Читать книгу The Road to San Donato - Robert Cocuzzo - Страница 15

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 friends around the streets of Florence on old clunkers. Not much of a student, young Gino got a job working as a bike mechanic in a shop in Florence after the sixth grade. All he ever wanted to do was become a racer, but his father forbade it. He thought competitive cycling was far too dangerous.

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 as an Italian American.