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Road to Valor: A True Story of WWII Italy, the Nazis, and the Cyclist Who Inspired a Nation - Softcover

McConnon, Aili; McConnon, Andres

 
9780307590657: Road to Valor: A True Story of WWII Italy, the Nazis, and the Cyclist Who Inspired a Nation
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307590658 ISBN 13: 9780307590657
Verlag: Crown, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

The inspiring, against-the-odds story of Gino Bartali, the cyclist who made the greatest comeback in Tour de France history and secretly aided the Italian resistance during World War II

Gino Bartali is best known as an Italian cycling legend who not only won the Tour de France twice but also holds the record for the longest time span between victories. In Road to Valor, Aili and Andres McConnon chronicle Bartali’s journey, from an impoverished childhood in rural Tuscany to his first triumph at the 1938 Tour de France. As World War II ravaged Europe, Bartali undertook dangerous activities to help those being targeted in Italy, including sheltering a family of Jews and smuggling counterfeit identity documents in the frame of his bicycle. After the grueling wartime years, the chain-smoking, Chianti-loving, 34-year-old underdog came back to win the 1948 Tour de France, an exhilarating performance that helped unite his fractured homeland.

Based on nearly ten years of research, Road to Valor is the first book ever written about Bartali in English and the only book written in any language to explore the full scope of Bartali’s wartime work. An epic tale of courage, resilience, and redemption, it is the untold story of one of the greatest athletes of the twentieth century.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Aili McConnon is an award-winning journalist based in New York. She has written for BusinessWeek, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Sports Illustrated and has appeared on ABC, CNN, and NPR.

Andres McConnon is a researcher, journalist, and award-winning author who has written for Sports Illustrated, the Huffington Post, and the National Post. 

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

Across the Arno

When we race together, let's each win a little! This time you, and the next time me," Gino shouted ahead to his younger brother, Giulio, as they pedaled up the steep, sun-drenched hills surrounding Ponte a Ema. Their tires kicked up clouds of grit, and it was all Gino could do to avoid swallowing a mouthful. He rubbed a sweaty palm against his shorts, trying to brush off the stubborn rust flakes from his bike frame, and tucked his elbows in alongside his body, the way his idols did as they sprinted to victory, clutching their sleek curved handlebars. Gino leaned into the pedals and sped past Giulio. He turned and grinned at his younger brother as they started their descent toward home. They would race again tomorrow, and on that forgotten stretch of Tuscan road their tomorrows seemed endless.

Cycling had become the Bartali boys' passion, a flash of excitement and adventure in their tiny, workaday hometown. For Ponte a Ema in the 1920s was a sleepy place, just beyond the sophisticated world of Florence. Resting on the banks of the Ema, a tributary of the Arno River, Ponte a Ema brimmed with the vineyards, rolling hills, and waves of sweet lavender undulating out to the horizon, which have since made Tuscany world-renowned. Still, the village itself, located across a small bridge on the road from Florence to Bagno a Ripoli, looked like little more than an afterthought. One would be hard-pressed to find it on a map, hidden as it was some four miles southeast of Florence's central square. And though it included a short litany of establishments common to any small Italian town of the time--a church; a bank; a bike mechanic's shop; a simple barbershop; a grain mill; a small wine store; a five-room school set up in a farmer's house--it lacked a town hall and a proper piazza, the pulsing heart of Italian life where nonni, or grandparents, gather to play cards and stray cats dart out of the way of running children and bouncing soccer balls. Without a nucleus, Ponte a Ema conveyed the impression of an accidentally inhabited byway between more important places. That more important places existed would not occur to Gino until much later. Back then, Ponte a Ema was all the world a boy could want.

Born July 18, 1914, Gino Giovanni Bartali was a wispy, blue-eyed boy with a moppish head of curly dark hair. He lived with his parents, Torello and Giulia, his older sisters, Anita and Natalina, and his brother, Giulio, in one of the cream-colored, three-story tenement buildings that lined Via Chiantigiana, Ponte a Ema's main street, where all the hubbub of daily life played out. Like most of the apartments along Chiantigiana, the Bartalis' consisted of one room and a small kitchen. Home reminded Gino of Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio and the humble abode of Geppetto, the hot-headed Tuscan carpenter who was known for getting into scuffles with anyone who insulted him. "The furniture could not have been much simpler: a very old chair, a rickety old bed, and a tumble-down table," wrote Collodi. "Little as Geppetto's house was, it was neat and comfortable."

