Chapter 1: the train from perugia

“I failed.”

There is little despondence that takes the human spirit lower than feeling that one has failed, whether themselves or others. I was in central Italy on the regional border of Tuscany and Umbria, sitting alone on a commuter train for the 30-minute return trip from Terontola back to Perugia. Staring out at the vastness of Lake Trasimeno through the train’s smudged window, I was numb. Disappointed in myself. Defeated. The late October sun reflected brilliantly on the lake and my mind drifted off. I remembered reading that in 217 B.C., Hannibal and his army of 40,000 men ambushed the formidable Roman army at this very spot, killing 15,000 soldiers. Many of the men died from drowning in their heavy armor, the viciousness of their attackers, or both. I was distracting myself, trying to forget what just happened the past few hours. It was so fast, and now it was over. A golden opportunity fell into my lap less than 48 hours ago. Now it was over, and I felt like a failure because I had nothing to show for it. I was leaving Perugia the next day so there was no second chance. My dream to carry on a hero’s fading story from World War II felt as gray and worn as the dusty old window separating me from the sunshine outside.

It was 2016, and I was studying Italian for a month at a university in the medieval hill town of Perugia. The past few years in Seattle, I had been taking a language class once a week after work with mediocre success stumbling through new vowel sounds and tongue-rolling syllables. Arriving at 5 p.m. each Wednesday evening, my mind was often already at full capacity from my government job planning for and responding to oil spills.  The challenge of remembering grammar and vocabulary lessons from week to week did not leave me with a profound literacy of Italian, but the passion was there. My teacher recognized that desire. She suggested I apply for a month-long scholarship to study Italian at the Università per Stranieri language school in Perugia, Italy, through our Seattle-Perugia Sister City Association.  I applied and was thrilled to be awarded one of the spots. An immense rush of gratitude prevailed as I realized that a dream to immerse in Italian culture could come true. This short sabbatical would mean an entire month without distractions where my only job was to learn Italian.

One of the other reasons that I wanted to explore this particular area was because it was like a living museum to a remarkable story from World War II of the champion cyclist and secretive Holocaust rescuer, Gino Bartali. He had died in 2000 at 85 years, but the sound of his name still warrants hushed reverence in his native Italy: Bartali L’Eroe – The Hero. Bartali Il Pio – The Pious. Bartali Il Campione – The Champion. Bartali who helped save 800 Jews during the Holocaust riding his bicycle stuffed with fake identity documents on secret missions for the Italian resistance. I had heard whisperings of this story long after his death when the English-language press picked it up in the early 2010s. They left me curious, “How could a man contest against the Nazis….and essentially win….saving hundreds of people from the Holocaust…using only his bicycle and hiding documents in its frame?” I thought of my own bike frame and the hollow tubing below the saddle with traces of grit and grease and I wondered how it could possibly store such delicate papers. The story seemed unworldly, and it partially was because I had never been to Europe. This man, Gino Bartali, was a mythical legend in a mythical land. Yet I could not stop thinking about the idea that good could fight evil using non-violence, on a bicycle no less, in the ultimate theater of the Second World War.

My grandfather and great uncle were of Italian descent and had served with the U.S. Army in France.. They returned to their lives and back into their mothers’ arms in the small steel mill town of Monessen, Pennsylvania, along the banks of the Monongahela River south of Pittsburgh. They raised their families and never spoke about what they experienced in the war. To me, their lifespan was limited to my own and their history was only as far back as the last raucous Steelers game.

