Fallen Angel

by William Fotheringham

  * * *

  The bike Coppi used to win that year’s world championship is kept by the Bianchi company at their factory in Treviglio, east of Milan. It still bears his race number, 60. His feeding bottle, covered with cloth to keep the liquid cool, is held firmly in the bottle cage. Compared to today’s fat-tubed carbon-fibre or aluminium machines, the bike looks archaic with its frame of slender, fragile steel. Even so, with its ten-speed Campagnolo gears, upright frame design and narrow tyres, it is recognisably modern compared to the bikes Coppi and company were riding just six or seven years before in the postwar years.

  Cavanna had told Coppi that this would be his last chance to win the world championship. He had always been unsuccessful before: quite apart from the Valkenburg debacle in 1948, the courses were never selective enough for him to get away from the field. This year, however, the circuit included the tough, cobbled climb of the Crespera, tackled on each of the twenty laps. Given the problems he had had with the Italian team over the years, Coppi wanted un’uomo di fiducia – a totally reliable team-mate – and a second-year Bianchi gregario, Michele Gismondi, was the man chosen by Cavanna; the young professional had just emerged from the blind mage’s ‘nursery’. Getting Gismondi into the team needed almost as much work as actually preparing for the event: he recalls travelling from Paris to Rome to ride the selection race with Coppi acting as his personal gregario: getting the sandwiches, making sure he rested in his couchette.

  Making sure Gismondi rode the race was merely part of Cavanna and Coppi’s meticulous preparation. To avoid fatigue, Coppi gave up all his criterium commitments for a month before Lugano, missing out on 53 million lire in potential earnings. He rode one race in France, the Bol d’Or des Monédières, because the circuit in the Dordogne was similar to that in Lugano. For a week before the race, Coppi and Gismondi trained together on the course, finding the easier sections where it would be possible to eat during the event. Both men put in long sessions with Cavanna’s ‘nursery’, outings that included solo efforts and that extended into the afternoon heat, when the race at Lugano would be decided.

  While Bianchi was Coppi’s personal fiefdom, the same could not be said of the Italian national team, even now. Although he had at least managed to persuade Binda not to include Gino Bartali, there were those, he said, ‘who would sell their souls to the devil to see him lose’. The evening before the professional event, the Italians should have been celebrating the victory of Riccardo Filippi in the amateur race, but instead there was a dispute over who would or would not help Coppi. Petrucci said he was there to win and accused Coppi of egotism. There was conflict about whether Gismondi was there for the team, or solely for Coppi: should he wait for another rider, Rossello, if he punctured, or should he devote himself entirely to Coppi? Gismondi is adamant that he and Coppi were largely on their own in the race: ‘It should have been everyone for Coppi, and it seems that way because he won, but several guys in the team were riding for themselves.’ In the event, it made little difference: Coppi left the field behind with eighty kilometres to go, gaining 200 metres’ lead in no time, and then pulling inexorably away.

  Only one man managed to hang on: the Belgian Germain Derycke, who was a better sprinter than Coppi. The Italian knew that if he did not get the Belgian off his back wheel, he might lose the title. On the final ascent of the Crespera, Coppi tried everything: he zigzagged across the road so that the climb would be longer for the Belgian, whom he felt was on the verge of cracking. He tried to manoeuvre him in front, so that he could attack from behind, but Derycke remained glued to his wheel. ‘I saw him pass with Derycke,’ says Fiorenzo Magni, ‘and I yelled, “Make him work.” He looked at me as if to say, “Don’t worry.”’ Finally, on the toughest part of the climb, as they accelerated out of a hairpin bend, he sprinted. That was the end of Derycke. In the ten kilometres that were left to the finish line, he lost a colossal six minutes. There was one pleasing irony as Coppi rode to victory: a Chianti company that was producing Bartali wine had bought many of the publicity hoardings around the circuit, so as Coppi stamped his authority on the race he did so with his rival’s name as a backdrop.

