Fifty years ago the first issue of the newspaper "la Repubblica" and the first copy of the album "Hotel California" by the Eagles. Fifty years ago the founding of Apple by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and the Irish rock band U2. Fifty years ago the first screening of the film "Taxi Driver" and the first time a woman became minister, partisan Tina Anselmi. Fifty years ago Felice Gimondi's victory at the Giro d'Italia and fifty years ago also the birth of Massimiliano Muraro, who fifty years later would write "50 Years Since Felice" (Ediciclo, 192 pages, 16 euros) precisely about that victory.

The grandfather, the television, the stories. Muraro was struck by the passion for bicycle racing. These were the years of Bugno and Chiappucci, but cycling is the sport of memory, certain stages repeat themselves endlessly, certain riders never dismount, certain faces and certain paces, certain breakaways and certain chases are never forgotten. It's worth finding them again, rediscovering them, recomposing them. Among finishing orders and general classifications, chronicles and interviews, thoughts and words, imaginations and reflections, legacies and debts, stories and geographies, thus facts and maps. Among letters and readings.

Muraro begins precisely with a letter to Felice, in which he explains where this Giro d'Italia of 1976 comes from, a machine (bicycles were once called machines) of time, "the reasons that drove me to write to you and to follow you like a shadow along the roads of the Giro you are about to face". The first of the reasons: "I ride a bicycle because I like it, because it makes me feel good and because it allows me to experience the world slowly". The second: "Cycling was the passion that" his grandfather "made his blood boil in his veins. Cycling and boxing, sports that come from hunger and misery".

From Friday, May 21 to Saturday, June 12, 1976, from Catania to Milan in 4,162 km, from Juan Manuel Santisteban's death in a sprint to Davide Tinchella's victory in a sprint, but also from Dino Buzzati to Gianni Brera, from Vasco Pratolini to Gianni Mura, from Patrick Sercu to Rik Van Linden, from Fabrizio Fabbri to Arnaldo Caverzasi, and then from Ciocco to Bracco, from Passo della Futa to the Pale Mountains, from Eddy Merckx to Francesco Moser, from Ercole Gualazzini to Gigi Sgarbozza. A kaleidoscope of colors and sounds, a labyrinth of secondary and silent roads, a centrifuge of emotions and feelings. For those who know, a resurrection. For those who don't know, a revelation. For those who both know and don't know, a feature film to pedal through with eyes and heart.

Letters and readings. The letters are Muraro's, three of them, before, during and after the Giro, and also that of Norma Gimondi, Felice's daughter, as an affectionate and grateful postscript. The readings are those that Muraro recovered from the archives, including Gianni Rodari and Carlo Levi. And then there is also the imagination, precisely, in dialogues recorded in good conscience. "Farewell Felice Gimondi from Sedrina – Muraro concludes -, for me it has been an honor to accompany you".