Gironimo!

by Tim Moore

  When they were done, the English photographer came up and explained that my entrance had serendipitously filled a gap: in a massively native turn of events, the entire field had got lost outside Florence after someone switched a few route signs. The finale of this four-day race had in consequence just been neutralised – the Tannoy commentator wasn’t building to a climax, just being Italian – and the riders were now rolling slowly towards the finish. We tutted indulgently, then I asked how she’d guessed at our shared nationality. ‘That hat and those hairy legs, mate.’

  It would be some time before a pissed-off peloton rolled over the line, and I spent most of it being patted on the back, photographed and giggled at. Armed with the keystone verb obligingly supplied on request by the bilingual Englishwoman, I was at last able to tell people – amongst them many local journalists – what I was up to. ‘Faccio il Giro d’Italia di 1914,’ I said proudly, though this seemed to ask more questions than it answered, predominantly: ‘Why?’

  Italy’s bountiful stock of senior cycling enthusiasts was as ever to the fore. A silver-haired mob cooed and clucked over the Hirondelle, taking especial interest in my cork brakes, worn down once more to crusty nubbins. One portly chap in a yellow jersey came up brandishing a little photo album, flicking through it to show me his lifetime measured out in bicycles: from monochrome, Brylcreemed youth to over-coloured, well-fed middle age, posing proudly astride or beside road bikes of increasing sleekness.

  I confess this was a rather affecting encounter. ‘Bici, no,’ he said, when I used this word to describe the Hirondelle. ‘Questa e una bicicletta.’ He patted my saddle, then his heart: this is no bike, it’s a bicycle. I liked that very much: as a gentleman of a certain age, Number 7 deserved a more respectful term of address. We chatted on, after a fashion, until the rain built to a cobble-clattering crescendo and he toddled away in search of cover, calling out words like ‘avventura’ and ‘passione’ over his shoulder. After this I hardly minded getting utterly, utterly drenched, or having my subsequent view of the cathedral restricted to a smeary impressionist watercolour.

  The rain abated, but the topography didn’t, and the ego-boost that propelled me away from Florence petered out in Chianti’s khaki humps. Rolling hills really are the most hateful of all cyclo-terrains, half the agony of riding up a mountain with none of the rewarding sense of summit achievement. Gasping over the bars at the crest of yet another punishing but unimpressive eminence, I was appalled by what the sat-nav kept trying to tell me. How could these gently billowing olive groves and vineyards be over a thousand feet up in the air?

  Greve-in-Chianti wasn’t as far as I’d hope to get that night, but I felt an urge to stop there after passing a family having a stand-up row in the street, dressed as ostriches. Round the corner I caught up with a carnival float upon which five large men in full drag were scooping facefuls of soft cheese from a giant treasure chest. I followed them down a narrow street which opened into a long, thin square teeming with garish insanity: water polo players in boxing gloves, women dressed as bananas, bellowing Renaissance nobles. Never would I feel less conspicuous.

  A single hotel overlooked the scene, and incredibly it had a spare room, though less incredibly I had to loiter at the desk for half an hour while the receptionist found this out. A small boy showed the Hirondelle and me to a rearward bike shed, then led me back through a kitchen in which a floppy-hatted chef was doing his stuff over an enormous open fire. By the time I’d showered, laundered my kit, changed and helped myself from a wicker basket decoratively filled with robust and durable vintage Chianti corks, the party was all over bar the shouting.

  What shouting it was, though. Seated outside with a plate of fire-singed pig bits, a stirringly ageless bacchanal unwound noisily before me. The square – more accurately a yawning cobbled trapezium – was bordered with canvas pavilions, each medievally bedecked in colourful standards and massed with chanting revellers. The waiter deferentially explained the spectacle in English, which was very good of him as I later realised I’d asked my question in Spanish: this, he said, was the annual celebration for Greve’s eight local districts, each represented by a tent decorated with their respective crest and banners. ‘Every year our festa has a new subject, a new tema,’ he confided, which rather surprised me as the only theme I’d detected was the refreshingly mad absence of one. ‘This year, is, ah, how it is, “a glass of fantasy”.’ That sounded pretty appealing, so I ordered one for a digestif, and woke up trouserless outside a bus station in Naples.

