Vespa Tunes XIX: Bartali, Paolo Conte, 1979

Central Rome is presently festooned with yellow tape discouraging parking and pink signs with arrows indicating the route of the final stage of the Giro d’Italia which is this year concluding in the capital. The Giro d’Italia began in 1909, six years after the Tour de France and pink is the colour of the Giro in recognition of the pink pages of La Gazzetta dello Sport which has organised the race since its ideation.

The Colosseum at 6 this morning, awaiting the cyclists on the final leg of the final stage of the Giro d’Italia

In fact the conclusion of the race in Rome is unusual, it only finished here for the first time last year. It more often ends in Milan, where La Gazzetta is based, but Rome puts on a good show and this year once again, just before seven o’clock this evening, the final stage will end by the Colosseum.

All of this brings to mind Paolo Conte’s paean to Gino Bartali, winner of the Giro in 1936 and 1937, and of the Tour de France in 1938. Extraordinarily he went on to win both races once more after a significant wartime hiatus: the Giro d’Italia in 1946 and the Tour de France in 1948. When he married in 1940 his wedding was blessed by Pope Pius XII, that’s how famous he was. Bartali died in May 2000 aged 85, I had then been in Rome a few months and I remember it was the first I’d heard of him. He was a big deal.

Gino Bartali in 1945. Photo credit: Wikipedia

Conte’s song is, of course both about cycling and not. It is redolent of endeavour and humiliation. The concern for what the French think speaks of the long-standing spiky relationship with Italy’s neighbours across the Alps. France, already wounded, had been gratuitously stabbed in the back by the entry of Italy into the Second World War as an ally of Germany in 1940. Bartali — a consistently and bravely staunch anti-Fascist — is a figure offering atonement for Italian post-Fascist shame and humiliation. He was beloved by all stripes of Italians, his post-war victories were said to have averted civil war.

A devout Catholic, Bartali rode messages and false identity documents for Partisan organisations throughout central Italy, all the while wearing a shirt with his name on: such was his fame that no one stopped him. Eventually he was questioned by the Nazi and Fascist authorities and his life threatened. This courage, that he hid a Jewish family in his cellar, and helped save many many more only came to light after his death. In 2013 he was recognised by the Holocaust memorial organisation Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.

Conte’s glorious, onomatopoeic poetry wears its erudition very lightly and doesn’t really translate. I’ve gone for the gist. His is a careful and clever use of vocabulary — the archaic exoticism of “caucciù”; the dated modernity of “cellophane”, one can just hear the crinkle; the surreal evocation of Bartali’s battered nose: quel naso triste come una salita (a nose as sad a climb), quel naso triste di un italiano allegro (that sad nose of a happy Italian). Plus it’s an excellent tune, I just love it and shall be humming it as the cyclists make their way from the coast to the Colosseum this afternoon.