The last photo, the one forever, is located just a few steps from the north entrance of Victor Bozzi square, in Caucade, southeast of Nice. He is portrayed in black and white, smiling, with pomaded hair, a pied-de-poule shirt, a bronze palm leaf on the tombstone. Still young. Too young. He was 29 years old.

Adrien Malachie Buttafochi. The surname revealing Italian origins. Silvius, the father, a coachman, from Mantua. Constance, the mother, an ironer, from Chateau-neuf-de-Contes. Charles and Joseph, the two older brothers. The surname replicated in various versions, the double letters - for the French - have always been a problem: Buttafocchi (as registered on procyclingstats.com and wikipedia.com), Buttafuochi (as transcribed on bdc-mag.com), Butaffochi... Date of birth: September 18, 1907. Place of birth: Nice. Date and place of birth in cycling: 1924, Circuit de L'Express de Lyon, for juniors, ninth place. Then a fifteenth place in the 1926 French amateur championships. Then military service in Morocco: a couple of years. Then return to cycling: 1929. Then finally victories: Gran Prix de la Victoire in 1930, Marseille-Nice and Nice-Annot-Nice in 1932, again Gran Prix de la Victoire and Marseille-Nice in 1933, Nice-Toulon-Nice in 1934. Meanwhile, as a domestique, the Tour de France, without luck: abandonment in 1931, out of time limit in 1932 and 1933, abandonment in 1934. With regrets. A distraction, Tour of 1932, the Montpellier-Marseille stage, a long breakaway, arrival at the velodrome, a long sprint, arms raised to the sky while Michele Orecchia snatched the victory from him. A misadventure, Tour of 1934, the Lille-Charleville stage, a fall and a fracture of a finger phalanx. Yet a great reputation as an attacker, courageous and fighter. When he won the Toulon-Cannes half-stage at the 1937 Paris-Nice, "Le Petit Journal" immortalized him like this: "The group nicknamed him 'grandma', both for his premature wrinkles and his kind manners". Buttafochi was deeply loved in the "peloton": cordial, loyal, sincere. A rare commodity. "His moral qualities - wrote "L'Auto" - would allow reconciling the Misanthrope with the Humanist".

Adrien Buttafochi participated in the Giro d'Italia in 1935. And he started brilliantly. The first stage, Milan-Cremona, 165 kilometers, a breakaway of four, in the sprint he finished third behind Vasco "Singapore" Bergamaschi and Domenico Piemontesi, ahead of Armando Zucchini, the group almost a minute and a half back regulated by "Gepin" Olmo, the twenty-year-old Gino Bartali in ninth place. Then he would collect other placements, less dizzying: eleventh in his "own" Mantua, tenth in Rovigo, ninth in Cesenatico, sixth in Rome, ninth in Asti and Turin, fifty-eighth overall, equivalent to the fifth-to-last place, almost two hours and a quarter behind Bergamaschi. He raced for Helyett, a bicycle brand, paired with Hutchinson, a tire brand, in a pea green jersey with white borders, somewhat as a free-rider, mostly as a lieutenant, also bodyguard of René Vietto.

1937 had begun luminously with that victory at Paris-Nice. Buttafochi dreamed of returning to the Tour de France. Three days before, ready to be selected for the national team, he participated in the Grand Prix d'Antibes to honor the club that had registered him as a young man, the VC Azuréen. But during the descent of Estérel towards Mandelieu, cruel, merciless, unexpected fate awaited him. Adrien was chasing some escapees. He took a tight curve to overtake another competitor, Jean Laugero. He did not see, could not see or predict, that the Peugeot 301 of Joseph Panzo, a baker in Vallauris, was approaching in the opposite direction. The collision was terrible. The reconstruction by "Le Petit Niçois": "Following his survival instinct, Buttafochi tried to protect himself and stretched his left arm forward, which almost detached under the effect of the impact. Smiling, with pomaded hair. However, thrown backwards, he fell heavily to the ground, unconscious". He was rescued. A serious fracture at the base of the skull, serious wounds to the left thigh and "a 16-centimeter bone embedded in the car's radiator", which was his forearm. At the Cannes hospital the rider arrived in a deep coma. The arm was amputated. But there was nothing else to do, except to transport Buttafochi to Nice, to Villa Costanza, a clinic north of the city, where he was declared dead on June 29 at 3:15 am. Michel Dalloni, in a beautiful article recalling Buttafochi's life and death, titled "The forgotten guardian angel of the group" and published in issue 24 of "cycle! Magazine", reports that on the day of the funeral, June 30, Vietto was there in tears, all regional champions, authorities, personalities, simple and anonymous citizens, a procession a kilometer long, the funeral oration held in front of a bar. And on July 12, on the rest day of the Tour de France, the riders arrived in a group at the Caucade cemetery to lay bouquets of flowers on the tomb of their friend. Smiling, with pomaded hair, he seemed alive.