Authors: William Fotheringham
A few kilometres away is the house Coppi bought not long before leaving Bruna and Marina; his wife remained there until her death and it is now the home of their daughter. Bruna’s old house is in the centre of the town, Giulia’s on the outskirts, but the two villas have much in common. They are both large, ornate, tranquil and set back from the road. Both still have furniture that dates back to the 1950s. Neither has changed a great deal since Fausto Coppi left for the last time; both the ‘Coppi houses’ are living museums.
Visiting both houses in the space of a day was a curious experience. Coppi’s son and daughter are both disconcertingly like their father, who is an opaque memory for both of them. Marina admits she has difficulty distinguishing between what she remembers and what she has been told, that gradually she has built up ‘a mosaic’ of memories. Faustino confesses that most of what he knows of his father comes through his mother. It was not until several years after the deaths of both their mothers that the pair became reacquainted, at a race organised in Novi in memory of their father in 2000. Faustino
and Marina had abruptly stopped meeting after their father’s death – when Marina was twelve and Faustino four – because their mothers could not abide one another. The two houses lie less than four miles apart but for forty years they were divided by a gulf that might as well have been the Adriatic.
* * *
Article 587 of the Italian penal code was explicit: ‘An adulterous wife shall be punished by imprisonment for up to one year. Her accomplice in adultery shall be punished by the same punishment … the crime shall be punishable on complaint of the husband.’ It remained on the statute book until 1968, part of a set of laws that now seem positively medieval. The phrasing makes it clear that a woman’s guilt was considered greater than that of a man, reflecting the importance attached to maintaining well-defined paternity, which would eventually be a key element in the Coppi imbroglio.
The law was out of kilter with a nation where sexual mores were beginning to change – a fact recognised by judges, who rarely gave more than a three-month suspended prison sentence. In the mid-1950s, when an amendment was proposed, it was not a move to decriminalise adultery itself, but merely an attempt to make men and women equally guilty in the eyes of the law. A straw poll of celebrities – lawyers, actresses, opera singers, sportspeople – sought their opinions on the proposed change, but did not find any voices in favour of the idea that adultery should cease to be considered a crime.
There was another twist to the law on adultery. If Giulia’s husband injured or killed either her or Coppi during a dispute about the breakup of his marriage, the law would take into account the fact that he had been cuckolded, his honour
blemished. A reduced sentence might be given if it was proved that a crime was committed to avenge one’s honour. This was the premise for the film
Divorzio all’Italiana
of 1961, in which the hero, depicted by Marcello Mastroianni, plans to murder his wife and use Article 587 to mitigate his prison sentence.
Coppi and Giulia had become ‘marital outlaws’. The phrase was coined by Luigi Sansone, the Socialist deputy who opened the debate over adultery and divorce not long after the scandal involving the
campionissimo
. Sansone estimated that some four million Italians were
fuorilegge
due to the anomalies in divorce law that left parents and children with no legal status. Women were disadvantaged, having to live where their husbands specified, while children born outside marriage were second-class citizens. Legally, husbands retained authority over their wives’ children, even if these were the progeny of another relationship. Coppi and Giulia’s situation was not complex; Italian law would make it so.
In embarking on their affair, Coppi and Giulia Locatelli were not merely breaking the law. In addition, they were defying the Catholic Church, which viewed marriage as part of the sacrament. Under Mussolini, control of marriage had been handed back to the Church, with the reversal of a law on civil marriages as part of the Lateran Accords of 1929. The government of the day was a religious party: the Christian Democrats. Both Church and party would fight attempts to legalise divorce and adultery.
For the media, the maintenance of the family unit was socially important, whatever false façades that entailed. This was a time when magazines praised ‘the most devoted wife of all Italy’ portraying an ideal of submissive womanhood not far from that of the exemplary mothers so beloved of the fascists. The elected ‘best Italian wife’ for 1954, one Anna Grazia Cicognani, was lauded for her ‘faith, abnegation, spirit of sacrifice and above all her gentleness of character and
understanding’. It was a time of public prudery, when, as the historian Daniele Marchesini notes, the television content guidelines specified that marriage must be portrayed in a positive way, that adultery should be shown as a grave sin, that children born outside wedlock were to be shown ‘with care’ and illegal sexual relations had to be depicted as ‘abnormal’.
