A Champion Cyclist Against the Nazis, by Alberto Toscano

Title: A Champion Cyclist Against the Nazis – The Incredible Life of Gino Bartali
Author: Alberto Toscano (with a preface by Marek Halter and an afterword by Gianni Mura, translator not acknowledged)
Publisher: Pen & Sword (originally published in France in 2018 by Armand Colin as Un vélo contre la barbarie nazie - L’incroyable destin du champion Gino Bartali)
Year: 2020
Pages: 184
Order: Pen & Sword
What it is: A brief biographical sketch of Gino Bartali, setting his life against some of the politics of the time
Strengths: It’s shorter than Road to Valour
Weaknesses: Toscano lacks critical distance and presents as facts things people simply want to believe happened, despite the lack of supporting evidence

The worst thing in the world is a hypocrite and a liar who hides behind religion. Ultimately we’re all responsible for our own actions not only to God but also to ourselves and to those affected by them. Here was a person who claimed to have profound faith yet spent his life lying and breaking promises.
~ Vito Ortelli

Gino Bartali, famously, had a big nose and short arms (they didn’t reach his pockets). Famous, here, is obviously being used in the loosest possible sense.

Other people think Bartali’s fame rests on his faith in God and the Catholic church, for being known as il Pio, the pious, for going to mass before Tour stages and for having a strange (yet almost appropriate) devotion to St Thérèse of Lisieux (as a young girl she dreamed of becoming a saint and the blessèd Gino is already a secular one and could yet gain entry to the Vatican’s VIP lounge). But Bartali is no more famous for that than he is famous for having won a couple of Tours, three Giri and a handful of Classics.

Bartali used to be famous for single-handedly saving Italy from Civil War, and then cleaving Italy in two, fans of him on one side, fans of Fausto Coppi on the other, each ready to take up arms against the other. But even those feats have fallen by the wayside and, today, Gino Bartali is famous for one thing and for one thing only: he spent the second world war saving Italy’s Jews from the Nazis.

In the last two decades or so, this last aspect of Bartali’s life has been a boon for creative types. Bartali has been the subject of a musical, Glory Ride (2023). He’s got a song, Giorgio e Gino (2008). There’s been films: Alberto Negro’s Gino Bartali – L’intramontabile (2006); Oran Jacoby’s documentary My Italian Secret (2014); and Enrico Paolantonio’s animated La Bicicletta di Bartali / Bartali’s Bicycle (2024). There’s been Terry Dodd Lomax’s short, Gino’s War (2022). There’s been a Black Listed script, Nathan Skulnik’s Lion Man of Tuscany (2007). A couple of kid lit authors have leaped aboard the bandwagon with thin but colourful picture books, Megan Hoyt with Bartali’s Bicycle (2021) and Julian Voloj’s imaginatively titled Gino Bartali (2021). There’s even been a epic poem, Viva Bartali! (2023), by Damian Walford Davies.

And then there’s the articles, the blog posts, the podcasts … so many, so, so many, almost all telling the same story. With only the odd notable exception that even acknowledges the existence of an alternative narrative.

Alberto Toscano’s A Champion Cyclist Against the Nazis – The Incredible Life of Gino Bartali does not acknowledge the existence of an alternative narrative. In fairness to the author, the alternative narrative was only beginning to be revealed as he was knocking off this slight (less than 200 pages) paean to his Italian hero. Even so, a little bit of critical distance should have seen Toscano questioning some of the claims made about Bartali’s wartime experiences.

Those wartime experiences, according to Toscano’s account, include:

• aiding in the creation and distribution of false identity cards that saved the lives of 800 Italian Jews;
• creating distractions in the train station in Terontola that allowed Jewish refugees aboard incoming trains to avoid German guards in the station when disembarking;
• being arrested and interrogated by Germans not once, but twice, each time escaping internment and torture by a friendly Italian guard recognising him and vouching for his innocence;
• allowing a Jewish family to hide in his house in Florence;
• freeing nearly 50 British soldiers trapped by fascist snipers;
• being captured by Italian partisans who thought he was a collaborator.

That would be quite the set of wartime experiences for anyone who endured the six years of World War II. They’re even more incredible when you consider that Bartali’s wartime experiences were crammed into a period of nine months or so, November or December of 1943 to July or August of 1944, from shortly after Italy withdrew from the war to the liberation of Florence.

But questions are not asked by Toscano. Everything is just accepted as having happened the way people say it happened. Hasn’t Bartali been declared Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Memorial Center? Well, yes, he has. But the full evidence they based this declaration on has not been revealed. Did it include all or any of the claims Toscano makes? The only one it is known to include is the claim that Bartali hid a Jewish family in a house in Florence. But in Yad Vashem’s account of that story the house was that of Bartali’s cousin, Armando Sizzi, not his own.

Six years before Toscano told his version of the Bartali legend in 2018, brother and sister Aili and Andres McConnon told their version of it in Road to Valour - Gino Bartali, Tour de France Legend and Italy’s Secret World War Two Hero (2012), a Hollywood film pitch stretched to 300 pages in which Gino wins the Tour, Gino saves the Jews, and Gino wins the Tour again. The McConnons then, like Toscano here, did their utmost to sell the legend. But even they, even then, had to acknowledge some failings in the evidence they sought to rely on. Such as that concerning the 800 Jews saved by Bartali.

