The twentieth and penultimate stage will depart from Gemona next Saturday, but his bicycles, jerseys and water bottles are already there, ready, in Gemona, for over a week now. On display. In the window.

Luciano Baldassi is 71 years old, he's from Gemona, and everyone in Gemona knows him. A qualified accountant, he first worked in a bank, then entered the family bar. And already then, caught by the fever of cycling and passion for the sport, he began collecting bicycles, jerseys and water bottles.

His first hero was Felice Gimondi ("My heart," he says, "has always beaten for Italians," so who knows how much he suffered from Eddy Merckx's dominance), his second was Gianni Bugno ("And obviously I couldn't stand Claudio Chiappucci – he confides – but, ironically, I've now become his friend and collector: I have one of his bikes and one of his jerseys, both Carrera, both autographed by him"), now he's crazy about Alessandro De Marchi and Jonathan Milan ("More than neighbors, I consider them sons if not grandsons, anyway family – he explains. On display there's also a pink water bottle of mine, branded Giro d'Italia, with both their autographs").

It all started with a 1972 Legnano ("Recovered from a landfill, and brought back to life first by cleaning it from head to toe, then by restoring the broken or missing parts"). Luciano prefers to handle the research ("I study the original models and try to recover them"), the washing ("With pressure washers"), the painting ("But also the stickers"), then he entrusts the "patients" to more experienced or specialized friends ("Like Roberto Bortolotti, I trust him blindly, myself much less, I'm always afraid I might do more damage than miracles"). The important thing is the rescue operation ("Discarded bikes, abandoned, rejected, dumped, scrapped, and instead reborn or resurrected").

For Baldassi the most beautiful moment is "that anxiety that grips me when the race approaches and I choose the spot where I'll intercept the riders, usually at the feed zones, when they receive food and drinks from the team cars and get rid of their empty water bottles" up to "that anxiety that precedes the moment when I show my new treasure to friends". He brings with him from home "the friable fricchetti," cheese-based pastries, irresistible Friuli specialties, as potential symbolic and gastronomic barter. In other circumstances Baldassi recovers jerseys from cycling clubs more or less historic. This time, for the Giro d'Italia, he has displayed five bikes in five shop windows in Gemona, from a Pinarello branded Banesto Indurain model to a Bottecchia Eroica type (derailleur on the frame, cages on the pedals and external cables) Sprinter model. Then, near Gemona station there's a window entirely dedicated to Milan. And that's not all. In Buja, for a similar exhibition, but with Bortolotti's bicycles, Baldassi lent about twenty jerseys, from Gimondi's Salvarani to Francesco Moser's Sanson, from Gianni Motta's Molteni to Roger De Vlaeminck's Brooklyn.

And Saturday? Baldassi will break his tradition, he'll give up the feed zone area and act in the departure area instead. "I have two objectives – he declares – the first, to bring Milan together with a ninety-one-year-old fan of his, and the second, to approach Damiano Caruso, because he had given me one of his water bottles and I gave him a book about the Zoncolan, and I'd like to ask him whether it was easier for him to climb the Kaiser on a bike or to read those pages about the Kaiser".