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The Road to San Donato. Robert Cocuzzo
Читать онлайн.Название The Road to San Donato
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781680512458
Автор произведения Robert Cocuzzo
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
On casual rides with his bike shop’s owner and his cronies, Bartali’s raw talent, even as a young boy, was undeniable. The owner pleaded with Bartali’s father that his son should compete; Bartali’s father reluctantly agreed. By the time he was twenty-two, Gino was one of the most celebrated cyclists in all of Italy. He dominated the Giro d’Italia three times and nearly became the first cyclist to win the Giro and the Tour de France in the same year. A year after his first tour loss, Bartali returned to win in commanding fashion. With a prominent Roman nose, wavy black hair, and a square jaw that looked like it could take a punch, Bartali became the era’s most famous face in all of cycling.
As his star was rising, his beloved younger brother Giulio entered the racing scene and was on track to become a champion in his own right. But while competing in a race outside of Florence in June of 1936, Giulio was hit by a car while speeding downhill in the pouring rain. He died a few days later in the hospital, with his older brother holding his hand. His father’s worst fears had come true. Devastated by the loss of his brother, Gino turned to the Catholic Church for comfort. He banished himself to a cabin by the ocean and considered quitting cycling altogether. When he returned to the bike a few months later, Bartali wore his devotion to the Catholic Church on his sleeve, earning him the nickname Gino the Pious.
BY THE FALL OF 1936, Fascism’s hold on Italy took a maniacal turn. Mussolini signed an alliance with Hitler, known as the Rome-Berlin Axis agreement, linking the two countries militarily and politically. This culminated in the Pact of Steel in 1939. Seizing on Italy’s downtrodden workers, Mussolini had come to power in the 1920s with a populist, nationalistic message, becoming prime minister in 1922 and dismantling the country’s democratic institutions. He declared himself dictator in 1925, taking the title “Il Duce” (“the Leader”).
Mussolini wanted Italy to be ruled by an elite class that would seize more land. He touted Italians as being a superior race and wanted the world to see that superiority on full display. Obsessed with physicality and athleticism, he made Italian athletes prized pawns in his grand propaganda plan. In the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, Italy took home thirty-six medals—second only to the host country, the United States. Two years later, Italy’s soccer team won the FIFA World Cup in the National Stadium of the National Fascist Party in Rome. Mussolini seized on every athletic achievement and exploited it for political gain. The propaganda press churned out story after story of Italian athletes dedicating their victories to Il Duce.
Beyond feeding his insatiable ego, Mussolini thought that if he could secure the public devotion of the athletes, the fans would be quick to follow. But he wasn’t going to leave that to chance. Mussolini and his minions controlled the athletes, telling them which races they could participate in. Corruption was rampant. If the athletes didn’t fall in line, they were reprimanded. Italy’s cycling scene had the most compelling cautionary tale.
Before Gino Bartali, the biggest name in Italian cycling was Ottavio Bottecchia, the first Italian to win the Tour de France. Bottecchia was victorious in back-to-back years, 1925 and 1926. At the time of Bottecchia’s first win, Mussolini had consolidated his power to become full-fledged dictator. Bottecchia wasn’t a fan, however, and said as much during an interview with a French journalist. A year later he was dead.
Bottecchia’s death remained shrouded in mystery for years. He was killed while on a training ride in northern Italy; his body was found with a cracked skull and a broken collarbone. His death was said to be the result of a crash, but no real investigation was conducted. Many people, including the priest who administered Bottecchia’s last rites, concluded that the Fascists had assassinated him. Decades later—on their deathbeds in the United States—two Italian immigrants, one of them the farmer who had found Bottecchia, confessed to having killed him. Regardless of who actually committed the murder, Bottecchia’s death cast a dark shadow over Italian athletes, reinforcing the fear that if you fell out of line with Mussolini and his regime, you could end up dead.