  Coppi did manage to raise one arm in celebration when he crossed the line – he never used the double-handed salute – but he had terrible cramp in his legs. When he told Cavanna, the answer was predictably terse: ‘With what you’ve taken do you expect to feel as if you’ve been on mineral water?’ He had been put on a course of strychnine a week before the race, and on the day he was given pure caffeine. That was not the only stimulus, says Gismondi: ‘There were other things that spurred Coppi to win – the lady with the flowers.’

  The Bianchi boss Aldo Zambrini had taken Giulia Locatelli to the finish line so that his man could see her as he rode. The cycling rumour mill had been grinding since photographs of the pair had been published after the Tour de France; Coppi, it was said, had missed the Tour so that he could be with his mistress. But there had followed a hiatus in the affair. Coppi had declared himself to Giulia; they were now lovers. He had told her, in their little hotel – she said – that they would spend the rest of their lives together. Giulia had returned home to find Dr Locatelli in bed with an ice bag and his suspicions, and the atmosphere in the little house in Varano Borghi was chilly.

  The day before the race, a newsreel had shown Marina reading out a letter in which she asked her father to bring her home the rainbow jersey. However, it was Giulia with whom Coppi shared the glory on the podium, although not every newspaper that acquired the pictures of the two lovers knew who she was. One Swiss paper captioned the image ‘Fausto Coppi and his wife Bruna’. On the front cover of La Gazzetta dello Sport, she is visible on the periphery. Coppi, tellingly, dedicated his victory to his mother and Marina. Not his wife.

  While it is Giulia’s presence in Lugano that has captured headlines since, Bruna was also at the race, and she apparently encountered Giulia in the Italian team hotel afterwards. To avoid a confrontation, Coppi did not go to the post-race dinner: he, Bruna, Cavanna and Gismondi drove straight home. ‘Bruna felt that something was going to happen, there was a dinner afterwards but she couldn’t wait to get out,’ Gismondi told me. Instead, they had a sandwich in Varese, where Cavanna joked that Coppi had better get him some sparkling wine because they had done nothing to celebrate the fact that his protégés had won both the amateur and professional titles.

  The drive home was triumphant: the Italian fans queuing at the border in clouds of smoke from the burned out clutches of their cars cheered their world champion as he passed. So many tifosi had crossed into Switzerland to watch Coppi that customs checks on the border were suspended so that they could get home; when they did so they were laden with chocolate and cigarettes on which duty had not been paid. When La Gazzetta dello Sport’s Rino Negri arrived at his home in Milan on the Monday, his paper’s presses were still running as a total of 630,000 copies were sold across Italy, double what would normally be considered a big sale.

  The following weeks were packed with track appearances and circuit races. In early October, Coppi teamed up with the amateur world champion Filippi to take another stunning win, at record speed, in the Baracchi Trophy two-man team time trial. On his bike, Coppi seemed unstoppable but what was happening in his private life also had a momentum of its own. Giulia remained with her husband, and Coppi stayed with Bruna, but another daring step towards the inevitable was taken at the end of the year. Coppi took Giulia to visit his mother in Castellania. Given the place of la mamma in all Italian men’s hearts, gaining Angiolina’s approval was like a marriage blessing, while exposing his peasant roots showed how far Coppi was placing his trust in his beautiful and very middle-class mistress.

  CHAPTER 12

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  THE OUTLAWS

  ‘Vélo is an anagram of love’ – Louis Nucera, Mes Rayons de Soleil

  Just outside the town of Novi Ligure where farmers’ fields are squeezed uneasily by a sprawl of factories and industrial estat
es stands a tall, elegant villa set among high cypress trees, a little way back from the main road. The handwritten label by the bell on the gate reads simply: Coppi.

