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  Trees began to outnumber buildings and I cranked up the revs. My knees pistoned crazily, the steel rings on the bidon lids launched into a spastic, bin-lid rattle and the blue world before me steamed up at its leather edges. I figured I’d soon be grateful for my easy-spinning, twenty-two-toothed main sprocket, but it did mean I’d never be eating up the kilometres. With my legs a rotary blur I checked the juddering sat-nav and saw I’d just topped 26kmh, barely faster than Calzolari’s average speed over the entire race. On the relevant screen, his digital blue-jerseyed homunculus was already pulling inexorably away from mine, twenty-seven minutes up the virtual road. As a race it was over before it had begun; I sat up and coasted down to a sustainable cadence.

  This brief effort and the lingering heat brought on a premature pit stop. Part of me could see that Legnano was no more than a run-of-the-mill, mid-sized Italian town, but another part was in charge as I sat outside a café on its main piazza. Slumped in the warm shade with a salami panino and a litre of acqua gassata inside me, what a profoundly splendid place it seemed, with its octagonal church and its terracotta roofs and its stooped old widows left behind when their families sneaked off to the seaside.

  They say the Tour encapsulates the spirit of France, but as an embodiment of its host nation the Giro is clearly the more convincing. In 2011, the organisers marked the centenary of Giuseppe Verdi’s death by dedicating each stage to a different opera. Stage winners are routinely required to participate in podium pasta-cooking contests. The Pope blesses the leader’s jersey, for heaven’s sake. Contemplating all this I expansively unfolded my Touring Editore map of Lombardy, a triumph of handsome, ageless Continental cartography, like something Napoleon would have jabbed at with an imperious finger. Sesto Calende, Lago Maggiore, Biella . . . every stop on my route ahead suddenly beckoned me with the promise of sun-dappled refreshments enjoyed amongst engaging natives in picturesque splendour. This journey, an undertaking that had previously seemed absurd and appalling, now made perfect, beautiful sense.

  It was getting dark when I called it a day at Gallarate. Rolling up to the first hotel in town I felt no more than pleasantly well exercised, but climbing off the Hirondelle my legs almost buckled. To my bewildered consternation I found I was utterly spent, so spent that I offered mumbling assent to the receptionist’s demand for €72 up front, some way above my daily accommodation budget. ‘I know you people like keep bike in room,’ she said as I fumbled out the cash. ‘You can take in elevator, is no problem.’ How things had changed. Twelve years before I’d faced nightly abuse for even suggesting such an arrangement to the hoteliers of France. But twelve years before I was better equipped for the challenge of forcing a laden bike vertically into a tiny lift. I shook my head and wheeled the Hirondelle down into the subterranean garage.

  It was a night of many long-forgotten rituals, relived with a twist. There I was again, stooped nude over a hotel bidet, sluicing the residue of human toil from my kit. Only this time it was all hundredweight wool, which clung on to its filth and wouldn’t be even half-dry by morning. There I was again, prodding uneaten pizza shards around a plate ringed with beer empties and unsettling fellow diners with my dead-eyed stare. Only this time the pizza was better, and a lot more crows had their feet round the stare. And there I was again, lapsing into a coma while brainless Continental shite pumped out of a hotel-bedroom telly. Only this time in gaudy, tits-out BerlusconiVision.

  CHAPTER 6

  ‘HELLO, SAVLON, MY old friend,’ I sang, wanly enriching my jacksie, ‘you’ve come to torture me again.’ The upside of this morning ordeal was that every squirt – of toothpaste and concentrated travel wash as well as genital bactericide – meant there was ever so slightly less to compress into my undersized saddlebag. The downside was thereafter sheathing my smeared nethers in sodden wool; the first coil of musky disinfectant steamed up from my groin as the hotel waitress came over with a cappuccino.

  Though few and flat, the previous day’s kilometres had wreaked an ominous toll. I drained the cup in a trembling, numb hand – the tips of my four smallest fingers were dead to the world – then advanced to the buffet like a pensioner in a post office. The full and horrid truth emerged as I dutifully ingested icky jam-filled brioche croissants: I had pushed myself as far as I could, but not nearly as far as I would shortly have to. The map revealed that my draining efforts had achieved no more than deliver me from one Milan airport to a place very close to the other. The waitress, via a puckered intake of breath and a steeply inclined forearm, made it clear that the route ahead led me smartly away from the gentle plains of Lombardy. Paolo Facchinetti was grimly setting the scene for the 1914 Giro’s looming apocalypse, and when I clicked up to Alfonso’s screen on the sat-nav he span round and flicked me the Vs.

