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  Beginning – at last – to regret my unsightly and draining granddad showdown, I laboured up a steepening valley with a motorway over my head. A robust odour hung around, and at length I established it came from the unfortunately marinated brim of my cap. ‘KIT WASHED DAILY’ – another message I needed to have embroidered on the back of my jersey, along with ‘BLOWA YOUR HORN I SMASHA YOUR FACE’ and ‘I SLOW DOWN FOR CATS’.

  Four hundred metres, 500, 600: the air freshened, especially once I’d stuffed my cap in my back pocket, and the settlements seemed progressively better groomed. Avellino had the look of a prosperous town in the French Alps, ringed with trim new corporate headquarters and landscaped apartment blocks. A rearing meander through its older streets led me to the well-scrubbed Piazza della Libertà , a showpiece space bordered by public buildings faced in the many shades of ochre that nineteenth-century Continentals were so partial to. This was it: the finish line of the leg from Rome, four down and four left. Would you just look at me go, ladies, like some kind of Four-Stage Johnny Halfway.

  I pushed the Hirondelle through the piazza’s ageless lawns and fountains, finding it quite easy to picture Giuseppe Azzini working his Bianchi over the line here. It would be half an hour before the rest of the field began to toil in, delayed by a convoy of carts and carriages en route to a religious shrine. Calzolari lost forty-four minutes, though he retained the overall lead by a country mile; Azzini moved up to second, but was still over an hour behind. Marvellously, though probably not for him, Mario Marangoni once again brought up the very rearest of rears, five hours down on the stage and almost a full day behind Calzolari in the general classification.

  It was gone five, and with some very lumpy scenery to traverse I was sorely tempted to call it a day. But sitting on a bench in the clear, bright sun with Paolo in my lap I was rashly galvanised by the tale of Riccardo Palea, one of the surviving trio of rank-amateur aspiranti. On the run-in to Avellino, one of those shrine-bound carriages ran Palea over, inflicting terrible head injuries that saw him rushed to hospital after he had somehow made it over the line. Despite working on him throughout the rest day, the doctors were unable to save the sight in one of his eyes; yet when stage five started out at 4 a.m., there he was on his bike, just his mouth, nostrils and functioning peeper visible through a hefty swaddle of bandage. Palea retired after a few dozen miles, but even so I felt honour bound to crack on. And as it turned out, to crack up.

  The celebration of unlikely local foods had been a feature of recent days: south of Frosinone I’d just missed out on a local Day of Dumplings, and now I passed under several banners advertising the Avellino and district hazelnut festival. It was difficult to avoid the townspeople’s enthusiasm for these diminutive hard-shelled fruits – every other household had at least a couple of hazel trees in the garden, and with school and work done for the day these were now being energetically relieved of their ripe bounty. At the same time I couldn’t begin to imagine how one might fill an entire weekend with hazelnut-themed celebrations, though I gave it a go as the road left Avellino behind. As it also left the town very distantly below, oxygen debt took a toll on these imaginings. ‘Smear your nuts in Nutella,’ I rasped bitterly at the empty tarmac. ‘Stick a Topic up your arse.’

  Stage five, Avellino to Bari, was comfortably the shortest of the race. It was also, in the estimation of the Gazzetta dello Sport’s correspondent, uncomfortably the most debilitating: ‘At least 200 of the 328km are painfully steep, the road always up and down, without a moment’s respite.’ Had my Italian been better I’d have understood enough of this to have regrouped overnight in Avellino. As it was, in failing light I progressed ever more agonisingly up the Campanian Alps, through the hazelnuts, then the chestnuts, and at horrid length into the lonesome mountain pines.

  Skree-eenk, skreeee-eee-eeenk. That becalmed slave-ship sidled back into my head as the pedals groaned round, full weight on left leg, full weight on right. Piles of leaves and twigs were heaped across a road that didn’t see much action these days, as further evidenced by the derelict holiday chalets leering creepily at me through the dark conifers. Occasionally the suffocating greenery parted and a yawning, untamed vista of rocky stacks and clefts tolled out.

