Fallen Angel (2 page)

By 30 August 1953 Coppi had twice achieved the ‘double’ everyone thought was impossible: victories in the Tour de France and Giro d’Italia in the same year. At the World’s that day he dominated the race in the style that was to become his hallmark: he waited for the moment until he felt the opposition tiring, then dramatically raised the pace until no one could
stay with him. The final fifty miles were a triumphant, if painful, procession in front of the hundreds of thousands of fans who had flocked over the Italian border.

Coppi’s rainbow jersey doesn’t quite fit over the deep blue tunic of the Italian team, stained with sweat after 165 miles in the sweltering heat on the hilly circuit above the lake. Alongside the cyclist are the usual dignitaries in suits and ties, the mayor of Lugano, the cycling federation president; behind are onlookers craning their necks.

At the shoulders of the men in suits, however, stands a woman. A woman with immaculately coiffed dark hair swept back from her forehead, eyebrows tightly plucked into two perfect lines, dazzling teeth, a chunky gold bracelet on her right wrist, a distinguished black dress and a jawline that hints at the unstoppable force of a battleship’s prow.

It was the presence of the woman, Giulia Locatelli, which made a routine podium photograph into one of the most reproduced images in Italian sport. To this day, no one quite knows how Coppi’s mistress cajoled, argued, pushed her way into forbidden territory to pass him the flowers in an almost peremptory gesture captured by the television cameras. She was alongside her lover in his moment of triumph, to share the acclaim of the hundreds of thousands of Italian fans, to be pictured alongside him in the next morning’s newspapers. It was the moment their love affair became public, because she had decided that it should be so. For an Italian, the image has the same power as the moment in the Profumo scandal in Britain in the early sixties when Mandy Rice-Davies answered: ‘He would say that, wouldn’t he?’

The affair had been going on for some months. It had been rumoured in the closed world of cycling that the biggest name in the sport had a dark-haired mistress. All was not well, it was said, with his marriage of nearly eight years, in spite of Coppi’s love for his daughter Marina. Cycling champions often
strayed as they flitted from race to race, and in most cases what happened on the road remained hidden. They were good husbands at home so people turned a blind eye. But Giulia’s determined move put the affair in the public gaze. In 1950s Italy adultery was still illegal. This was an act of colossal daring, many would say sheer folly.

When Coppi left his wife Bruna for Giulia soon afterwards, such an act of open immorality could not be allowed to go unchecked. The Pope publicly expressed his displeasure and became involved in fruitless moves to restore the marriage. The police dragged Giulia and Fausto from their beds in an attempt to prove their illicit liaison. The woman, the guilty party in the eyes of the law, was briefly thrown into prison. The adultery trial was brief but vicious, the bitter little details of marital breakdown mulled over in public. The children were called as witnesses. The sentences were suspended, but the case remains a landmark nonetheless: a major public figure and his mistress prosecuted for adultery just as Italy was turning into a secular society, developing into a modern European state.

The Lugano world championship marked a turning point for Coppi in another sense. It was one of the last major races he won. He was nearly thirty-four: his glittering career was all but over, his decline inexorable in spite of his best efforts, the more marked because no matter how poorly he performed he could never be anonymous. When he struggled, it was noticed. Inevitably, the scarlet woman was blamed for his decline; even for his premature, controversial death. Within cycling, she would never be forgiven, not on moral grounds, but for emasculating the champion of champions.

Coppi is Italian sport’s immortal hero. ‘
Coppi viva, Coppi il mito
’ – Coppi lives on, Coppi the myth – say the placards at the great races, the Giro, the Tour de France, and they are right. He remains a mythical figure nearly fifty years after his
death. Walk into the reception at
La Gazzetta dello Sport
, the paper that embodies the spirit of Italian sport, and there in front of you is a life-size black and white picture of a man on a bike: Coppi. Not a Ferrari, not a footballer, but the cyclist. In the Giro each year, the highest mountain is given the title
Cima Coppi
, the Coppi summit. No French or Spanish champion is remembered this way in their home Tours. And who can count the number of Italian cycling clubs called Gruppo Sportivo Coppi?