  The house has barely changed since Coppi and his lover Giulia Locatelli moved there in 1954. It is still the home of their son, also named Angelo-Fausto, usually known as Faustino, and his family, which includes a little Giulia. But everywhere the past can be felt. I park my car under a line of fir trees at the top of the drive: a little later in the house Faustino shows me photographs of his father, his face prematurely lined by age and stress, lying on a camp bed under those same trees with his leg in plaster, examining a hunting rifle in one picture, eating a bowl of pasta in another.

  When I call Faustino to arrange the visit, I learn that the telephone number has not changed since the days of his father. The interior of the house is ornate, with chandeliers, elaborate plasterwork, fine wallpaper, decorative furniture, vertiginous ceilings: it is a massive step up from anything Castellania can offer, and from Casa Coppi, where Fausto’s mother Angiolina used to keep her kindling in the fridge he had bought her.

  The photographs leave no doubt as to the identity of the previous owner. There is a series of pictures of Coppi sitting on a sofa drinking wine with a journalist, others of Faustino driving a pedal car. Another shows Fausto putting Faustino on a bike, not long, surely, before the campionissimo’s death. There is a series of pictures taken while Fausto and Giulia were on holiday on Elba, endearingly amateurish and unposed. One shows Giulia to the left, with the sea taking up the rest of the frame. She looks tired, her body a little floppy: you can envisage her scolding Fausto for not making it more flattering. Her picture of her lover shows him bending sideways, displaying all the thinness of his body, his clearly defined leg muscles. As Faustino Coppi admits, the house is home to ‘a cult of the dead’. By any measure, his can hardly have been a normal childhood, among the photographs of his illustrious father and the trophies brought back from races around Europe, all retained by his grieving mother.

  A few kilometres away is the house Coppi bought not long before leaving Bruna and Marina; his wife remained there until her death and it is now the home of their daughter. Bruna’s old house is in the centre of the town, Giulia’s on the outskirts, but the two villas have much in common. They are both large, ornate, tranquil and set back from the road. Both still have furniture that dates back to the 1950s. Neither has changed a great deal since Fausto Coppi left for the last time; both the ‘Coppi houses’ are living museums.

  Visiting both houses in the space of a day was a curious experience. Coppi’s son and daughter are both disconcertingly like their father, who is an opaque memory for both of them. Marina admits she has difficulty distinguishing between what she remembers and what she has been told, that gradually she has built up ‘a mosaic’ of memories. Faustino confesses that most of what he knows of his father comes through his mother. It was not until several years after the deaths of both their mothers that the pair became reacquainted, at a race organised in Novi in memory of their father in 2000. Faustino and Marina had abruptly stopped meeting after their father’s death – when Marina was twelve and Faustino four – because their mothers could not abide one another. The two houses lie less than four miles apart but for forty years they were divided by a gulf that might as well have been the Adriatic.

  * * *

  Article 587 of the Italian penal code was explicit: ‘An adulterous wife shall be punished by imprisonment for up to one year. Her accomplice in adultery shall be punished by the same punishment … the crime shall be punishable on complaint of the husband.’ It remained on the statute book until 1968, part of a set of laws that now seem positively medieval. The phrasing makes it clear that a woman’s guilt was considered greater than that of a man, reflecting the importance attached to maintaining well-defined paternity, which would eventually be a key element in the Coppi imbroglio.

  The law was out of kilter with a nation where sexual mores were beginning to change – a fact recognised by judges, who rarely gave more than a three-month suspended prison sentence. In the mid-1950s, when an amendment was proposed, it was not a move to decriminalise adultery itself, but merely an attempt to make men and women equally guilty in the eyes of the law. A straw poll of celebrities – lawyers, actresses, opera singers, sportspeople – sought their opinions on the proposed change, but did not find any voices in favour of the idea that adultery should cease to be considered a crime.