  The sat-nav told a tale of falling heat and rising height, 10km of uphill shit-eating, now 15, now 20. At 900m the temperature had sunk to 12 degrees, but I was frothing death-sweat like it had gone out of fashion, which I’m told it may have. How I longed to rip that hateful woollen jersey off and hurl it into the plunging abyss of my choice, followed by these hateful woollen shorts; with the elastic gone and the safety pin bent, they spent the day working their way down my hips, leading to unseemly and sometimes illegal scenes by late afternoon.

  After a finale of wildly flailing switchbacks, the road topped out by a desolate clearing strewn with a museum of litter. I was beyond hate now; a toneless, reedy lament creaked unbidden from my throat, the sound of Harvey Keitel’s whimpering nude meltdown in Bad Lieutenant. Too bollocksed to manage a dismount, I slid my arse forward off the saddle and planted both feet on the gravel, a procedure that simultaneously slammed my testes against the crossbar. A pallid smile: a month ago, that would have really hurt. Then two shiny squares bounced the last rays of sunset into my hooded eyes, and I shuffled the Hirondelle across the gravel towards them.

  Embedded in the wall of rock at the clearing’s edge: a pair of small hand-decorated tiles, each portraying a cyclist in traditional kit astride his machine. The blue-glazed words beneath were in a cursive, old-school hand, and the iron frames around them bore rusty witness to the passing of many hard winters. ‘Ad Angelo,’ began the first, ‘continua pure la tua scalata, noi ti staremo sempre a ruota.’ The second: ‘A Benedetto Corrado, indimenticabile compagno di tante scalate. Gli amici del G.S. ciclo run.’

  As my brain stumbled through the translation, I realised my Bad Lieutenant had turned sad, so sad that a fluid other than sweat was now dripping off his chin.

  ‘To Angelo – carry on with your climb, we will always be at your wheel.’

  ‘To Benedetto Corrado, unforgettable companion of so many climbs. The friends of the G.S. ciclo run.’

  I stood there in the gathering gloom and let my face leak. No one does poetic eulogy and pathos better than the Italians. I wept because I was only halfway through and already running on empty. Because I could see no end. Because I didn’t want to die, and because if I did I’d wind up on that unbearably poignant memorial wall and Angelo and Benedetto might not like that and their ghosts would draw a nob on my plaque.

  And I wept because riding a bike up a big hill makes heroes of us all. It was impossible to imagine Angelo and Benedetto being so affectingly immortalised had they occupied their leisure hours with any other recreational activity. Nobody waxes lyrical about the Convicts of the Baize, or publishes lump-throated retrospectives entitled, The 1914 Mixed Doubles Final – The Toughest of All Time. Footballers don’t play on after losing an eye, and no darts player will emulate Tom Simpson by checking out with the croaked words, ‘Put me back on the oche.’

  But when Angelo and Benedetto toiled up here, and when I followed them, we’d all starred in our own one-man epics of tribulation and triumph. In conquering this forsaken mountain road we had suffered like Merckx suffered, like Coppi, like Alfonso Calzolari; for 24 brutal kilometres, we were one of them. Yet the two old boys on those tiles had died many years ago, and it now struck me that it was some time since I’d seen any young cyclists. A wave of nostalgic regret for the passing of an age of everyman two-wheeled heroics swept over me and I wept some more.

  The tear-smeared view from the other side of the summit was both wonderful and appalling: a shadowed eternity of plunging green valleys and peak after mist-wreathed peak, more like the bastard Andes. Emptied of human needs and emotions, I succumbed to gravity, and after eight missing minutes registered that chilly mountain isolation had given way to balmy civic hubbub. Having freewheeled through a number of vibrant,
messy towns I grasped that it was now completely dark, and came to a halt outside the large mirrored-glass hotel that welcomed visitors to Montecorvino Rovella.

  I propped the Hirondelle against an upside-down chair by the brackish outdoor pool and stumbled woodenly inside, greeted by a wave of stale heat and the smell of cupboard and Dettol. The fading red carpet was lavishly soiled and the lights flickered; that soaring glazed façade seemed distantly at odds with what it concealed. There was something funny about this place, but, swaying Weeble-like at the reception desk, I was in no fit state to put my finger on precisely what.

