La Bicicletta (1918)
Cite this book
Citation
Alfredo Oriani. La Bicicletta (1918). 1918. cyclearchive.com, https://cyclearchive.com/books/la-bicicletta-a-oriani-1918/
Page numbers are pages of the PDF, which can differ from the numbers printed on the page.
Contents
- Oriani imagines a future Italian poet who will write an ode to the bicycle, setting the horse, the ship and the railway, which hold the traveller to a fixed path, against a machine that lets the rider roam freely and come to know whole countries.
- A history of the machine from the first wheel and the 1693 pedal carriage of Richard of La Rochelle, through Drais's Draisienne of 1816 and Micaux's pedal velocipede, to Starley and Dunlop's chain bicycle with pneumatic tyres, and the mass boom of clubs, races and sales.
- The bicycle's remaining faults: the saddle and the puncturable tube, the strain on the rider's body and the seduction of racing, and the failure of tandems and a six-man machine at Chicago, ending in an exchange with the author's old Greek professor.
- From Achilles and Hector's race under the walls of Troy to the modern professional racer, now a paid jockey on the track; the Athens to Marathon run won by the shepherd Louis is recalled, and the author asks for free public cycle tracks where anyone may race without prize money or tickets.
- At a provincial one-hour race on a town track the narrator watches the American rider and the Swiss lead the field until the young Italian Nuvolari sprints late and is beaten by a palm at the line by the American, and reflects on Italy's lack of world champions and its reliance on past heroes.
- The French champion Ormont, who has given up his medical studies to race, speaks of the dead champions Medinger and Gambetta, both killed by women; that night the narrator and his friend Enrico argue on a grassy bank over whether all victories are alike.
- Oriani attacks the amateurs who crowd art, music, horse racing and the army, and argues that military bicycles and a bicycle cavalry are impractical, since a pierced tyre or a thrown stone unseats the rider; the bicycle, he says, needs no tinkering by enthusiasts.
- A meditation on the pleasure of riding: the freedom to stop and turn at will, the sun from dawn to midday heat, the cool evening and a night ride on empty roads, set against the coming motor carriage, which will carry its passengers without their own legs.
- Oriani mourns Magry, a young Faenza rider who taught him to cycle at the old circus outside Porta Imolese and who died of tuberculosis in June 1897 aged twenty-two; the funeral is described, with the cyclists of the Veloce-Club following the coffin to the cemetery.
- In Modena a retired Roman dandy, known as the Count, falls from his velocipede when a dog attacks it at the house of the young Velleda, and teaches her little daughter Nella to ride; the affair cools when the family hangs an enlarged photograph of him in their parlour.
- In Rome a poor student, Roberto, borrows a bicycle from his sick neighbour Antonio, a clerk, and has a brief affair with Antonio's wife Francesca; on his return the following winter he learns she has had a son, and Antonio gives him the bicycle, the cradle taking its place.
- After a Bologna race won by Pontecchi, the narrator visits Emma, a former dancer left paralysed in a tandem fall near Brescia in which the officer Guido came off unhurt; she tells him how she was abandoned, while he poses as a doctor for her young admirer Enrico Maurigi.
- On a spring ride beside the Faenza canal the narrator meets Oreste Casali and his hunchbacked son Nino, who rides a tricycle for his health; the story follows the family through the mother Tuda's rage, the death of the elder son Aldino, and Nino's own death, after which the father is left alone.
- The author's solo ride from Faenza in July 1897 over the Apennines by Forlì, Meldola, Galeata and Bagno to La Verna and Bibbiena, then to Siena, Certaldo, Pisa and Pistoia, with chance encounters on the road, reflections on St Francis and Siena, and a return by the Via Emilia to Casolavalsenio.