There are glimpses of my grandfather and great uncle’s war time efforts passed down through retelling of stories from those still around who know them. Most of the memories are interpreted from the aging black and white photos of them posing in their military uniforms. During the war, my great aunt kept a photo album constructed of black paper pages bound with string. The stiff, delicate pages are now a time capsule pasted with yellowed newspaper clippings of other Monessen and “Mon Valley” servicemen. The pages are carefully arranged with the original small, square Kodak Brownie photos of her husband and my grandfather posing with their mothers as they prepared to leave for basic training. Other photos taken by the Army show them smiling and posing at their base in France. My great aunt carefully wrote notations in blue pen on the photos if she knew where and when they were taken. They show her men with faces as charming as when she last saw them, but nothing of what they saw when the camera wasn’t focused or when their eyes closed to sleep. Years after they had passed on, I was astonished to learn at one family gathering that my parents’ basement is the current archive to a full-size Nazi flag and wooden box full of Nazi soldier pins and badges my grandfather brought back from France as souvenirs. Nestled in the same box is a guide for the soldiers while on holiday in Nice. I like to think that at some point after Germany’s surrender they were able to let loose and enjoy the French Riviera.

Like my grandfather, Gino Bartali never talked about the war. And so, like many tales from this era, Bartali’s story is not well known beyond his native country’s shores. Voices from this generation are not so loud anymore in our world filled with constant noise competing for our attention. I felt duty bound to find my own version of the story and add to the account during my month in Perugia. The 2012 book, Road to Valor, was the first English-speaking book that uncovered the secrets of Bartali’s past. Part investigative journalism, part biography, the authors worked for 10 years researching new information about the cycling champion’s life to paint the story in riveting detail. I referenced it as canon and used it as a guidebook while cycling around Umbria. I imagined the book’s cast of characters from the Assisi Network and studied maps to figure out where they lived in pockets of Umbria and Tuscany during the war. I planned out my own sort of reenactment of Bartali’s past. After class and on the weekends, I would venture out on my bike into the Umbrian countryside looking for traces of Bartali, for a section of the farm road he may have ridden, chasing his ghost from over 70 years ago. I rode across the valley to the hill town of Assisi and up the same narrow cobble streets to the immense basilica of Saint Francis, its cloisters built like a fortification into the hillside in 1253, yet its inner walls decorated with the bright golds and blues of Giotto’s frescos. I hiked through an olive grove under a hot October sun, down to the monastery of San Damiano to glimpse shadows of Bartali as he picked up forged identification papers with Father Rufino Niccacci. I stumbled over words at a local café, asking the owner if they knew of someone who could show me vestiges of Bartali in this town that was so central to his mission. I peered through the gates of the cloistered San Quirico convent where Mother Superior Giuseppina Biviglia hid Jews and was handed fake identification documents from the tanned and muscular Tuscan. I hid from a rainstorm in the doorway of Saint Clare’s basilica staring across the piazza for a sign of which storefront hid the secret Brizi family printing press that long ago made crucial fake identification papers for the underground.

But more often than not, I cried under the weight of my own expectations to be allowed to insert myself into this story, at the frustration of not knowing the language, endlessly tossing in a bad dream where I was set on mute, unable to shout out my desire to revive these voices from the past. I cried trying to explain, in stilted Italian, who I was and why I was there as my identity dissipated into irrelevancy in this culture that was not mine. I cried because I assumed what they saw in me was a silly American woman riding a bike on her own in Italy, when they couldn’t understand I was passionately pursuing a legend from so long ago.

When venturing away from the known tourist enclaves and into the real heart of Italy, the reward is discovering how generous its people are. Some think it’s a continuation of a culture that believed in the importance of taking care of strangers during World War II. When word got around the sister-city community that I was interested in learning more about Bartali, I was encouraged to talk with Daniela Borghesi of Perugia’s Office of International Relations. Working in the mayor’s office, she has been integral to coordinating the Perugia sister-city relationships around the world and was known for often doing the work of three people. We were finally able to meet during my last week in Perugia. Just as I’d been told, she was an impressive woman of action who made the impossible materialize. In the matter of a few hours, she had made some calls to the nearby village of Terontola and, as luck would have it, connected me with Bartali’s former bike mechanic, Ivo Faltoni, who still lived there and was an ardent Bartali storyteller. He and a small entourage would be happy to meet me the next day. “And they do not speak English,” she reminded me. I had no time to prepare. As I left her office, Daniela waved off my dread that I could barely speak the language and wished me good luck. I wanted more than anything to bottle up this amazing woman’s confidence and charisma and take it with me.

