The bike? For writers it is a triumph of eros

For Maurice Le Blanc, the creator of the gentleman thief Arsene Lupine, the bicycle was «the uncontested queen, the absolute empress».

It was the year 1894, and the new means of transport was impetuously asserting itself. The writer and journalist was one of its most enthusiastic bearers: «It really is an infernal joy to devour space and devour it with one’s own strength, […] one feels formidable, conqueror of the elements, lord of the world», he wrote in the periodical “Gil Bals”: ​​which three years later published thirteen episodes of “Voici des ailes” (Here are the wings) in the feuilleton.

It was the story of two married couples who cycle between Normandy and Brittany, on holiday, between sport, entertainment and free love: because the “great liberator” “is stronger than sadness, stronger than boredom, as strong as hope. She reduces annoyances to their value, she takes us away from the past, she teaches us to live in the present and to move towards the future ».

Somehow, stripped of nineteenth-century rhetoric, it still is. And in these spring days, excellent for getting back on the bike even by the laziest (like yours truly), an amusing and curious book by Claudio Gregori, «I Vagamondi» (publisher 66THAND2ND) reminds us of it, which lines up 30 medallions of «writers on bicycles» recounting a great passion that did not spare Conan Doyle or Mark Twain, Emilio Salgari or Émile Zola, George Bernard Shaw and scientists such as Albert Einstein or Marie Curie.

There were the sportsmen, dominated by the spirit of competition, and the distracted cyclists (Einstein and Shaw collided disastrously on a steep descent towards Tintern Abbey, the famous Welsh abbey, and it ended up in the newspapers); the creatives (Salgari conceived the character of Sandokan as he darted over the hills around Verona pedaling on one of those terrible bicycles with a large front wheel and a small rear one, and the «La Nuova Arena» of Verona published the first installment of the novel The Tiger of Malaya on October 16, 1883); the stoics.

One of these, justly famous, is Mark Twain, who mounted the usual very heavy and complicated bicycle on March 10, 1884, and gave an account of it in a writing known among enthusiasts, Taming the bicycle, which at the last riga provides readers with definite advice: «Take the bike. You won’t regret it if you live.”

He spoke with good reason, given that he had undergone a series of lessons in the garden of the house with an expert in the new art, recovering from falls and bruises one on the other, which apparently also involved the instructor.

But in A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court he organized a charge, led by Lancelot, of knights… on bicycles. The revolutionary means of transport, at least as an initial project, had been born some time ago, at the beginning of the century, but only in 1861 thanks to a certain Ernest Michaux had pedals been invented, so to speak, and it still took quite a while before to archive, with the transmission chain, the large front wheel that caused so many problems for newbies. Winning them, I tamed that steel horse, was a source of pride.

But let’s go back to Salgari: he was so passionate that he overcame every obstacle and above all did not take into account – he like others, however – physical fatigue. In June 1986, for example, he left Verona with his friends (fourteen speedopedists and two tricyclists) to take part in a race that was to be held in Mantua. He told it in the newspaper “L’Arena”: «It was four in the morning when we left there [sede] social […] We were almost all in new glasses. Dark cap with feather, short jacket and trousers with buttons stopped at the knee, blue socks and sweaters, high belt and boots. At half past four the guides give the signal for departure.’

Perhaps, as a novelist, he exaggerated a bit on the heroic-fantastic side, but there is no doubt that reaching a pedal race by pedaling, and then competing in it, and finally returning home always with the same system must have been a truly noble undertaking.

Like Olindo Guerrini, a poet close to the so-called scapigliatura of the late nineteenth century; he could proudly say of himself «a happy step over the iron courser / like a new youth reborn».

Because the bicycle, in the imagination of heroic times, seems to solve any situation: in Zola’s case it allows him to lose weight (he was a big belly) and thus conquer his beloved Jeanne, the woman of his life; Sherlock Holmes, given that Conan Doyle knows everything about the bicycle, can solve very intricate cases thanks to the knowledge of his creator, as in “The Adventure of the Priory School” (1904) where he says to Watson: “I know 42 different tire tracks” , and of course spot the right one that leads to the killer. We could go on and on (Gregori’s book is well documented), up to Gabriel García Márquez’s “Memoirs of my sad whores”, where the 91-year-old protagonist gives a bicycle and a 16-year-old prostitute, but first he jumps with happiness and youth pedaling in the streets of the market.

Nor should we forget the only “heretic” of the illustrious company, Edmondo de Amicis, who wrote a lot about sport, and about the bicycle as well, but deaf to every invitation he never really rode it. He made full confession: and he called himself “a pillow biker”. Two incompatible elements? Not so.

Someone really put them together, and Gregori will excuse us if, infected by his book, we try to go on, to add at least one exemplary case: it was the great Mario Soldati, who in disgrace in Rome, after a cinematographic disaster, in 1934, he decided to change his style and fled towards Lake Orta.

He left Novara in October with his friend Mario Bonfantini, both intending to entrust themselves to chance. They loaded the “essential books” and some luggage onto two old bicycles and off they went.

They pedaled “at an almost professional pace”, Soldati writes in A long magical moment, a story-memoir published in 1982, then they began to zigzag, getting lost in unfortunately closed taverns and hotels, amid abundant dinners and adequate libations, until they reached Corconio , fraction of Orta San Giulio.

There, at the Stazione hotel, their adventure culminated. Soldati was immediately enraptured by the eyes and the silvery voice of one of the owner’s daughters: and he remained there for almost two years, fully satisfied.