The 800 are central to the legend of Gino Bartali and his wartime activities. No telling of the story is complete without mention of the 800. The number appears to have been magicked into being in 2003, when the Regional Council of Tuscany, headed by the politician Riccardo Nencini (a nephew of Gastone Nencini who, like Bartali, was a Tuscan cycling champion), sought to honour a Jewish accountant from Pisa, Giorgio Nissim, who was at the heart of a clandestine network that provided forged identity documents to Jews in the area of Lucca, to the northwest of Florence. Nencini somehow linked Bartali to Nissim’s network, which is credited with having saved the lives of 800 Jews. Or at least 800. Or over 800. It varies depending on how precise or imprecise the teller wishes to be.

Nencini’s Regional Council awarded Nissim and Bartali their highest honour, their Gonfalone d’argento – a silver ribbon. In 2006 the Italian president, Carlo Ciampi, followed suit, and awarded Bartali Italy’s Gold Medal for Civil Valour. But was Nencini right to link Bartali to Nissim’s network? About a dozen pages before the end of Road to Valour, the McConnons admit a flaw in the evidence supporting some of their claims:

Very little is known about Gino’s work with this particular network [Nissim’s]. Despite repeated calls the government ministry responsible for the [Civil Valour] award would not share the file compiled for Gino because, they said, the selection process for the award is not public. The two surviving members of the network in Lucca who also received awards told us that they did not meet with Gino during the war.

In 2003, one of those priests – Arturo Paoli – also told Toscano Oggi that he was unaware of Bartali’s involvement with Nissim’s network.

Toscano, though, he admits no flaws in the evidence. He admits no evidence. He just accepts as fact that Bartali “had managed to save the lives of around 800 Jews.” He just accepts as fact all the other claims made about Bartali’s wartime experiences, too. Claims that since the original publication of this book in France in 2018 – to tie in with the Giro d’Italia’s grande partenza in Jerusalem – have been challenged by others, including people who have previously helped popularise the legend, such as John Foot and Stafano Pivato. Challenges that will be dealt with in more detail in a Mythologies piece in the near future.

An Italian journalist and political commentator with a love of France, Toscano sets Bartali’s story against the backdrop of Italian history. In a book of 184 pages that means that neither biography nor history is dealt with in any detail. All Toscano can do is skip lightly over the surface of the story.

Most of Bartali’s story, as told by Toscano, you’ll already be familiar with from all of those articles and all of those podcasts, or from the McConnons’ Road to Valour. The history, there Toscano is very selective and too often it feels like he’s pulling a Zelig or a Forrest Gump on you, painting a real backdrop into which he can then drop in the stories told about Bartali, thus imbuing them with verisimilitude. It certainly beats offering footnotes disclosing sources for the claims made (A Champion Cyclist Against the Nazis comes with 43 endnotes, only one of which is a source, the rest are either minor contextual glosses – such as that the Col d’Izoard is an Alpine mountain pass – or simply the original Italian versions of some of the text).

Toscano, as if he were his namesake the other Alberto Toscano, likes to toss in references to popular culture, particularly Italian films you’re unlikely to have seen. There’s Ettore Scola’s A Special Day (1977), used to shine extra light on Hitler’s visit to Rome in May 1938. Vittorio De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970) “shows us the shock provoked by the racial laws of 1938”. which stripped Italy’s Jews of their rights as citizens. De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) is dragged in, kicking and screaming, because apparently you can’t write about Italian cycling in those years without mentioning it. Pier Pasolini’s Mamma Roma (1962) is touched upon, as is his The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966) and Luigi Comencini’s Everybody Go Home (1960). Toscano even quotes from 2006’s Gino Bartali - L’intramontabile to show us what Bartali’s childhood was like. Because BOATS films – based on a true story – are renowned for the accuracy of the tales they tell.

This pop-cult angle does perhaps offer something slightly more fresh when it comes to Bartali’s post-cycling life, when he and Coppi appeared on Il Musichiere, a Name That Tune type game show:

An unforgettable moment, the climax of the 1959 show, came when they started a duet of the famous (Italian) song Come pioveva! (It was Raining so Hard!), based on alleged polemics of their old rivalry. Bartali sang ‘on the snow-capped Alps the challenges we faced’. And Coppi replied: ‘Yes, but it’s you who lost!’ […] With scripts carefully prepared by the channel’s writers, the musical duo ended with lyrics sung in unison. As one man, Gino and Fausto sang:

We were rivals, but friendly
We were enemies, but always loyal
The hostility that divided us
What was it like! What was it like!

The come pioveva! of the famous song became ‘What was it like!’ The friction between Gino and Fausto (often loyal and sometimes less so) pleased the Italians enormously. They entertained them, represented them, reassured them, and brought them together, a little like Alcide and Palmiro and Don Camillo and Peppone. Thank you both.

This, in many ways sums up A Champion Cyclist Against the Nazis. It’s not really about what happened. It’s about how people want to imagine it happened. It’s a book for people who want to be entertained and reassured. If that’s all you really want from a cycling book ...