Lots of people along the streets and at the arrivals of the three (and a half) days of the Grande Boucle in Italian territory. “We expected a great success with the public, but maybe not of these proportions”, Stefano Bonaccini tells us
Today in Claviere, in the Alta Val di Susa, after having passed Sestriere, the riders and the caravan of the Tour de France they will leave Italy behind to take the roads of France. Adieu Italie, or perhaps au revoir. The Grande Boucle started from Florence, reached Rimini by crossing the Apennines. It started again from Cesenatico to reach Bologna, climbing first towards the Sanctuary of the Madonna di San Luca. It started pedaling again from Piacenza, bowed to Fausto Coppi, before heading through the Langhe and Monferrato to reach Turin. It left behind full streets and squares, millions of people on the sidewalks and on the platforms, leaning out of their balconies, with something yellow to wave or a few red polka dots on a white background, because there is nothing more French than the climbers’ jersey. Above all smiles, hurray, allez! An incredible celebration made up of many micro-parties full of beer, grilled sausages, sandwiches, chatter, bicycles, all in the name of an absolute love for this sport, cycling. The only one capable of reaching people where they are. Just go down to the street if you are lucky enough to live near the race route.
“We expected a great success with the public, but perhaps not of this proportion,” the president of Emilia-Romagna, Stefano Bonaccini, tells Il Foglio. “For me it’s a dream come true,” he confesses, smiling, looking around, observing a Via Irnerio in Bologna packed with people along the finishing straight of the second stage of the Tour de France. “It’s an incredible satisfaction to end ten years of presidency in the region like this, with the Tour de France.” In one hundred and ten editions, the Tour had entered our country from Ventimiglia, from some Alpine pass, it had reached Liguria, Piedmont and Valle d’Aosta. This year it started from Florence, “and traveled for three days along the roads of Romagna and Emilia.” Bonaccini looks around and sees “three years of work” taking shape, becoming reality. I have to thank the director of the Tour, Christian Prudhomme, for having listened to us and Davide Cassani, who I appointed eight years ago to lead the Tourist Promotion Agency, who allowed us to have a reference, unique in terms of competence and passion, to carry out the project”.
Philippe Lescoth, who has been on the Grande Boucle technical staff for twenty years, confides to Il Foglio that “I have never seen anything like it. We have been to Denmark, Holland, Belgium, the Basque Country, but I have never seen such passion, such enormous happiness in seeing the Tour de France pass by in any other country. It seemed like being in France, it seemed like a huge village festival. And cycling is just that: a huge village festival”.
A project born in 2020, when Switzerland gave up on organizing the Cycling World Championships due to the pandemic. “Nobody wanted to organize them. They called us and we got to work,” says Bonaccini. “In three weeks in Imola and the Imola area we organized the world championships. They were a huge success, despite the limited audience.” It was at that moment “that the crazy idea came to mind for someone to try to bring the Tour to Italy. We worked hard, involving the mayor of Florence Dario Nardella. Then the president of Piedmont, Alberto Cirio, joined in.” The demonstration that good politics for the territories can be done even between representatives of different parties.
A spectacle of cycling and people that was seen by hundreds of millions of people in 190 countries around the world. Men and women who came from all over Italy, because if there was one thing that everyone was saying in these first Italian days of the Tour de France, it was that “the Tour is in Italy, how could I miss it”.
There was, and still is, for about sixty kilometers, the Tour in Italy and millions of people left their homes, traveled tens, hundreds of kilometers (some left from Benevento by bicycle a few days earlier to get to Bologna) just to see it pass by, to take part in that enormous itinerant popular celebration that cycling still is.
