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from an uncertain diet, the bizarre remedies peddled by team helpers. The professional cyclist had to accept adversity – punctures, crashes, stronger rivals, capricious team managers, poor wages – with the stoicism with which a peasant views the weather.
    Cycling was physically demanding, but it was better than the unremitting drudgery of working the land. As the Irish farmer turned racer Sean Kelly said two generations later, at least when you were on your bike you got paid more for being out in the rain all day. That was ever the case for professional cyclists who were not campionissimi or even campioni . Coppi’s contemporary Alfredo Martini explained: ‘When I left to go training early in the morning, the peasants were already in the fields; my father, my brother, bent over the spades thinking only of work and fatigue. I would ride two hundred kilometres in training and when I came back in the evening, tired but happy from the long trip, I would see the same people still thinking only of the same tiring and repetitive work.’
    ‘Cycle racing opened the doors to a world forbidden to mere mortals,’ writes the historian Daniele Marchesini. As well as the financial rewards and the chance to eat foodstuffs never seen on peasant farmers’ tables, cycle racing offered the chance to travel, a glamorous business at a time when the nearest market town was a major excursion for many. Martini told of the pride he felt on returning home with the labels of the best hotels in Paris and Brussels stuck on his suitcase. ‘Cycling meant leaving the status of peasant behind and travelling the world, getting to know other people, other languages, meeting famous people and – not the last thing on our minds – earning more than normal.’

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    At twelve, Coppi was out of school and working alongside his father on the farm; a year later, however, in 1932, he moved away from home to work at a butcher’s shop, Ettore’s, in Novi Ligure, twenty kilometres away on the plain. Such a move was common among the children of peasants: the land could only support the parents. The seagoing uncle Fausto, il comandante , was the man who found him the job. Coppi recalled the day he left: a cool spring morning, walking alongside his father who was on his way to the fields, pushing his bike, this one lent to him by his brother Livio, ‘an enormous heavy machine with regal handlebars and tyres like lifebelts’, carrying his lunch in a checked handkerchief. Domenico said goodbye to his son at the foot of the first hill.
    Coppi did not stay long at Ettore’s. He moved to another butcher’s shop, run by Domenico Merlano at Via Paolo 17 – a single room opening onto the street under a stone lintel in the Roman style, with vast hams and salamis swinging from the door frames and two colossal pigs’ heads hanging from the wall.
    Initially, Faustino stayed the entire week in Novi, but soon he grew homesick and asked his boss to allow him to sleep in Castellania and ride daily to and from his work. And here, it seems, the bike suddenly gained in importance, with a round trip of forty kilometres each day to build his young muscles and the long climb back up to the village from the pianura to develop the heart and lungs that would power him in the future. Angiolina would wake him at six, but Coppi liked to stay in bed as late as he could in the mornings. ‘To avoid the clips round the ear that would be waiting for me, there was only one solution: make up on the road the time I had wasted in bed. And so I ended up sprinting the twenty kilometres to the butcher’s. No one ever timed me, but none of the cyclists I met along the way could hold onto me.’
    The downhill run to Novi would turn into a time trial, with a slap from his boss if he failed to make the cut. He would‘go lorry hunting’, looking for a vehicle that was moving slowly enough for him to tuck into the slipstream. Sometimes he met local amateurs, and the story goes that, in the