Mussolini wanted the great Gino Bartali. With the face of a bricklayer and the strength of an ox, Bartali embodied Italian might. His dominating wins in the Giro caught Il Duce’s eye, and the dictator envisioned him riding into Paris in the Tour de France wearing the yellow jersey in honor of Fascist Italy. But Bartali personally rejected Fascism. His father, a socialist who resisted the rise of Fascism when Bartali was a boy, had also witnessed his employer murdered at the hands of the Fascists. This sowed a deep distrust of Fascism in his son. Gino’s devotion to the Catholic Church trumped his political interest. Despite the ominous cloud of Bottecchia’s death, Bartali refused to wave the Fascist banner as other athletes did so readily.
Still, Il Duce wielded his control over the Italian cyclist. After failing to become the first to win the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France in the same year, Bartali had his heart set on accomplishing the feat the following season. But Mussolini, intent on putting Italy prominently on the world stage, demanded that Bartali forgo the Giro in 1938 to focus entirely on the Tour. The champion cyclist protested adamantly but ultimately conceded to this demand. After winning the Tour de France, Bartali did not even mention Mussolini in his remarks during a radio interview, let alone dedicate the win to the Fascist regime. When Bartali arrived back home in Italy, there was no parade, no grand spectacle marking his victory. In fact, there wasn’t anyone at all waiting for him at the train station. If you turned your back on the regime, the people felt compelled to turn their back on you.
Two months before Bartali’s win in the Tour de France, Mussolini welcomed Hitler to Italy. Il Duce did everything but kiss the Führer’s boots in his effort to gain an ally in executing his own version of the Nazi’s lebensraum, or space for the master race. After parading Hitler through Florence, Mussolini capped the day off at the Piazzale Michelangelo overlooking the Arno River and the city. “From now on, no force on earth will be able to separate us,” he was said to have gushed to Hitler. But beyond throwing the Nazi parade, hanging swastikas from Rome to Florence, and even naming a street in the capital city in honor of the Führer, Mussolini poisoned Italy with anti-Semitism. Six months after Hitler’s visit, he published Manifesto della Razza (Manifesto of Race), which appeared in major Italian newspapers. The manifesto declared Italians as Aryan descendants and stripped Italian Jews of their rights, laying the groundwork for what was to come.
Jews had lived in Italy for more than two thousand years and were fully integrated in the patchwork of Italian society. Numbering around fifty thousand in the 1930s, many Italian Jews were fiercely patriotic even after Mussolini embraced anti-Semitism as a tenet of Fascism. In November of 1938, Mussolini made anti-Semitism the law of the land through Leggi Razziali, racial laws that targeted Italian Jews. Jews were thereafter forbidden to marry gentiles. They were kicked out of schools, government jobs, and military service. Foreign Jews were arrested and sent to internment camps in the mountains. In the lead up to World War II, thousands of Jews fled Italy for the United States. Those who stayed behind lived in terror. Many hid in the shadows in Florence, Rome, and other major Italian cities. When the Nazis occupied the country beginning in September of 1943, the Gestapo arrested and deported ten thousand Jews to concentration and extermination camps in central and Eastern Europe. Thousands were murdered at Auschwitz.
THE STORY OF GINO Bartali offered a window into this grim period in Italy that I hadn’t fully understood. Reading about this history in the McConnons’ book left me feeling conflicted and, at times, ashamed. Was it possible to have pride in my Italian heritage when Italy was so complicit during the most vile chapter of the twentieth century? Inevitably the past distills into heroes and villains, and, apart from the cycling lure around Bartali, I had not identified any Italian wartime heroes. The country had literally rolled out the red carpet for the worst villain of them all.
As I delved deeper into Italy’s role in World War II, my curiosity about my family’s immigration story increased. Although my great-grandfather had left Italy by the time Mussolini welcomed Hitler to Florence, I had so many nagging questions about my heritage. As my father and I prepared to embark on this tour into the heart of the countryside, I wanted to better understand this history and reconcile it with my own identity