The Bicycle Runner
A Memoir of Love, Loyalty, and the Italian Resistance
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
G. Franco Romagnoli's The Bicycle Runner is an irresistible memoir of coming of age, friendship, love, and war during the perils of Fascist Italy.
Like all boys growing up in Rome during the 1930s and 1940s, the author was expected to join the Balilla—Italy's fascist Youth Organization. With political divisions running deep in the families within his palazzo, he and his motley group of friends were recruited into the underground Resistance. Racing around Rome on bicycles, they smuggled messages and weapons for the partisans. Later, the author fled to the Italian countryside and narrowly avoided German mop-up operations—despite being sold out by his most trusted of friends.
But this is much more than a war story. Lyrical in language, rich in sentimentality, and possessing the magic of a classic Fellini film, Romagnoli's memoir is a charmingly told tale of the search for manhood and the bonds of family and friendship.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At 14, the young Romagnoli, like any other Italian youth, marched to the beat of the Balilla, the Fascist Youth Organization in Italy. Not long after his days in his little squad, he realized the error of his ways and became a bicycle runner, secretly delivering books, pamphlets and other materials to members of the Resistance. Romagnoli, who died in 2008, at 82, and developed an affectionate following as a writer on Italian culture and cuisine (Italy, the Romagnoli Way: A Culinary Journey), warmly chronicles his coming-of-age in the midst of upheaval and conflict. This memoir covers 11 years in Romagnoli's life (from 14 to 25) and contains the outline of a portrait of the young man as famous artist. During his stint with the resistance, he meets a young American pilot named Bob, and with their insatiable appetites whetted by their hunger, the two dream of home by exchanging constantly their favorite succulent menus. Romagnoli reminisces, too, about first love; his forays into lust and sex with his neighbor; his fear of confession to the local Catholic priest; and the warmth and largesse of his extended family. In this heartwarming memoir, Romagnoli offers a picture of a young boy whose passions and longings for love, homeland and family abide with him as he turns quickly into an adult because of WWII.