  That first morning introduced one of the unexpected challenges of long-distance touring on a really old bike: getting out on the sodding road before lunch. As I pushed the Hirondelle up the garage ramp, it fell apart like a clown’s car. The saddlebag bracket collapsed, and while attempting to keep the destabilised bike upright, the front wheel somehow worked free of its dropouts. In fact, almost every bolt, screw and spoke that could have loosened itself had done so.

  Do you own a bicycle manufactured in the twenty-first century? If so, I would ask that you go and kiss it full on the saddle, right now. My everyday ride is a decade-old ladies’ hybrid bought second-hand off eBay for forty quid, chosen largely for its lack of theft appeal. Yet this machine is capable of taking me up and down hills in all weather, in ease, safety and comfort – and doing all this while requiring no maintenance beyond a monthly squirt of air in its tyres. You know what a Victorian cyclist would say to that? He’d say, HOLY FUCKING SHIT.

  The point I’m trying to make is that owners of even nominally crappy modern bikes really don’t know how lucky they are. I didn’t until I’d spent the balance of my morning in that hotel garage, tightening stuff up and trying to get the Hirondelle to roll straight. By the time the bike and I creaked out into the daylight it was gone twelve, and my jersey cuffs were despoiled with black streaks that accurately looked permanent. On the plus side my shorts were almost dry.

  ‘Eh – tutto completo d’epoca!’

  I was wheeling the Hirondelle through a shopping centre in Gallarate – thanks, sat-nav – and looked up to see a plump chap of middle years giving me a big grin and the circled forefinger and thumb of Latin approval. It was a doubly cheering encounter: not only was someone appreciating my full-monty vintage get-up, but I understood that he was. Forza 1984 Business Italian! The man came over and positively assessed my bike’s incantible wheels of wood and handsome original sella, then shouted ‘Bravo!’ and clapped me extremely hard on the damp woollen back. Some upgrade from previous native interactions: everyone from the airport staff to the hotel receptionist had visibly pitied me, an ageing loser who couldn’t afford proper cycling clothes or a new bike.

  The sun was high, and not far out of Gallarate the road set off to join it. Enthused by my bravo encounter, I stood up in the saddle. When I sat down again it gave way slightly, then – OW! – completely. With something beyond disappointment I turned back and saw the front two inches of the saddle, its whole nose section, face-up in the cobbled gutter. The hundred-year-old leather had torn through all the way round, taking with it the steel end bracket. I retrieved the severed nose but the damage was ostentatiously irreparable; I looked down and saw that my nuts were now to be cushioned by a big rusty bolt.

  Grateful again for the absence of witnesses, I flung the Hirondelle against a tree, sat heavily down on the wizened grass beside it and tried to feel sorry for myself. It wasn’t easy. The very first time I’d got on this ancient bike a bit of it broke, and with fewer than 100km covered since, equipment failure was already into double figures. Getting my leg over this geriatric suddenly seemed an act of perverted abuse: it was old enough to be my grandmother. What in the name of Satan’s cock and balls had I been thinking of?

 
; The tanks of gloom were on my lawn, with the stormtroopers of sober realism already kicking the shit out of the rockery. I picked up the severed saddle nose with quivering fingers that could not feel it. After less than one full day on flat roads, both man and machine were falling apart; imminent gradient in both its flavours seemed unlikely to retard these processes. Things were going to go wrong that I wouldn’t know how to put right. All sorts of things, involving public disgrace at best, and disfiguring injury at worst. The only sensible, adult course of action was quitting right here, and right now.

  I pressed my crochet-gloved hands over my face and screamed into them loud and long. Then I climbed back on the Hirondelle and pedalled tentatively away in a semi-erect half-crouch, failing to admire the glittery splendour of Lake Maggiore laid out beneath me.