Every era is marked by the emergence of a possible ‘new Coppi’ amid much speculation. On the fortieth anniversary of his death, a video of his life sold 60,000 copies in a few days. Half a billion lire was spent on an elaborate memorial in Turin. And it was Coppi who was voted the most popular Italian sportsman of the twentieth century, ahead of the great skier Alberto Tomba and the motor racing legend Enzo Ferrari. Not a footballer within a mile of him.

Coppi has moved way beyond his sport. He is now immortalised in opera, film, television docudrama, experimental works by classical composers, sculpture, painting, ceramics and T-shirts as well as in print. Memorials to his name stand on high Alpine passes and obscure climbs in distant parts of Italy. The writer Bruno Raschi called the obsession with
il campionissimo
‘inexplicable … an irrational over-reaction to his memory and to his earthly image. No athlete is wept over in this way. No other has brought forth so many memories or has had a destiny of this kind. And no one has decided that it should be so.’

No one decided that Coppi should be wept over, in the same way that no one quite knows why the obsession with Coppi has endured. The answer lies in the gulf between the letter and the photograph, between the world of Aunt Albina and the image snatched at the world championship in Lugano. In the four years and four months between the two, her
Faustino, the boy from the tiny hamlet of Castellania, had become Fausto, the greatest cyclist in the world, a figure who dominated his sport. The photograph subverted and transformed the image of Italy’s greatest sports star of the post-war years. It marks the moment when the idol was shown to have feet of clay, when the simple country boy of the letter suddenly became a far more complex and controversial figure. Coppi’s mythical status, the tears that are still shed, stem from one essential question: how did the Faustino of the letter become the Fausto of the photograph?

Castellania is almost the end of the road. Only a few hamlets and farms lie beyond the village, where the foothills of the Apennines rise up, wave after wave, steep green valleys, wooded hilltops, pocket-handkerchief vineyards, lonely towers. Like the other villages in this part of north-west Italy, Castellania is not thriving. Not all the houses are lived in and there are few signs of active agriculture, although the Catholic organisation Opus Dei is investing in the village in a move which may well revitalise it. The population has declined as the small farms no longer support more than one or two people. At one time there were ten families called Coppi in the village; today there are only four. The population is now well below fifty, where once it was three hundred, and those who are left are ageing: only three children have been born here in the last twenty years. The school closed in the 1960s. The hills feel empty, silent but for birdsong.

Armando Baselica is warming himself in the April sun, sitting in an old chair repaired with planks. Behind him, a maize field slopes away and the mountains rise up, their summits still flecked with snow. If there were anything of note happening in Castellania he would have a grandstand view, but the village is sleeping. At eighty-four, Baselica, wizened and bullet-headed, has earned the right to a little rest. He is the last man here whose life ran parallel with that of the village’s only famous son. He was born in 1922, went
to the village school with Faustino Coppi in the late 1920s during the rise of fascism, left his studies to work in the fields, quit the hilltop to fight in Mussolini’s war, returned a changed man. Had cycling not intervened, had he not been successful, Coppi might well have ended his life like this old man: sitting in peace in the spring sun watching a very small world go gently by.

Coppi and Baselica were part of the last generation who can bear witness to a lifestyle that has now all but disappeared from Italy. The world of subsistence farming by small peasant communities had changed little in its essence since medieval times, but it is now largely a memory, and even those who can recall it are dying out. This is the life from which Coppi escaped, as did so many, because the road out of the village was the only one offering any relief from hard labour and little reward. Baselica can describe life here in a single word: ‘
miseria
’. Poverty.

The hills are attractively rounded and green as they rise from the plain. The vineyards stand in neat rows. The maize fields swish gently in the spring breeze. But the fields were not easily worked when the work was done by hand, ploughing with oxen, swinging the double-pronged spade known as the
zappa
to break the clods for planting. The fields are clay and turn to mud when the autumn rains come. ‘It takes the thighs of a horse to lift your feet out of the mud,’ said the journalist Gianni Brera.

Up here, 1,000 feet above sea level, a living had to be scratched from the land, supplemented by selling wood, maize, and the relatively poor wine from the local grapes. The peasants kept chickens, rabbits, a pig or two – vital as the source of hams and salami that would last a year – and perhaps a cow. Once a week, they made bread in a wood-burning oven, bread that, says Baselica, improved over the eight days it was kept. The houses contained only the essentials: one book,
perhaps, passed down from brother to sister, might have to last ten years.

