Wolmer sounded strange, it sounded foreign. Much like Wolsit from Legnano, or Wilier from Trieste, or Welter from Milan sounded strange and foreign. It wasn't an acronym, Wolmer, it wasn't an abbreviation. It was simply a strange sound, a foreign sound, one that was hoped would have the desired effect on customers, reassuring them, intriguing them, and pushing them to make a purchase.
Wolmer Biciclette Pasturana, a couple of kilometers from Novi Ligure, the twentieth-century capital of cycling. It was 1954 when Piero Guido, a mechanic, and Gino Grosso, his cousin, joined forces to open a workshop and produce frames. In Pasturana, on Via Cavour, just a few dozen meters from the two hairpin turns where, last May, during the Giro d'Italia along the Imperia-Novi Ligure stage, two banners were displayed, one dedicated to Costante Girardengo, the other to Fausto Coppi, the two legendary Alessandrian champions in the eternal history of cycling.
However, the story of Wolmer was not a long one: it may have been the competition, who knows, but the business dissolved. Piero Guido found employment at Italsider, Gino Grosso in the taxi and funeral services sector. Yet both remained attached to the world of cycling and bicycles. And in town they remember and tell the story of the appearance—it was 1987—of Gino Bartali. The Man of Iron had met Piero Guido in 1949, when he left Legnano to found Bartali, and he chose the bicycle of the Santamaria brothers from Novi Ligure. Piero Guido worked there as a mechanic. And because he was meticulous and passionate, he was chosen to follow the races in the support vehicle, ready for any intervention, first aid, ready for anything. Between Gino Bartali and Piero Guido, a relationship of mutual respect, trust, and friendship had developed: because the mechanic is not only a doctor and surgeon of bicycles, but also a confidant and confessor, psychologist and psychotherapist of the riders.
Bartali was in Tassarolo, ten minutes by car from Pasturana. His specialty was connecting and staying connected; friendships were kept alive by looking into each other's eyes, not into a telephone, verified by a glance, not on a screen. Bartali asked about the Redhead, as Gino called
Piero for the color of his hair, and immediately the meeting was arranged, and the meeting became a celebration, and the celebration is today historical, collective, village memory, also recalled by "A Sigera", the newsletter of the Pro Loco of Pasturana. A human gathering in the garden of Gino Grosso, at the Ginettaccio center, national hero
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