Coppi was flouting the moral norms of his sport as well. The private lives of the stars – or what was seen of them in public – were expected to be exemplary. The popular, idealised view of Coppi was of a man with a small child and an adoring, modest wife who dedicated her life to supporting him in his sport. Bruna, and later also Marina, turned up at the occasional race to show the public why Coppi was racing: to provide for his women. Coppi himself had played up to this before Giulia became an important part of his life. His memoir
Le Drame de Ma Vie
ends: ‘Every win is part of Marina’s dowry, and that’s why I put all my willpower towards winning if I can. When, later on, I take my little Marina to the church dressed in white, perhaps, curious onlookers will say, tenderly “That’s little Marina, you know, the daughter of the old
campione
”.’
‘Cycling was a mysogenistic area of life,’ says Jean Bobet. ‘A team is like a bunch of boys on holiday together. If they talk about women it is not their wives they talk about. They see wives as noble beings, but they discuss the women they find along the way. I believe this ethos contributed to Fausto’s secret love life.’ There was, as Bobet hints, a distinct contrast between the public image and what actually went on. Turbulent love lives had always been part of cycling. For all the best efforts of men such as the Tour de France organiser Jacques Goddet and before him Henri Desgrange – who attempted to ban women from the Tour de France caravan – there were women aplenty on the cycling circuit.
Coppi cannot have lacked female attention as he plied his
trade on the velodromes of Europe in the winter. International stars such as Gina Lollobrigida and Maria Callas made a point of visiting him and Bartali at races. Clearly they believed that being pictured with either
campione
would enhance their celebrity status. Giulia Locatelli claimed, after Coppi’s death, that his conquests before her included noted actresses of screen and stage. This is impossible to verify; he must have had opportunities but no one knows whether he acted on them. What was extraordinary about his entanglement with the doctor’s wife was that some of its crucial moments took place in front of journalists and cameramen who could not believe their good fortune.
* * *
After the world championships of 1953, the affair continued. The week after the race and a few hours before the star was due to face the Australian Syd Patterson in a pursuit match, a
soigneur
entered Coppi’s hotel room close to the Vigorelli track in Milan. He found the cyclist in bed with Giulia. The
soigneur
asked if there was a risk that Coppi might sap his strength before taking on Patterson, who was world champion at the discipline; Coppi replied that he was good enough to make love and then beat the Australian later.
Coppi’s
gregari
played their role in keeping the affair secret. Giulia Locatelli would travel to Milan to meet Coppi, taking her daughter Lolli as cover. In Milan, the eight-year-old would be consigned either to Ettore Milano or Giovannino Chiesa. She would be taken to a film or a puppet show, while the couple spent time together.
Lolli, naturally, was under orders to keep her mouth shut, because Dr Locatelli had his suspicions: he was receiving letters that warned that something was going on. ‘My husband wanted to make me swear that the contents of the anonymous letters
he received did not correspond to reality,’ said Giulia Locatelli. ‘I swore, yes, on the heads of our children, and I was sincere when I shouted through my tears that only sporting fanaticism connected me to Coppi.’ The doctor and his wife would spent entire nights arguing, and he would set off to see his patients at 7 a.m. without having slept. At some point late in 1953, Fausto and Giulia escaped on holiday for a week on Capri ‘like man and wife’, she said later. Also late that year, she discovered that she was pregnant – or so she claimed in 1978 – but had an early miscarriage. In the wider world, however, the affair had yet to make headlines, although the podium photograph at Lugano had in effect made it public. Still the affair remained an open secret. ‘Everyone in cycling closed their eyes. It didn’t create too much trouble,’ says Fiorenzo Magni.
All that changed at the 1954 Giro, where, as the defending winner and the world champion, Coppi was the overwhelming favourite. He lived up to his status on the first stage in Palermo, a team time trial that he and his Bianchi team-mates won by four minutes from Koblet’s Guerra squad. However, on the second day he effectively lost the race, suffering serious stomach trouble after eating oysters for dinner in a Sicilian hotel. His deficit was eleven minutes; at the end of stage six, where he failed to respond to an attack by the promising young Italian Carlo Clerici, he had lost a colossal thirty-nine minutes and had no chance of overall victory.
