“Go Alfonsina!“, Costante Girardengo shouts to him, and the encouraging voice of the first campionissimoof the history of cycling silences all the doubts in her head and all the insults, all the “vacaburra!” November 1917 in Milan. Thus begins the Giro de Lombardia, one of the great classics on the calendar, and a woman, Alfonsina Strada, 26, competes on an equal footing with the best cyclists of the moment. Hair cut by bites, as many cuts with scissors as poor children, black sweater, black culottes. It is the first time that it has happened, that a woman competes with men. And his rivals in the race, winners of Tours like Thijs and Pélissier, winners of Giros, like Girardengo and Belloni, other greats, like Everardo Pavesi, who gives him a sprint on a steep slope, and everyone, who knows his story, his fight. , they welcome her like brothers. It’s 200 kilometers. More than seven hours. 54 start. 29 finish. Alfonsina arrives last, but she arrives.
“You are one of us,” Girardengo tells her, who, as Di Gregori sings, ran out of rage and love, and Alfonsina also ran out of rage and love, and also out of the uncontrollable desire to flee from nothingness and sadness. , to reach the moon by pedaling.
Pedaling under the full moon, secretly, at the age of 13, on the bicycle of his father, a poor farm laborer, Alfonsina had discovered the liberating value of disobedience in the very poor Italy of the early 20th century, a childhood in Fossamarcia, On the outskirts of Bologna, in a shanty next to a mosquito lagoon and a garden of cabbages that when cooked filled the entire area with their smell, two cots for eight brothers, and even more children, sick with consumption and malnourished, who Their mother, Virginia, received a wet nurse from the asylum to breastfeed them, and most of them died. “I’m going to mass,” she said on Sunday mornings, before taking the bike and flying even at the cost of receiving beatings when the lie was discovered.
His life is written by the novelist Simona Baldelli, Alfonsina and the road (Alfonsina and the road). His life goes through the first half of the 20th century, the First World War, Mussolini’s fascism, the Second Great War.
Her name was still Alfonsina Morini. With the bike she discovers that the boundaries of her life are not misery and hopelessness, that there is a world, and she sets out uninhibited to discover it. They call her La Loca, The Devil in skirts. She works as a dressmaker and with the bike she looks for clients and delivers orders on Sundays. But she wants more. She wants to be a cyclist. Social conventions, the horror of having an athletic daughter, what people will say, prevail over Virginia’s love. “Either you leave home or you stop running,” her mother tells her one morning in 1905. “To escape you will have to do what we all did, get married.” Alfonsina does not marry, but she finds Luigi Strada, a dreamy and sensitive blacksmith, and with him she goes to Milan. She is 14 years old. He is 17. She gives him a racing bike. She changes her last name. She is already Alfonsina Strada. They live together and only 10 years later they get married. He is her mechanic. Her coach. She’s happy. She travels and competes. She breaks the hour record. She is already the Queen of the Cranks. She competes in France and Russia. She is decorated by Tsarina Alexandra at the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg. In Paris she performs in circuses.
The bicycle was the great tool for the liberation of working women at the beginning of the century, write sociologists and historians of two wheels. Alfonsina may know it, but she does know for sure that it is the tool of her liberation, of knowledge, of adventure. The machine that always pushes her to seek her limits beyond herself. To wonder why she couldn’t compete with men. She convinces those responsible for the Gazzetta dello Sport,the race organizers, to let him run the Giro de Lombardia: “The regulations say that it is a race reserved for cyclists. It doesn’t say what gender.” It runs in 1917, a week after the great Italian defeat at the Battle of Caporetto, tens of thousands of soldiers dead on the border with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and in 1918. It also ends, and it is no longer the last. Then, misery again. Poverty. Luigi, now her husband, goes crazy and has to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital. The return to Fossamarcia. The dressmaker’s job again. While fascism advances in Italy, the Alfonsina rebellion, which in 1923 takes place again in the offices of The Gazzetta and proposed to run the 1924 Giro d’Italia.
“A woman riding a bicycle may not be very aesthetic or pretty,” Alfonsina, who is already 33 years old, tells them. “But I have a husband in the asylum who I have to help and a little girl at school who costs me 10 lira a day. What am I going to do, act like a whore?”
More than its moving argument, the organizers are convinced by the advertising aspect. The great champions – Girardengo, Belloni, Brunero, Binda, Bottecchia – have given up on the Giro because they consider the financial reward too meager. Without stars, the Giro runs the risk of being a disaster. A woman’s participation can save him. She promises: “In the absence of figures, I will be the attraction.”
He fulfills it. At 4 in the morning, on May 10, 1924, the neatly trimmed hair that then bore the humiliating nickname of a baby haircut, a black T-shirt and black shorts, the number 72 on his back, and a backpack on his shoulder With a quarter of a chicken, a fillet, two ham sandwiches and two jam sandwiches, three raw eggs, two bananas, two apples, an orange, some cookies and a chocolate bar, Alfonsina Strada is a woman in a platoon of 107 men waiting at Porta Ticinese in Milan for the starting shot of the first of the 12th Giro d’Italia. Destination Genoa. In the list of numbers that she publishes The Gazzetta appears as Alfonsin, and as Alfonso in Il Corriere. They don’t want to create a scandal ahead of time. But it is she, the Queen of the Connecting Rods, from Fossamarcia (Emilia), who leaves in the dark. Crescent moon. 3,613 kilometers await them in 12 stages, 300 kilometers more than the Giro a century later, half as many stages. Its length varies between 230 and 415 kilometers along roads that are paths, from 10 to 18 hours a day on 20 kilo bicycles, and a day’s rest in between.
Alfonsina holds on. She finishes the stages, always behind the first, but always ahead of some men, until in the eighth, 296 kilometers between L’Aquila and Perugia, through the Abruzzo and the Apennines under a deluge, the hardest, she falls twice, he punctures, breaks the frame, which he fixes with a broomstick, and breaks a wheel. She gets out of control. She is officially eliminated, but the entire platoon prays for her, to continue, they ask the organizer. The organizer not only relents, but also decides to pay her accommodation, assistance and maintenance even if she runs out of competition. It is, as they knew, the great attraction, the reason for the increase in sales of The Gazzetta during a Giro won by Giuseppe Enrici, an Italian born in Pittsburgh, whose fortunes matter less to the public than the misfortunes of Alfonsina Strada, whom the crowd awaits at the finish line to acclaim. 30 men finish the race, and Alfonsina. She was never allowed to sign up for the Giro again.
Mussolini, in power since 1922, wants to honor her, but she never came to receive the honor. She toured all of Italy and half of Europe performing in circuses, in theaters, accepting challenges. She also competes seriously. She breaks the hour record in Longchamps, 35.280 kilometers. She is widowed by Luigi in 1950 and remarries, opens a bicycle shop and workshop, and is widowed again. She is 60 years old. She continues to travel by bicycle, but she buys a red motorcycle, a 500cc Guzzi, for long trips, to enjoy herself as a spectator of the races. On Sunday, September 13, 1959, she traveled with her Guzzi to Varese to enjoy the Three Valleys of Varese. She returns to Milan at night. When she tries to take the motorcycle to the garage, it won’t start. Always unable to give up, Alfonsina presses the starter pedal again and again. Her engine refuses to start. Her heart also decides to stop. Alfonsina collapses on her motorcycle, dead. She was 68 years old. She had pedaled to the Moon, and beyond.
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