  Because that simply isn’t true, I came round in my hotel bed to the sloosh of very wet traffic. Not a cheery reveille for any touring cyclist, particularly one facing the challenge I had set myself: today I was going to do it 1914 style, riding on gravel tracks now being audibly churned into peat bogs.

  Chianti’s fabled strade bianche, its white roads, are rare survivors of the unmade byways that were Calzolari and Co.’s daily lot. The swishing crunch of tubular tyre on loose chippings is what draws the Eroica to this region every October, an amateur sportive open to road-racing bicycles built before 1987. The first Eroica, not coincidentally, was held in 1998, the year the Festina affair blew the lid off EPO; the event now draws three thousand nostalgic enthusiasts to celebrate the hard-bitten heroes of a nobler age. It’s only supposed to be a bit of fun, but given the indomitable spirit they’re trying to recapture it’s no surprise that every year some push themselves too far. Eroica veteran Lance McCormack had told me of several riders taken away by ambulance, and a tragic pair by hearse. But he’d also told me that even at the ragged edge of hard-core authenticity, common sense prevailed: ‘Don’t remember seeing a rider on wood rims and cork blocks. No one’s that fucking daft.’

  Paolo’s unusually threadbare itinerary allowed for generous leeway through these parts – he didn’t name-check a single town between Florence and Radicofani, 140km to the south – and before leaving I’d laboriously planned a route that would maximise my contact with bleached gravel. Eating breakfast out on the covered balcony, how I wished I hadn’t. Through a curtain of drips I watched cagouled binmen sweeping rain-mulched party detritus off the cobbles below. The hungover waiter looked like he’d swum into work. The Giro d’Italia planners still like to stick in an occasional strada bianca for old times’ sake, and this was a bad moment to remember the last time they’d done so. Watching the sodden 2010 race, I’d seen just how much fun you could have on these roads in a downpour: half the field slid from gravel to ditch, though a uniform slathering of mud meant the commentators couldn’t tell which half.

  As General Galtieri had predicted in his breakfast TV weather slot, the skies soon cleared. With the sun out, I could sort of see why this area earned the nickname Chiantishire. Aside from its popularity with my loaded countrymen, it looked like the Cotswolds left a bit too long in the oven: everything had browned and risen. And risen, and risen. By mid-morning I had toiled up to 700m, higher than I’d been since the sodding Alps, the leaden weight of sweat-soaked merino wool pulling me back downhill. Then, with a pre-programmed warble, the sat-nav ushered me off the tarmac and up a forlorn track that meandered away through the spindly oaks. An introductory parade of red triangles transmitted one overall message: shit road ahead.

  Yet my introduction to the famous brown roads of Chianti, as they were that morning, proved almost disappointingly benign. The emergent sun swiftly hardened the mud into a firm paste that seemed annoying at worst; certainly less of a challenge to the business of staying upright than the chalky granules I’d trained for. Revised for, at least: for months I’d been collating tips from anyone who’d ever ridden on a strada bianca. ‘Don’t let the camber drag you over to the edges, it’s like sticking your front wheel in one of those kids’ ball pits’ (Lance McCormack). ‘Use the ears and the eyes, when bici start to slide you hear it first’ (off-road wizard Fabio). ‘Oh, orribile, oh, difficile, oh!’ (that old feller at the Tour of Tuscany finish line).

  None of that now seemed
relevant, not in these conditions and at the speed I was going. A far greater test was working up any appetite for the big bag of raisins that was all I had to fuel myself. (Raisins offer the endurance athlete an unbeatable balance of yumminess and calories per gram, or so I’d read on some website – I think it was liesaboutraisins.com).

  By mid-morning the sun was really getting to work, kiln-baking the road into something slightly less brown and more gravelled. At last I stopped going uphill, tracking the brow of a desolate eminence that offered a view of scrubby, ill-tended farmland. Away from the Cameron/Blair ‘wanker belt’, here was the old Chianti, the region that in 1914 found itself cursed with some of the most desperate poverty in all of Europe. It was extraordinarily remote, just me and the occasional walnut-faced farmer in a three-wheel pick-up, half a tree and a caged goose bumping dustily about in the back. At times the track all but disappeared, leaching seamlessly into the rocky undergrowth. It hadn’t been bianca; now it wasn’t even a strada.