Isolation and the shared need for survival meant the people in the village were closely knit, ‘like a big family’, as Baselica puts it: tasks such as harvesting maize were shared cooperatively; the maize would be ground with a handmill to make the flour for
polenta
, the staple form of carbohydrate.
Miseria
, Baselica may call it, but it was not unremittingly grim. The day dedicated to the village’s patron saint, San Biagio, was celebrated with two days of dancing and eating: ‘rice, meat, chickens,
agnolotti
on the second day’.

In part of
Love and War in the Apennines
, a classic tale of life as an escaped prisoner of war in Italy between 1943 and 1944, Eric Newby documented daily life in a peasant house-hold further south along the mountain range from Castellania. By the midday meal Newby and his fellow workers on the farm are already sleeping over their food through physical exhaustion. ‘I had always thought of Italian
contadini
as a race of people who sat basking in the sun before the doors of their houses while the seed which they had inserted in the earth in the course of a couple of mornings’ work burgeoned without their having to do anything but watch this process take place. I now knew differently. These people were fighting to survive in an inhospitable terrain from which the larger part of the inhabitants had either emigrated to the cities or to the United States or South America.’

* * *

Casa Coppi, Fausto’s home until he left to seek his fortune on two wheels, is one of the biggest of the twenty-five or so houses in the village, a three-storey yellow building on the south side of the cluster of dwellings and barns. It follows what is clearly a typical local pattern: a long, thin house, along-
side a two-storey open-fronted barn used to store hay, maize and piles of stakes for growing tomatoes. The house has barely changed since Coppi’s time: the cyclist’s mother Angiolina lived here until her death in 1962, after which it was shut up until it was turned into a museum in 2000.

Today, the contents are a curious mix of traditional peasant fittings and slightly incongruous, highly polished furniture from the 1940s and 1950s, presumably bought as Fausto’s winnings accumulated. The large kitchen on the ground floor still has its sloping stone sink, but alongside is a new-looking wood-burning cooking range. Sadly, there is no sign of the fridge, which was Coppi’s first gift to his mother. She never knew exactly what it was for and kept her underwear in it, he said, while at other times she used it to store kindling for the fire. He would never have the heart to tell her its real purpose.

The sitting room has the single-channel television Coppi bought for the family – the first in the village – but retains the myriad hooks in the ceiling for hanging hams, grapes and salami. Upstairs, both Fausto’s and Serse’s bedrooms contain ‘
preti
’ – priests – the sledge-like contraptions containing an earthenware pot, used for heating the beds with coals from the stove, which were the cause of many a house fire. The cot Coppi slept in as a child, with its uncomfortable looking metal frame, still stands in his parents’ room, a cord still attached to one side so it can be rocked from the bed.

The Coppi family were small peasant farmers like the rest of the population, but they were slightly better off than many of their neighbours: a four-ox family where the norm was two, farming some thirteen hectares, some of it rented, but still well above the average for a holding in rural Italy. It was not enough to feed everyone, however, and Fausto’s father, Domenico, had no choice but to hire his services out to other local farmers. Thin-faced, moustached, Domenico was a good-looking man, reputed to have had an eye for a pretty face.
According to one biographer, Jean-Paul Ollivier, Domenico’s marriage to Angiolina Boveri, the niece of the local priest, was a shotgun affair. Their elder daughter Maria was born three months after the wedding.

Angelo-Fausto was their second son, their fourth child after their daughters Maria and Dina and their eldest son Livio. He was born on the ground floor of the house at 5 p.m. on 15 September 1919 while Domenico was working in the fields. It was his father who wanted to christen him Fausto, the family name; his mother felt he should be named Angelo after his grandfather and he was always referred to in official documents by both names. From his father, he would inherit a long, thin neck and almost Slavic cheekbones; from his mother a prominent Roman nose in the middle of a roundish face. He soon acquired the nickname Faustino, the diminutive due partly to his slender physique but also to distinguish him from his uncle of the same name.