  By unhappy coincidence, my Giro had started to unravel in almost precise geographical sympathy with the 1914 original. As the storm-sodden peloton rode out of Sesto Calende and away along the shore of Maggiore, a cry rang out from the darkness: ‘Watch out – nails in the road!’ Too late: the entire field, plus its following motorcade of journalists and race marshals, came to a ragged, hissing halt. Sabotage-related punctures were a feature of almost every major race back then, and more than a few since: the practice enjoyed a memorable revival in the Tour de France I’d just watched, when a scatter of carpet tacks wreaked carnage on a Pyrenean summit. But this was something else. Nails had been strewn in countless thousands along a great length of road, and in the rain-lashed blackness the riders’ acetylene lamps couldn’t pick them out. The lucky got through with just a couple of flats; others found that the three spares they carried about their person weren’t enough. For some of the pros and almost all of the aspiranti, the Giro was over before it had begun.

  The race organisers had expected serious pointy-metal bother, even offering a hefty 1,000-lire reward for anyone who dobbed in a nail-chucker (dob in four and you’d have out-earned the Tour winner). Sabotage in those days was seldom an act of mindless mischief: people disrupted bicycle races because they really hated bicycles.

  In the history of transport, unfamiliarity has always bred Luddite contempt. Let us refer once again to the development of the balloon, and the pioneering experiments of Jacques Charles. On 27 August 1783, Charles untethered the first hydrogen-filled balloon, an unmanned 35-cubic-metre sphere of rubberised silk he dubbed Le Globe, from its moorings in the Champ de Mars in Paris. His gasps of delight as he watched it rise up, up and away would evolve to cries of anguish: having come to a rest near the village of Gonesse, 21km north of Paris, Le Globe was summarily shredded by a baying pitchfork mob. (In fairness, their fears were well founded: less than two years later, 130 houses in the Irish town of Tullamore were razed to the ground after a balloon crashed and burned.)

  Bike-bashing had been part of cycling history from the very beginning, when Karlsruhe’s fearful citizens banished Baron von Drais and his pioneering velocipede from their streets. By the end of the nineteenth century, as bikes became integrated into daily life, all manner of spuriously affected parties queued up to despise them. Farmers grumbled that bicycles panicked horses and lowered dairy yields. Embittered watch- and piano-makers claimed they were being driven out of business by the trend for marking special birthdays with the gift of two-wheeled personal transport. Milliners complained that cyclists had stopped wearing hats: a US consortium petitioned Congress to pass a law obliging bike-owners to buy a minimum of two felt hats per year. Shoes didn’t wear out when you switched from walking to pedalling; cobblers weren’t happy. Theatre owners, innkeepers and preachers blamed time-hungry bicycle touring for a downturn in trade, and – pass the chutzpah – tobacco firms raged that a million fewer cigars and cigarettes were being smoked every day.

  Direct action was often alarmingly extreme. Carriage drivers, fighting a rearguard battle against the horseless future, drove cyclists into ditches and against walls. Street-sweepers pelted them with the equine ordure whose impending scarcity threatened their jobs. Things got especially out of hand in Holland, would you believe, where gangs of ‘velo kannibalen’ routinely battered bike riders unconscious. Dutch cyclists felt compelled to ride in groups, and cycling magazines carried adverts for a ‘handlebar-grip high-calibre revolver’, with a handy quick-release holster.

  By 1914, all this business had died down in most European countries. Backward and impoverished Italy, however, was not most European countries. Anti-Giro hostility remained intense and widespread, in most cases the product of simple rural resentment. Who did these bloody people think they were, poncing about on velocipedes while hard-working country folk tried to scratch out a living? Let’s see how they like this.

  That night, looking at the photo I’d taken of the sawn-off scrotum-stabber between my legs, I was impressed that I’d carried on at all. Astonishment set in when I saw how much of the map I’d crossed, and how brown and pointy most of it had been. At the lakeside town of Arona I wasted a lot of time trying to cushion what was left of the saddle with my emergency fleece, then set off up a modest thoroughfare that identified itself, in Italian, as ‘road of the little Alps’. I didn’t think there could be such a thing as a little Alp, and I was right. The trees turned to pine and the road twisted upwards through them. My hands flapped reflexively at gear levers that weren’t there; my thighs quivered under full load. When they could support me no longer I cravenly lowered my buttocks down onto the saddle. At once the metal frame and its fixings seemed to gather into a bunched metal fist; rumbling down the brief descents was like being energetically violated by a robot.