That night on the floor of my apartment in a medieval building in Perugia’s old town center, I laid out all my maps, photos, and books that had led me to this point hoping they would coach me through the next day. I visualized that the language would flow from my mouth with ease and I would immediately connect with these voices from the past. I figured out how to record on my iPhone and hoped for the best. My stomach was knotted and I slept fitfully. Shyness and introverted tendencies were not an option. Waking up, my brain was heavy and fuzzy, even with the extra coffee. My years of bike racing had taught me enough to know that the body and mind could push through great achievements even with little sleep, so I buckled up my resolve and packed my bag. Preparing to catch the morning train, I took a few deep breaths, pulled on my vintage leather jacket to wrap a barrier against my insecurities, and stepped out the door to begin my journey.

The Terontola train station is in the southeastern corner of Tuscany at the edge of a flat, dry valley. To the west are the famous vineyards and hills of Chianti, and to the east are the foothills of the Umbrian Apennine mountains. There are only four platforms, and arriving passengers descend below them through a tunnel connecting to the main building. As they walk past the café, they see on the wall a bronze bust of Bartali mounted on a large slab of pale grey marble. Its inscription, in Italian, reads:

The plaque marks the location where the champion would use his fame to distract the Nazis while Jews would use those precious minutes as a clear path to grab their new documents and jump onto a train headed to Allied territory.

That is where Ivo met me with his camel-colored wool sport coat and cap and unmistakable face tanned by a life in the Tuscan sun. We were joined by his friend and fellow journalist, Claudio Lucheroni. Without pause we walked through the small train station’s doors and off on my tour. Right away my fears were confirmed as he proceeded to narrate our tour barely stopping for a breath. My comprehension of Ivo’s Italian was so elementary that within minutes I knew that I was already failing to do my time with him any justice. He led me from his office, bike shop, and home; he cheerfully chatted nonstop for over an hour. I prayed he was oblivious that I understood nothing. I followed him like a puppy with no idea if he was describing his breakfast or some hidden clue to Bartali’s spirit. He was sharply dressed, charismatic and generous, well organized, and obviously excited to have another visitor – an American woman no less - interested in Bartali. He xeroxed newspaper clippings, showed me vintage race bikes lined along the wall of an attic, and filled my arms with gifts and more books to read while I stood tongue-tied, too nervous to ask questions that had weighed on my mind for years: “At the end of his life how did Bartali feel about his legacy? What did it mean for his bike to be a tool of non-violence against the Nazis?” and most of all for me, “What would he say to people now as they face fear and struggle to find the good in our world?”

Reality was that my month in Perugia had not transformed me into a talented, multilingual journalist. The opportunity of a lifetime was literally standing by my side and I saw it as a failure, that I had let down the thousands of brave voices from World War II whose numbers were thinning as time marched on. I had initially balked at meeting Ivo, hoping I could return in a year better prepared, but Daniella said of Ivo, “He’s in his 80s now so there may not be another time.”

There was never another time with Ivo. A few days later I was back in Seattle unpacking my suitcase and bags. I sighed heavily at his thoughtfully xeroxed papers and books and stored them away in a large envelope, my life taken over by more pressing matters back in the real world. Over three years later on February 10, 2020, I learned on social media of Ivo’s passing and felt struck in the chest. This passionate voice of Bartali and his brave generation who risked their lives to save strangers during the Holocaust was no more. I also realized that I did not fail on that October afternoon near Lake Trasimeno. It took a few years to revisit the special moment that Ivo had given me, even if I did not fully understand at the time. The sharing of an important story, no matter when, is never a failure as long as it eventually begins.