  Down we went. Whee – look at me go! Woah – look at me fail to stop going! Flap-bollocking-arse-funnels no no no no OK I’ve got it I’ve got it no I haven’t skeeeeeeesshhhh OW.

  I looked up at the oak trees through a cloud of beige dust. This time I’d managed to wrench my shoes out of the toe-clips, and had even improvised a speedway-style foot-slide, which took off a few kmh before I lost it and hit the deck. I hauled myself aloft and took stock. The bidon rack had shed its load and I’d lost three more brake springs. Otherwise the only damage was a small tear in the side of my shorts, and some impressive gouges in the craggy railway ballast that had annexed the road surface on the winding descent, precipitating my fall.

  Fifteen minutes of more guarded progress took me down to the floor of a small and peaceful valley. Here the track ran along an innocent little brook that had plainly been up to no good in the night. A bridge over it was festooned with muddy branches, and flash-flood detritus lay in ugly clots all over the meadows around. The track followed this stream into a forest, and soon I was threading the Hirondelle through big brown pools of standing water. After a while it became a challenge to distinguish brook from road, and I was off and pushing, mud up to my ankles. When at last we squelched away from the riverside, what a sight the tyres were: thickly encrusted with gravelled clay, like Ferrero Rocher doughnuts.

  Two hours of dust-scrunching, wheel-slipping white-road action confirmed it: I’d pulled a reverse Goldilocks. My first stretch of strada bianca had been Just Right; the ones that followed exposed me to uncomfortable extremes. Ew: too muddy. Ow: too dry. Profitable employment of Lance and Fabio’s handling tips did at least mean I negotiated the punishing corrugations without falling off again, though what a stupendous relief it was when my front wheel at last nosed back onto bitumen. The deranged percussion of bell and bidons fell silent; the scenery stopped vibrating. Oh, the velvety miracle of tarmac! It felt like stepping onto the dockside after a storm-lashed voyage, a joyous relief the poor 1914 riders would never experience.

  The enemy was now above, not below – a blazing sun that scorched away all trace of the previous night’s deluge and brought a billion flies to life. Most seemed very keen to investigate the inner workings of my ear; I defended myself in a manner that would have alarmed passers-by. There weren’t any though, nor a single town or hamlet where I might have acquired cold fluids and something to eat that wasn’t a warm raisin. Only the descents kept me going, those delicious gusts of cool air blasting sweat off my messy red face, bending back the brim of my cap to ventilate the plastered scalp beneath. Bonus refreshment came courtesy of the carbonated water I’d filled my bidons with that morning: at downhill speeds above 40kmh, the juddering front-wheel bobble agitated the contents so violently that a fine spray forced itself through the screw-top threads and all over my thighs. Then the road flattened, and rose, and an airless, broiled silence ruled once more.

  By now I was deep in the kingdom of the über-villa: palatial wrought-iron gates by the road, glittering infinity pools glimpsed through surgically maintained olive groves and vineyards. The contrast between the unseen occupants’ pampered sloth and my slow-roasted suffering seemed unbearable, especially when the bidons were drained and my brain began to boil. In a moment, or perhaps an hour, I saw myself shaking the manicured hand of a linen-shirted German industrialist, who had hailed me from his villa’s gates in refined Bond-villain English. ‘My good friends,’ he was now saying to his poolside house guests, ‘may I introduce Mr Moore, who I believe you will find a rather remarkable gentleman.’ Later: ‘I am glad you rested well, Mr Moore. Might I offer you a chilled Calzolari?’ And: ‘This is Mr Thompson, who will be redesigning your bottom bracket tonight. Silence, Thompson, you snivelling dog!’