  The sat-nav let me know that it was stupidly hot, that my speed was into single digits, and that we’d just passed 600m altitude: nearly 2,000ft, higher than almost anything in England, miles higher than I’d been on a bike for twelve years. I kept trying to forget that I probably shouldn’t even be up here, that the threadbare itinerary as related by Paolo had left some very widely spaced dots to join, and that I’d eschewed a far more sympathetic valley route out of – yes, really – scenic preference. Sweat blotted right through my cap, and pooled repellently around my woollen waistband. My entire head seemed to expand and contract in time with my lungs. How had anyone ever managed to do this sort of thing on this sort of bike, in this sort of long-sleeve roll-neck jumper? When the sat-nav beeped me off the tarmac and up a meandering red-gravel footpath I was in no fit state to argue. It seemed like a good time to trial that ladies’ gear on the other side of the hub, but my shrivelled brain feebly spat out a more appealing plan: I got off and pushed.

  ‘No pizza? No panino? No croissant repulsivo con jam?’

  I had to find out the hard way that small-town Italy doesn’t do lunch, at least not in a form of any use to the dying cyclist. Touring France, I could count on stuffing my big, fat midday face in even the most dismal hamlet. In Italy it seems everyone goes home for lunch, to get their cheeks pinched over a massive bowl of Mamma’s pasta. The few village restaurants are rarely open for lunch, and though – as in this case – there’s always a bar, you’ll be lucky to find one offering more than a sandwich. That day I wasn’t even that lucky. I bought the last two packets of crisps in Valduggia and ate them under a roadside parasol, next to a table of old men playing an ill-tempered game of cards.

  In between crumbly fistfuls I slaked an obsessive thirst for Coca-Cola, the glucose drip in a can. It seemed almost poignant to find I could muster no enthusiasm for the more potent refreshments that had featured so prominently in my French déjeuners. I hardly needed an excuse: almost every rider in the 1914 Giro started each stage with one of his bidons filled with vino rosso, and thereafter topped it up whenever possible. Later in the race, an over-zealous customs officer tried to confiscate a bottle of Barbera from Giovanni Gerbi’s saddlebag as the race crossed a departmental border. Gerbi was a fêted rider who had finished third in the 1911 Giro, but he was having a bad day and evidently couldn’t face the rest of it without his reserve supply: when the of
ficials and journalists drove up they found Gerbi kicking the officer senseless.

  The scenery settled, and I rolled along a hot valley dotted with forgotten towns, decrepit Renaissance palazzos cheek by dusty jowl with cement works and abandoned sawmills. All was quiet, or almost all: the Hirondelle pulled a swelling symphony of harsh decibels over the fan-pattern cobbles. The jangling scrape of ancient chain round ancient sprocket, the desiccated rattle of an oven-baked freewheel, the increasingly bothersome pa-donk that crowned every turn of the pedals. Every tiny imperfection in the road surface had the bidon lids a-pinging and the brass bell a-dinging. Larger bumps sounded like a slammed cutlery drawer, and presented more serious issues: I bucked over a level-crossing and shed two springs from the brake calipers. Six spares used in a day and a half: would my 150 be enough? All the while draughts of hot, wet sheep rose up from my merino jersey, and the saddle’s exposed metalwork enmeshed itself ever deeper into my horse’s skull of an arse.

  After a stop to sustain myself with a messy fistful of roadside blackberries, I remounted and found pain replaced by a harrowing absence of sensation. It was as if my intimate parts now belonged to someone else: someone who was dead, and had died a virgin. I had somehow coped with a busted sit-upon for 60km, but only now wondered: Why? I hadn’t even tried to find a bike shop, and at 5 p.m. with a weekend looming I might have seventy hours to rue that oversight.

  In the event I barely had time to burst into tears before looking up to see a sign that read: Pepebike – tutto per la bici! The road was passing a rundown little industrial estate marooned between distant towns, and the sign led me to the only unit open for business. If I have another child, I hereby vow to christen it Pepebike. Though after what my reproductive organs endured that day I doubt I’ll get the chance.