  Presently an unprofessional character sauntered out of a back room and assessed me while blotting his brow with a crumpled hankie. He considered my rasped request for a room by repeatedly flicking his tongue across a stubbled lip, and at length asked for €60. I fumbled out three sweaty twenties and he snatched them with a chancer’s glee: Done – you have been.

  Every town in Italy boasts at least some small pocket of loveliness, but if Montecorvino had one it had hidden it even better than La Spezia. The total absence of municipal illumination didn’t help: I almost had to feel my way into town, guided by passing headlights and the cluster of orange glows emitted by groups of aimless young smokers. If my mirror-fronted hotel exuded the tatty, Western-knock-off vibe of Brezhnev Communism, then the town centre went the full Ceaus¸escu. Because they were Italian, people were gamely out in droves along the dingy promenade, but because they were here, there was nothing for them to see or do: no well-dressed shop windows to linger before, no neon-fronted gelaterias to gather outside, nothing in fact but a kid-show puppeteer packing his stall away by torchlight.

  This was by no means a small place, but hunting down calories necessitated a twenty-minute trudge. Still, just as it was when I drove through Romania in 1990, when I did find food it was almost free. ‘Solo bottiglie,’ said the pizzeria waitress after I asked for a carafe of red. I didn’t think I was up to a whole bottle, but nearly asked for two when I learned they were €3.

  Replete with dough and plonk, on the way back I viewed Montecorvino through more forgiving eyes. Look: there’s a rather delightful old doorway. Hey, love the war memorial! And what’s this fetching townhouse with its softly lit façade and hand-painted hallway murals and promise of free wifi and . . . oh, it’s the hotel I should have stayed at.

  Approaching the very strange one I was staying at, a cheery little scene played itself out before me. Three young men were trying to hitch a lift on the main road out of town, employing an age-old ruse: the most presentable stood at the roadside with his thumb out, while his vest-wearing friends crouched behind a wall. Almost at once an old Fiat Uno pulled over, already crowded with heads. Thumb-man jogged up to the driver’s window, followed by his emergent chums; after an exchange of companionable noises, two of the three somehow bundled inside and the overladen Fiat laboured away. Their remaining friend was bereft for no more than twenty seconds, at which point a ponytailed girl pulled her scooter to a halt just past his outstretched thumb. After a brief and jolly chat he swung his leg over the pillion seat – no helmet, no problem – and off they buzzed into the darkness, down towards the clusters of light spread distantly along the valley.

  It was at once a heart-warming vignette of the kindness of Italian strangers, and an appalling tragedy: to think that young people from across a generous area had to congregate in a dump like this in search of fun. But two minutes later, pulling back my red nylon bedspread with a dramatic crackle of static, I accepted that Montecorvino Rovella was no worse than a good 70 per cent of British towns, in fact better than half, and that if you tried to hitchhike home from any of them you’d be walking in at 4 a.m. wreathed in flob.

  * * *

  GENERAL CLASSIFICATION – STAGE 4

  (Rome–Avellino, 385.4km)

  Alfonso CALZOLARI 63:35:18

  Giuseppe AZZINI + 1:03:15

  Clemente CANEPARI +1:57:07

  Timothy MOORE +31:50:10

  Stage starters: 26

  Stage finishers: 23

  CHAPTER 17

  ‘THAT GENTLEMAN IS doing a historic tour, I saw his antique bicycle in the games hall.’

  The great thing about very old Italian men, other than sometimes being slower than me on a bike, is the loud and measured clarity of their speech. A couple of granddads were in conversation at the breakfast salon’s dim fundament, yet I could hear and understand their every stentorian word.

  ‘Why is he here?’

  ‘In Montercorvino?’

  ‘No, in our hotel.’

  ‘Ha! I have no idea. Hungry, isn’t he?’

  ‘Very.’