  There was another twist to the law on adultery. If Giulia’s husband injured or killed either her or Coppi during a dispute about the breakup of his marriage, the law would take into account the fact that he had been cuckolded, his honour blemished. A reduced sentence might be given if it was proved that a crime was committed to avenge one’s honour. This was the premise for the film Divorzio all’Italiana of 1961, in which the hero, depicted by Marcello Mastroianni, plans to murder his wife and use Article 587 to mitigate his prison sentence.

  Coppi and Giulia had become ‘marital outlaws’. The phrase was coined by Luigi Sansone, the Socialist deputy who opened the debate over adultery and divorce not long after the scandal involving the campionissimo. Sansone estimated that some four million Italians were fuorilegge due to the anomalies in divorce law that left parents and children with no legal status. Women were disadvantaged, having to live where their husbands specified, while children born outside marriage were second-class citizens. Legally, husbands retained authority over their wives’ children, even if these were the progeny of another relationship. Coppi and Giulia’s situation was not complex; Italian law would make it so.

  In embarking on their affair, Coppi and Giulia Locatelli were not merely breaking the law. In addition, they were defying the Catholic Church, which viewed marriage as part of the sacrament. Under Mussolini, control of marriage had been handed back to the Church, with the reversal of a law on civil marriages as part of the Lateran Accords of 1929. The government of the day was a religious party: the Christian Democrats. Both Church and party would fight attempts to legalise divorce and adultery.

  For the media, the maintenance of the family unit was socially important, whatever false façades that entailed. This was a time when magazines praised ‘the most devoted wife of all Italy’ portraying an ideal of submissive womanhood not far from that of the exemplary mothers so beloved of the fascists. The elected ‘best Italian wife’ for 1954, one Anna Grazia Cicognani, was lauded for her ‘faith, abnegation, spirit of sacrifice and above all her gentleness of character and understanding’. It was a time of public prudery, when, as the historian Daniele Marchesini notes, the television content guidelines specified that marriage must be portrayed in a positive way, that adultery should be shown as a grave sin, that children born outside wedlock were to be shown ‘with care’ and illegal sexual relations had to be depicted as ‘abnormal’.

  Coppi was flouting the moral norms of his sport as well. The private lives of the stars – or what was seen of them in public – were expected to be exemplary. The popular, idealised view of Coppi was of a man with a small child and an adoring, modest wife who dedicated her life to supporting him in his sport. Bruna, and later also Marina, turned up at the occasional race to show the public why Coppi was racing: to provide for his women. Coppi himself had played up to this before Giulia became an important part of his life. His memoir Le Drame de Ma Vie ends: ‘Every win is part of Marina’s dowry, and that’s why I put all my willpower towards winning if I can. When, later on, I take my little Marina to the church dressed in white, perhaps, curious onlookers will say, tenderly “That’s little Marina, you know, the daughter of the old campione”.’

  ‘Cycling was a mysogenistic area of life,’ says Jean Bobet. ‘A team is like a bunch of boys on holiday together. If they talk about women it is not their wives they talk about. They see wives as noble beings, but they discuss the women they find along the way. I believe this ethos contributed to Fausto’s secret love life.’ There was, as Bobet hints, a
distinct contrast between the public image and what actually went on. Turbulent love lives had always been part of cycling. For all the best efforts of men such as the Tour de France organiser Jacques Goddet and before him Henri Desgrange – who attempted to ban women from the Tour de France caravan – there were women aplenty on the cycling circuit.

  Coppi cannot have lacked female attention as he plied his trade on the velodromes of Europe in the winter. International stars such as Gina Lollobrigida and Maria Callas made a point of visiting him and Bartali at races. Clearly they believed that being pictured with either campione would enhance their celebrity status. Giulia Locatelli claimed, after Coppi’s death, that his conquests before her included noted actresses of screen and stage. This is impossible to verify; he must have had opportunities but no one knows whether he acted on them. What was extraordinary about his entanglement with the doctor’s wife was that some of its crucial moments took place in front of journalists and cameramen who could not believe their good fortune.