo—formally known as the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore—was such an arresting sight, all at once massive and painstakingly ornate. We fell in line with the thousands of others, heads cocked back and mouths agape. We were all technically tourists, but my father and I didn’t feel that way. We couldn’t relate to the flocks of people trailing tour guides with flags in their hands from their respective countries. Nor did we see ourselves in the families bumbling around with selfie sticks, their backpacks worn across their chests and passports stapled to their bodies. We were on a mission here in Italy. We were here to find our roots, to honor my grandfather, and to understand how the history of this place fit into our family lore. Nevertheless, the Duomo forced us to forget about all that for a moment and simply marvel at its grandeur.

      We passed by cafe tables with their bright umbrellas and around to the towering town hall of Palazzo Vecchio, and then up to the Loggia dei Lanzi with its graphic sculptures of beheadings, rapes, and clubbings. Dad studied the replica of Michelangelo’s David. It was impossible not to think about the history of this city. It wafted off of every square inch of architecture and lurked around every corner. Though the Medicis, Michelangelo, and the Old Masters of the Renaissance came to mind, I also thought about the darker history that unfolded on these streets not so long ago.

      Almost exactly eighty years earlier, Benito Mussolini courted Adolf Hitler in hopes of making him an ally. Il Duce, as Mussolini was known, saw his Italian countrymen as the chosen race and wanted to bring about the second coming of the Roman Empire. To do so, he thought he would need the backing of German might. So in May of 1938 he threw Hitler a parade, leading him into this piazza in a grand celebration. Before leaving the States, I had pulled up footage of this infamous spectacle online. In the black-and-white newsreels, tens of thousands of Italians lined this piazza, cheering wildly as Hitler waved from a convertible. Mussolini had spent months turning Florence into a Nazi tribute. Bridges, buildings, and historic landmarks were laboriously restored by teams of high-profile architects. Nazi banners were hoisted up every flagpole and hung from almost every building.

      How unthinkable it was, swastikas hanging from these regal edifices. And yet the history that ultimately unfolded in these streets was infinitely more tragic than an embarrassing parade. All this was fresh in my mind, thanks to a book my father gave me before the trip.

      A FEW MONTHS BEFORE our departure, my father rang me up with a request. “Can you order a poster for me?” he asked. “It’s a cycling photo from the forties called ‘The Bottle,’ or something like that. You should be able to find it on your computer. I want it for my man cave.”

      Since my brother and I had moved out of our parents’ house, my father had transformed the basement into a cycling shrine. Old helmets, tattered bike seats, warped wheels, and dented water bottle cages were mounted to the basement walls like modern art installations. The centerpiece was a dilapidated fixie that my father had pedaled so hard for so long that the teeth to the chain ring had been literally worn away by all the torque. “Wait till you see this picture,” Dad said. “It’s going to look dynamite down there.”

      When the poster arrived, I slipped it from its tube and unfurled it on my desk. Even without any context, the dated, black-and-white photograph instantly told a story. Two cyclists, faces twisted with fatigue, are in the throes of a grueling climb. The heat of the day radiates off their sweaty, bronze skin and soaked black hair. The scene looks so hot that the dirt on the road appears to be sizzling like spices on a skillet. Although the two men are competitors, they share a bottle of water, as if they are no longer battling each other but doing everything they can just to survive.

      “Got that poster,” I told Dad over the phone. “So who are these guys?”

      “Oh, man, those are two of the greatest cyclists ever,” Dad said, his voice on the edge of exasperation. “Definitely the greatest Italian cyclists. Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali.”

      “Never heard of them,” I said. “Course my knowledge of cyclists begins and ends with Lance.”

      “Oh, man, no. Forget Lance. This was the golden age of cycling. You gotta read about these guys.”

      A couple of weeks later, when I had a chance to meet up with my father to give him the poster, he handed me a tattered paperback in return. “This book will blow your mind,” he said. “I’ve read it twice. This will get you pumped for our trip.”

      “Road to Valor by Aili and Andres McConnon,” I said, reading the cover. “Alright, I’ll check it out.” I always took my father’s book recommendations with a giant grain of salt. His most recent literary fascination was about a guy called “The Iceman” who trained himself to withstand arctic temperatures through intense meditation and breathing techniques. A few days after he took that book out of the library, my mother walked into the kitchen to catch him standing outside in his underwear in the dead of winter.

      Road to Valor appeared more promising. I recognized the man on the cover from the poster: Gino Bartali. The other man in that photograph, I learned, was Angelo Fausto Coppi. The two cyclists first met when Bartali brought Coppi onto his cycling team for the 1940 Giro d’Italia, Italy’s version of the Tour de France. But when Bartali hit a dog on the course and crashed, Coppi pedaled away with the other leaders and claimed victory. From that point on, a fierce rivalry was born between the cyclists that later split Italy into two groups of fans: the Coppiani versus the Bartaliani. For fifteen years the two cyclists traded podiums—a golden era for Italian cycling that my dad raved about.

      As I got sucked into the McConnons’ enthralling book, Bartali’s life off the bike held my fascination most. He grew up four miles outside of Florence. His father was a laborer, working in the quarries or laying brick in the city. Bartali and his brother Giulio grew up racing

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