  I crawled into Siena in limp-home mode, my face scabbed with sunburn and raisin husks. Coke, salami panino, Coke, Extra Cacao, milk, water and more water: it all went down in the shade of a grocer’s awning. Feeling much less dead, I weaved off through the rearing streets and alleys. This was the twisty, banked realm of the Palio, the age-old stampede that hoofs through the city twice a year, clattering to a finish in the wondrous square that now opened before me: Renaissance palazzos and grand civic buildings arranged around a vast sloping shell paved in red brick and travertine marble, the scene crowned with the slender, soaring Torre del Mangia, one of the medieval world’s loftiest structures. Siena’s Piazza del Campo ranks amongst the most noble public spaces on earth, and as such was thickly carpeted with gormless foreign oafs holding Apple teatrays above their heads.

  Not for long, though. The absurd heat had been building to some sort of climax all afternoon, and now hit it: the heavens abruptly blackened, and a terrific whip-crack of thunder ricocheted off the ancient walls. Shrieks and giggles begat a multinational stampede in the aquatic bombardment that followed at once. Perched under the archway where I’d been standing to admire the scene, I had a splendid covered overview of the scurrying panic. In moments the machine-gun rain had the piazza all to itself, and I was sharing my very compact recess with two dozen bedraggled refugees.

  ‘Get a load of that feller with the bike,’ whispered one of them, in Australian. ‘Is he for real?’

  ‘Negative, master,’ I blurted in a loud, robotic monotone, without looking round. This riposte satisfied me immensely, for perhaps three seconds. Then, in preference to enduring an unknown period of claustrophobic awkwardness, I pushed the Hirondelle out into the pitiless monsoon and pedalled slowly across the deserted square. A wolf whistle rang out from some distant rain shelter, followed by a radiating smatter of silly whoops, fitful applause and all the other trappings of a traditional idiot’s ovation. I hoisted up a sodden glove and kept it waving, thinking: If I fall over now, I’m ditching the bike and going straight to the nearest airport.

  I’ve always been quietly proud of my mastery of the touring cyclist’s core skill: being asleep while it’s raining. Clearly I was out of practice. Just past Siena’s city walls I ducked under a bus shelter and for the first time unlashed and donned my shriekingly twenty-first-century bright orange rain jacket. I waited there for a while but it got worse, the heavy-metal sky overflowing helplessly, as if God had fallen asleep in the bath with the taps running. Oh, nob goblins: I splashed back out through the gutter rapids and pointed the Hirondelle south, into the headlights and double-speed wipers of the evening rush hour.

  Each passing car flung a bucket of grey-brown acqua da strada hard at me; the honking lorries unloaded a brimming wheelie bin. Number 7’s front wheel ferried a constant sprinkle from road to face, like a massively annoying child with a water pistol. My feet quadrupled in weight; every heavy revolution squelched out little dribbles of sock-water through the ventilation holes in Gerard Lagrost’s shoe uppers. Through some perverse osmosis, rain endeavoured to saturate my saddle, from where it was eagerly blotted up by my chamois groin pad. My waterlogged rain jacket was soon doing no more than preventing the escape of body heat; I pulled over and angrily tore it off.
It wasn’t all bad: in minutes, every trace of the morning’s strada bianca pebble-dash was jet-blasted clean off the Hirondelle.

  The sky assumed the exact colour of wet Italian tarmac, hurling forked lightning into the hillsides. Farmhouse drainpipes gushed like fire hoses. Every bridge I crossed was struggling to contain a torrent of churning chocolate, up to the top of its arches in furious brown froth. Having long since concluded that nothing could possibly make my brakes any more shit, I now found sustained heavy rain proving me wrong. Presently I greeted my fate with a Hamlet-ad sense of resigned acceptance, channelling the spirit of every famously unflappable character I could think of. Mr Spock, Angela Merkel, my brother, Alfonso Calzolari: your boy took one hell of a soaking.

  I threw in the filthy, wet towel at Buonconvento. It was a solemn, rather neglected little place sulking behind a clumsy slab of medieval wall, with a mood-compliant old hotel. The ancient proprietor put his hairless head through a beaded fly curtain as I stood there in the austere hall, pooling cold tea on his age-worn quarry tiles. It was probably the most 1914 I’d ever look, and certainly the most pathetic. Captured in sepia mode I’d have made a great poster boy for distressed retro berks. ‘This is Tim. Just £250 could buy him a proper bike.’