Here we are, Sunday, December 28th, a watershed moment of the year, with a singular certainty just reaffirmed. Via email, courteous and refined, granite and azure, arriving first in the heart with greetings, the "Long Live Naples, Long Live Coppi" for the Holidays, sent by Ezio Zanenga.

Ezio Zanenga, yes, Coppi's scholar, the first enthusiast from Treviglio, with his "The Book of Books" that remains the enviable sum of everything published and produced about Fausto Coppi urbi et orbi: an anthology to keep on the bedside table, to stay warm in a dream that carries you in flight...

Long Live Naples and Long Live Coppi, and this epinicion acquires an additional azure shade today, now that we have learned that last month Jorge Batiz also passed away, at 91 years old, the Argentine track cyclist who was Coppi's lead-out in the Six Days of Buenos Aires during his extreme seasons.

Long Live Naples and Long Live Coppi, and we will remember him passing away on January 2nd - as we have done for a decade with exquisite devotion - in Ercole di Caserta, at the Memorial Mass on the day of his passing, in the Private Chapel of Madonna della Libera, in Vicolo Michitto, the corner of the world where Coppi, as a war veteran, resumed his life and everyone's history.

Long Live Naples and Long Live Coppi, and it is objectively a trailer of the only non-fictional sports narrative we know. And it is a fresco, a polyptych, panels that fold and unfold multiple and different, but uniquely Coppian and Neapolitan, or rather - for a legitimate expansion - Campanian.

Long Live Naples and Long Live Coppi, and it is the very English captivity with Lieutenant Towel of the RAF, December '44, for whom he becomes an orderly. And it is the acquired family, through cycling communion, of the Milano family at the bakery in Sant'Antonio Abate in Naples... And it is the racing bicycle on which to seriously start pedaling again, donated by popular petition of a newspaper of the time, "La Voce di Napoli", and delivered by the mild carpenter D'Avino from Somma Vesuviana, on Epiphany Day 1945...

Long Live Naples and Long Live Coppi, and the concrete and allegorical primacy in hearts of unique and different victories in the "Campania" of 1954, in the world champion jersey and in a tight sprint over Monti, Gauthier, and Gismondi, and in that of '55, after a metaphysical solo ride on Agerola overlooking the sea, and alone like an Annunciation on the Arenaccia Velodrome... (Ezio Zanenga would have experienced it even better from afar, as described here).

Long Live Naples and Long Live Coppi, and it is a series far from any comparison on platforms, here we are on the highlands of sentiment, if we intersect the love escape with the White Lady, on the Coast - Coppi had two Coasts, the Ligurian and our Amalfi Coast -, after winning the "Campania" in '54, at the "Santa Caterina" in Amalfi.

Long Live Naples and Long Live Coppi, and let it be the ritual of the new-style Persol glasses bought at the glorious Ottica Pascotto, on Corso Umberto, where today there is a less illustrious flashing green cross of a pharmacy.

Long Live Naples and Long Live Coppi, long live the only Giro stage won at Vomero in '47 and less alive is the flu that prevented him from racing, he was at the Hotel de Londres, in Piazza Municipio, at the "Campania" of 1956...

Long Live Naples and Long Live Coppi, thanks to Ezio Zanenga who leafs through every almanac with us in black and white colors. And who knows if from here Naples will not stand up to write about it again, with the comfortable allusion from the Maradonian mural that Jorge Batiz, from Buenos Aires, Argentina, has just passed away - the last of the six-day racers still existing and always in glory on Fausto Coppi's track.

Long Live Naples and Long Live Coppi.

from tuttoBICI of January