Evviva Coppi!

The 32nd Giro d’Italia takes place almost simultaneously with the new investigation into the murder in Piazze of Dr. Alberto Rinaldi, Arturo Toscanini’s doctor. As you read through the pages of the novel, you get the impression that there is some connection between the two activities, the sporting and the investigative.

Colonel Luigi Mari devotes all his energy to shedding light on that mysterious murder, but at the same time he is a great fan of the most important cycling event.

He knows everything about the protagonists and teams of the great sporting event. In the newspapers, before any other article, he reads the stage reports and rankings. The broadcasts with live radio commentary and commentators on the Red and Blue networks are unmissable afternoon and evening appointments.

Once his anxiety about the day’s stage results and the general classification has subsided, Mari prefers on the Blue network at eight-thirty the program “Il Giringiro”, a daily audio report following the Giro d’Italia. He is always “cheered by the polite hosting of Silvio Gigli and the amused songs of Isa Bellini, and the very catchy little tune by the two young authors Garinei and Giovannini used as the closing theme.”

Lieutenant Barbetti also experiences Mari’s sports fandom when he “upon hearing the announcement of the excellent position in the general classification of his idol Fausto Coppi and the considerable gap of Gino Bartali, clenched his fists and pressed his lips together to contain that same exclamation of joy that he would instead gladly let out when he was home alone.”

Cycling, and in particular road cycling, was in those postwar years and for much of the 1950s the favorite sport of Italians, enjoying a popular participation and spread far greater than that of soccer, the second great national sport.

Mari cheers and will always cheer for the “champion of champions” Coppi.

He is the hero who excites the crowds, the radio commentators like Mario Ferretti and Alberto Giubilo, the radio listeners in bars and squares, the readers of emphatic pieces of sports reporting.

He has the physique of a hero, the deep and calm gaze of someone who knows how to face heroic feats, used to commenting on his performances at the limits of scientific possibility with plain and unhurried words.

Coppi, however, has one quality that overshadows all the others: he has the courage to dare, to want to win, and to want to fight only for victory. He is not a calculator of his own performances, or rather he is, with the limit of ultimately letting his indomitable willingness to surpass himself prevail, regardless of his physical condition, not caring about natural adversities, reasoning with his heart against tactics and set schemes.

These characteristics of the “champion of champions” fascinate Mari to the point of infusing themselves into his reflections, conjectures, and initiatives during the days of his investigation.

The paradigm of the great athlete becomes emblematic of the irrationality of boldness, sustained to the point of transforming into the desperation of courage, until having to face the enemy within, the alluring voices of the instincts of survival and self-preservation, the last hostile barriers to the heroic feat.

Boldness, courage, and again boldness, and again courage.

Mari finds in it the essence of his actions, the strength of the commander who fights against everything and everyone for good, for peace, for freedom and justice. And certainly not out of duty.

“Just like Ulysses with his ‘little speech’,” Mari would say as a good Dante scholar.

Long live Coppi!