Review: A Champion Cyclist Against the Nazis, by Alberto Toscano

Title: A Champion Cyclist Against the Nazis – The Incredible Life of Gino BartaliAuthor: 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: 2020Pages: 184Order: Pen & SwordWhat it is: A brief biographical sketch of Gino Bartali, setting his life against some of the politics of the timeStrengths: It’s shorter than Road to ValourWeaknesses: 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 an 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.