bartalic e Coppi there were two great sports champions made in Italy, but also two great champions of human and civil rights in our country, loyal witnesses of a friendship made of solidarity and timeless between them and Italians (and Europeans in general).
A snap into memory. Bartali and Coppi
There aren't many photos that have remained in memory like the shot of Liverani, 4 July 1952, at the Galibier Alpine Pass (2600m), between Lausanne and Briançon, during that year's Tour de France. Few photos have said so much about a certain idea of “Italianness”, an image which still today, sportsmen and women alike, look at with nostalgia or hope. Above all, the hope that in such a competitive world, as current events sometimes appear to us, that spirit can still be the deepest Italian spirit.
Gino Bartali (1914-2000) passed to Fausto coppi (1919-1960), "eternal rival", a bottle destined to become part of Italian history, wrote Malaparte, in his very tasty little book on the two samples. Almost everyone has always thought that it was Coppi who handed the bottle to Bartali behind him, but it was the Liverani photographer himself who revealed the opposite. He also revealed that the photo, so well taken, was taken later, once the race was over, making its protagonists repeat the scene (which actually happened). Liverani had grasped the dynamics, but with the means of the time he had not been able to take it back as he would have liked.
Why was that shot so important?
Certainly, such an opportunity could not be missed. It was Italy that had just emerged from a devastating world war, ended in a civil war, plunged back into the cold war and new clashes. If in the books of Guareschi and then at the cinema, Don Camillo and the mayor Peppone always made peace and represented a collective cathartic moment for the masses of new voters, in very bloody campaigns, it was necessary that even in the real world and moreover in the sports one, two old friends (made rivals by the fans), two characters of such popularity and who had polarized the fans, showed that friendship it went beyond ideological and sporting conflicts and the Italians, to recover from the disaster, would always have to be ready to pass a bottle, between competitors and rivals, between center and periphery, between older and younger, faster and slower.
The protagonists of the shot, champions not only of cycling
Coppi and Bartali (122 races won by the first and 124 by the second) represented in the collective imagination the secular and libertine soul the first, the devout and popular soul the second. The first is the sophisticated and urban spirit, the second the extra-country and rural spirit. Coppi was a heron, who prepared himself with a technical and scientific attitude, Bartali a marc'antonio who went on, as he himself said, “by willpower, one pedal stroke after another”. According to Malaparte, blood and Chianti flowed in Bartali's veins, petrol in Coppi's veins. Coppi of the lower Piedmontese industrialized world, Bartali della Florentine province. Finally, it is important to remember that the two were really great friends, since the first youth races, both had lost a brother. They represented two great figures far beyond sport, two champions of rights in our country, as well as obviously two envied champions made in Italy.
Bartali and Coppi champions of human and civil rights
Bartali even Righteous among the nations for it Yad vashem, saved Jews, persecuted and refugees during the Second World War. He carried false documents for hundreds of kilometers in the barrel of his bike. Coppi was a civil rights hero as he cared about his love more than anything else. His fiancée and later wife, in Italy without divorce, was still formally married. Her husband succeeded in having her arrested for adultery. Coppi was vilified with his white lady. The two went through the storm and managed to finally marry abroad. Coppi's life then ended when he was only 40 years old due to a lack of malaria diagnosis, in 1960, on his return from a trip to Africa.
