Fallen Angel by William Fotheringham Page A

Riviera, is decked with palm trees, the sea sparkles as the field snakes along the coast road, and at the finish it’s hard to resist pulling on sunglasses and calling for a gelato .
    The point of transition is the Turchino Pass, the crossing of the Apennines. Today, this is a wide main road, sweeping up a valley in a succession of gentle hairpins to a short tunnel. The summit is only 500 metres above sea level, no major obstacle for a professional cyclist of the twenty-first century. It is nowhere near the scale of the Alps, but in the early years of Milan–San Remo, before the road acquired a proper tarmac surface, it was a climb to be feared, and it was a key strategic point in the race. On 19 March 1946, when the first post-war edition of the Classic went over the pass, the road was still unmade and there were no lights in the tunnel: electricity had yet to be restored after the conflict.
    The tunnel itself had only just been reopened, connecting Piedmont to Liguria again. For L’Equipe ’s writer Pierre Chany, the symbolism was too good to miss. ‘The Turchino tunnel is small, only 50 metres long, but on 19 March it took on exceptional proportions in the eyes of the world. It was six years in length.’ For Chany, the darkness of the tunnel stood for the darkness that had engulfed Europe between 1939 and 1945. It also represented the suspension of international cycle racing during the war years. Milan–San Remo itself had particular significance: it was the first major international cycle race after the conflict. It was, said an editorial in the organising newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport , evidence that Italy was coming back to life.
    Milan–San Remo had particular significance for Fausto Coppi as well. The early part of the race ran right through his homeland, the Piedmont plains below Castellania, where his friends and family would be watching. That morning, his young cousin Piero and one of his uncles had come down from Castellania with two apples in their pockets to hand up to Faustino, as they still called him: apples from the trees in the village, carefully preserved through the winter. As he sped past, Coppi recognised their call, because no one else called him by his diminutive. He grabbed one apple, but dropped the other.
    By the time Coppi reached the roads around Novi, he was already in the lead, to everyone’s surprise. The Turchino had yet to be climbed and descended; there were still 200 kilometres to the finish on the Riviera. It was unheard of for a favourite to chance his arm so far from the finish, but Coppi needed to take this race particularly seriously. Much had changed in his life since he had ridden up the hill to Castellania at the end of the long road home from Rome through the shell-holes and minefields: he had a wife and a new home. On 22 November 1945, he and Bruna had married. There wasno money to deck the church with flowers, so Bartali, like the good Christian he was, had overlooked their rivalry and rigged a win for Coppi in a criterium so he could take home a bouquet or two. A cook had come in from Novi to help Mamma Angiolina prepare the chickens; she had too much to do simply making the mountains of agnolotti . After their wedding, the couple had moved to Sestri Ponente, just outside Genoa, to a little apartment above a stairwell.

    Another wedding had taken place three months earlier, on 26 September 1945, in Rimini, on the other side of Italy, again with the disruption of war as a backdrop. An Italian army doctor, Enrico Locatelli, met and fell rapidly in love with a dark-haired Neapolitan girl of spectacular beauty, aged just twenty. Giulia Occhini had been educated in a convent, and had come north to stay with an aunt during the war; she desperately wanted to escape her relation and was engaged to a local boy who worked in a baker’s in Ancona. Locatelli was seventeen years older but good-looking, nicknamed ‘ il bel Valentino ’; ‘on the beach, all the girls were