  The TV hall outside the basement games room was dotted with geriatrics paying homage to the breakfast-show weather-general. At last the pre-decimal penny dropped: this was an old-people’s home. Or, to quote the homepage I’ve just consulted, ‘The largest hotel for pensioners in southern Italy.’ Suddenly I understood why my en suite had been carpeted in non-slip mats, and why I’d woken up in the sweaty small hours to yank off a heavy plastic undersheet. The games room, I now noted, was a bingo hall, with a tombola on the stage before many ranks of chairs with faded, balding red-plush seat cushions.

  Having lugged the Hirondelle into the TV room I paused before the scattered audience, with the general over my shoulder. This was surely my crowd, an unmissable show-and-tell opportunity for nostalgic reminiscence. I recalled how Paolo Facchinetti had tracked down Alfonso Calzolari to an old-people’s home up near Genoa, and now scanned the crinkle-eyed faces: he might be Calzolari’s nephew, she might be Benedetto Corrado’s widow. But fiddling with the moist brim of my freshly sink-laundered cap I realised they were just too far gone, not looking at the general or me but straight through us, two dozen studies in crumb-mouthed vacancy. These people had been born into the almost medieval world of Calzolari-era southern Italy, and had since lived through some of the most profound changes any human is ever likely to experience: so much locked up in those heads, with the key now thrown away. I’d have smothered them all with a pillow, but it was pushing nine and I had a long ride ahead.

  Morning kilometres come cheap, two-for-one, get ’em while you can. I’ll have twenty of those big hilly ones, a couple of dozen flatties – oh, and five straight into a gale past these wind turbines. I piled on the miles before lunch, up and down sweaty valleys threaded with skeins of smoke: this was still hazelnut country, and the after-harvest leaf-burning left a not displeasing tang in the hot air. Coke and a sack of crisps were taken on board at Zurpino, and I was still chewing when the road abruptly threw itself at the scrubby plain beneath the village. It was a straight descent signposted at 15 per cent: I tucked down and went for it, hitting 64kmh amid a tumult of rattles, creaks and howling wind. Near the bottom, with the Hirondelle under no overall control, a big blue school bus passed me with an inch to spare and the usual colon-draining horn blast. You should have heard what I called the driver. If you live within 30km of Zurpino, you would have.

  As the sun went down, the price of a kilometre went up. It always did, though the rate of inflation seemed particularly harsh that afternoon. I began to understand why the 1914 pundits had decreed this stage the most forbidding: there were five ups for every down, and the threadbare semi-desert made every horizon seem a hundred miles away. The few towns I passed through were cursed with dauntingly steep high streets that I would gladly have pushed the bike up. But never did, because every one of them was dotted with witnesses, groups of locals idling in the shade with their arms folded, watching the world go by. And paying especially close attention when that world was one hundred years old, squeaking past on wooden wheels wearing a funny hat and Child Catcher goggles.

  Vietri di Potenza was pencilled in as my overnight stop, after a lunchtime map session revealed it as the southernmost point on the route: every turn of the pedals from here on would take me closer to home. A flick through Paolo sealed the deal. ‘After Vietri, the road became worse: rid
ers faced a terrible ascent of many kilometres on a surface of big stones.’ The gradient would still be there, and the way things had been going so might the big stones. It was a prospect that begged for fresh legs.

  I emptied myself up the fearsome hairpins that snaked down from Vietri di Potenza’s rocky pinnacle, then wound through its quiet, narrow streets in a state of weary dismay. If I’d learned one thing in the last few days, it was not to count on finding a bed in even quite sizeable towns down here. But I clearly hadn’t learned that thing at all. Vietri was big enough to merit boldface typography on my Touring Editore map, yet had nothing to offer the visitor but fags and alcohol, plus fresh bread and shoes if he came back in the morning.

  After two difficult day-ends on the trot, the unthinkable thought of a third yanked me in through the swing doors of the last-chance saloon: I was going to ask strangers for help. The people of Vietri could certainly boast a promising record of assisting cyclists in need. When the 1914 frontrunners rode up to the dreaded post-Vietri section, they were astonished to find townspeople crouched by the roadside with hammers and chisels, making those big stones smaller. It proved no great challenge to connect the current inhabitants with this distant act of dedication: everyone I saw could quite plausibly have participated in it. I have seen the face of death: it lives in Vietri di Potenza and wears a black headscarf.