That would have been bad enough for his public image, but the state of his private life finally hit the headlines during the rest day on the shores of Lake Garda. Both ‘
la signora
’– as the team called Giulia – and Bruna turned up, almost simultaneously. Doctor Locatelli had received an anonymous letter, recommending that he keep his wife at home. Giulia had promptly fled with Lolli, pretending that she was going to help a friend in Bergamo prepare for her wedding. Lolli would later describe phone calls along the way to the race,
the sudden appearance of various members of Coppi’s entourage and her mother saying at one point, ‘When I have married Mr Coppi, he will be your father’.
The race caravan was awash with rumours: Coppi and his wife had had an intense argument, their angry voices echoing down the corridor of the Bianchi team hotel. The mystery ended when Giulia got in her car and followed the cyclist on a time trial stage, the forty-two kilometres from Gardone to Riva del Garda – something completely unheard of. Bianchi were staying in an out-of-the-way hotel where a room had been booked for an unnamed guest. One writer described a pretty girl of eight or nine trying to persuade the police to let her into the hotel, saying ‘I must go to Uncle Fausto’. It was Lolli. A Bianchi domestique let her in; the journalist said he didn’t know Coppi had a niece, and the rider replied she was ‘the daughter of the woman on the third floor’.
Five days later, amid the chaos, Coppi won the race’s toughest stage across the Dolomites to Bolzano in his old style, but he could do no better than finish second overall behind Clerici. Giulia was also in evidence in St Moritz – the day before the finish in Milan – and this was the day she acquired the name
La Dama Bianca
, the White Lady, thanks to her white Montgomery duffel coat, of the style made famous by the English general during the Second World War. The
gregario
Sandrino Carrea recalled: ‘We finished the stage into St Moritz and there was this lady with a white coat. “Carrea, where is your hotel?” she said. I told her we were at the Poste. It was the first time I had seen her. And Fausto didn’t come to eat with us.’ ‘Who is Fausto Coppi’s lady in white?’ asked Pierre Chany in
L’Equipe
.
A couple of relatively minor events on the race were immediately linked with Coppi’s private life and turned into a scandal. On the leg into St Moritz the field staged what amounted to a strike, covering the two hundred mountainous
kilometres in nine hours without any significant racing. ‘Sheep on bikes’ was how
La Stampa
described the riders. Coppi himself had a fight with a Swiss cyclist, Emilio Croci-Torti, as they pedalled along, reflecting the stress he was suffering. The blame for both events was put on Coppi’s ‘physical and moral crisis’, amid rumours that he and Bruna were about to separate. A weekly magazine headlined its review of the race ‘
Il Giro degli scandali
’: the report said that the stars of cycling were overpaid and the sport was decadent, violent – there had been a fight at a stage finish as well as the Croci-Torti incident – and drug-riddled. The writer pilloried the stars for abusing their power over the
gregari
by making the lesser lights race how they wished. The vitriolic tone had been set.
* * *
When the White Lady is mentioned to one of Coppi’s circle the response does not vary a great deal. To start with, she is never referred to by name, but in various derogatory terms – as
quella signora
,
la dama
or, in the case of one former team-mate,
quella la
– that woman. There is usually one small anecdote, enough to make it clear she is not approved of, before the eyes are raised to the heavens, and the former cyclist says he cannot say more, for fear of offending her son, Faustino. The questioner is then referred to another member of the inner circle, who ‘knows much more’. Needless to say, the response is identical when that other ex-cyclist is questioned. It is enough, however, to get the message across: feelings have not weakened over fifty years.
A quietly spoken man in his early fifties, Faustino Coppi is gently protective of his mother. Given the odium that has been heaped on her over the last half-century, he has good reason. Faustino describes Giulia Occhini as ‘protective, gentle, but a very, very strong character. She always knew
where she wanted to get to and got there. There were no half-measures with her. She said what she thought and people took it as being unpleasant. There are people who have laid the responsibility for his death on her. They have said she changed my father [but] he was a person who had a certain way of living, then became famous and that changed. I don’t think it was so much marriage with my mother, but an evolution in his lifestyle.’ He uses the word ‘marriage’ in spite of the fact that Fausto and Giulia were never to be united in a ceremony that was recognised in their home country.