The Bartalis' home possessed a similar modest charm. The children helped Giulia cart jugs of water from nearby springs. Together with several families, the Bartalis shared a privy at the end of the hall on their floor, which consisted of a hole in a bench through which refuse dropped into a small container on the ground floor. Running water, like electricity, would only come several decades later, after the end of the Second World War.

These were cramped quarters to be sure, but Gino didn't know any different. Besides, outdoors was where the action was. Along the road, the boys from town would huddle for hours around a game of marbles, keeping a stern eye on the rainbow array of tiny glass globes that already belonged to them, and hawkishly watching the ones that would soon join their collection if luck and skill were on their side that day. The game was serious business for Gino and his friends, and almost always ended in a violent brawl, broken up only by the clatter of a pair of dark green window shutters being flung open above to make way for somebody's mother leaning out to deliver a strident scolding. Gino always got a particularly severe tongue-lashing when he came home for dinner covered in bruises. Thin and undersized, a cuff from another child was enough to topple him to the ground, but that did little to deter him from bounding up and swinging right back. Gino knew he was the weakest, but he hated being teased. "I would have liked to have friends who didn't take advantage of being stronger than me so that they could beat me up after every game of marbles," he said later. Already headstrong as a youngster, however, he was willing to stand up for himself, even if the outcome was rarely favorable. "I was an unlucky marbles player, and an even unluckier boxer."

When he and his friends would scatter into the surrounding fields for games of tag or cops and robbers, winning and losing was a more straightforward affair and fisticuffs could be kept to a minimum. The orchards outside town were ideal for any pastime that involved hiding and chasing, draped as they were with row upon row of rippling white washing hung out to dry. For Ponte a Ema was a laundry town; many of its villagers labored for small businesses charged with cleaning the linens and finery of Florence's gentlemanly class. Men organized the transportation for this industry, picking up and delivering laundry with a mule pulling a dray. Women, predictably, bore the brunt of the dirty work. With brushes and lye ash soap, they scrubbed soft mountains until they were spotless. They cleaned shirts in large cement basins called viaios; they rinsed large bedsheets on the banks of the Ema River, by the ponte or bridge for which the town was named. Once each stain had been painstakingly removed, everything was carried out to the orchards and hung to dry in endless bay-scented fabric corridors, perfect for dodging potential jailers or for lying in wait to snatch a slippery thief and triumphantly march him back to town, where his punishment would be determined and duly meted out.

"As children we had fun with little, in fact nothing," Gino said. They played murielle, a game that involved tiles and smoothed stones, in the small rectangular schoolyard, and diecone in the Ponte a Ema cemetery; whoever knocked down the most graveside candles by rolling coins at them won the ten-cent piece. They would sneak off to the Arno for a forbidden swim--the river was known for claiming lives with its currents and sudden whirlpools, and Gino's mother once had to resort to stealing her son's clothes from its banks, forcing him to scurry home naked, to teach him a lesson. Most days, though, Gino and his friends would scamper out of the water, get dressed, and, when somebody had a spare coin or two, run over to a riverside cookie factory that sold broken pieces of biscotti, with flavors like fig and sambuca, at an end-of-day discount.

Gino's favorite pastime was one he had to keep completely secret or risk an encounter with his father's leather belt. Torello's bicycle had always fascinated Gino and one day he hatched a plan to learn to ride atop it. It was far too big for a boy his size, but he was determined to master it. Like a bullfighter closing in on a bull in an arena, he approached it. Standing one foot on the left pedal, he slid his right leg under the crossbar to reach the right pedal. Balancing precariously, and much too short to sit on the bike seat, he stretched up to grip the handlebars from below. Crooked and wobbling, he learned painstakingly to maneuver the unwieldy contraption and barely noticed the smirks and giggles his clumsy expeditions elicited. He was too busy keeping his balance as he pedaled along Ponte a Ema's side streets.

Gino would have spent all of his waking hours...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307590658
ISBN 13 
9780307590657
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
344
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