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repeat. At catechism in the church, an uncle Coppi presided with the help of a collection of sticks to match their aunt’s at school. Not surprisingly with the church connection on Angiolina’s side of the family, the Coppis were ‘ gente di chiesa ’, religious people: missing a service meant trouble, recalls Piero.
    When not at school or working alongside their parents on the farm, the boys played a version of hopscotch, and some-times stole fruit, which wasn’t mere mischief: they were always hungry. They played soccer with a ball made of rags until it split, or until one of the boys went to tell the owner of the field that they were ruining his grass; out would come the peasant brandishing a stick, and they would run away laughing fit to burst. Serse tended to be the prankster among the children; Fausto was as serious a child as he would be as an adult.
    Coppi’s first bike was a reject, picked up from a corner where it had been abandoned because it was virtually unusable. He had no money, so he restored it to working order as best he could. He remembered a frame with the chrome cracking off it, so big that he had trouble getting his leg over the crossbar. On 17 October 1927, Albina wrote the letter A, for absent, against the boy’s name in the school register. The eight-year-old Faustino had gone out on his bike that day and played truant, so she made him write out one hundred times: ‘I must go to school and not ride my bicycle.’ On their clunky old machines, the boys played at bike racing, running time trials where the lack of a stopwatch did not matter: one of them would count the seconds out loud. One such bike racing game was the Giro d’Italia.
    That reflected the fact that in the time before the rise of football, cycling was Italy’s most popular sport. Although cycle ownership was lower than in France or Britain, the bike wasthe main means of transport for most of the population. Since its foundation in 1909, the Giro had drawn the country together, bringing its glamour and festival atmosphere to the most far-flung areas. As well as the great one-day Classics such as Milan–San Remo and the Giro di Lombardia, monuments of the sport even today, a host of regional one-day races such as the Giro del Veneto, Tre Valli Varesine, Milan–Turin and the Giro del Piemonte drew massive crowds. The tifosi thronged to watch the stars at exhibition events on short circuits and banked velodromes, and the start contracts for the cyclists were correspondingly fat.
    The first great national rivalry of Italian cycling, between the campionissimi – champions of champions – Alfredo Binda and Learco Guerra, had caught the popular imagination. Internationally, Italy could boast the first world road champion in Binda (1927) and a brace of Tour de France wins for Ottavio Bottecchia in 1924 and 1925. Together with Tuscany to the south and Lombardy to the east, the Piedmont of Coppi’s childhood was a hotbed of the sport, producing champions such as Gerbi, Brunero and Costante Girardengo, whose home was in Novi Ligure, on the plain below Castellania. As well as the campioni and campionissimi , the men who made the serious money, there were decent pickings to be had for the gregari , the lesser lights who helped the great men in the big races and made up the numbers in the exhibition races.
    When a journalist went to Castellania with Coppi in the 1940s, the cyclist said simply: ‘Do you understand now why I became a cyclist? What could I do other than go off on my bike?’ The parallels between subsistence farming and the life of a professional cyclist are surprisingly close: both entail hours of repetitive physical labour in the open air, in all weathers, with no certainty that all the effort will have its due reward. For all the drama of the breakaway or the sprint, the podium girls and the chance of prize money, there was a distinctlyunglamorous side to cycling in those days: saddle boils from the poor roads, sickness