TRADUZIONI A CURA DI MARTINA MERONI.
Martina è nata un giorno di dicembre del 1997 e come tutti i capricorni è energica e determinata. Ama viaggiare, scrivere, fotografare e inseguire le sue passioni senza briglie. Nel 2015 ha scelto di lasciare per sei mesi la sua vita di sempre e trasferirsi in Australia come exchange student.
Ho chiesto a lei di tradurre alcuni post del blog perchè ci siamo trovate subito, nel carattere, nella determinazione e nei pensieri. Grazie a questo e al fatto che sia una lettrice del blog, sono convinta che riesca a tradurre con più cuore rispetto a traduttrici professionali proprio perchè condivide la passione per il ciclismo. E infine perchè mi piace crescere assieme a persone che stanno cercando di crescere a loro volta.
Questo è un luogo virtuale per sogni concreti.
22ND MAY 2017 – #GIRODAYS | BERGAMO
Estate.
Di quelle giornate con il cielo azzurro senza una sbavatura, con il sole a picco e la gente che cerca il fresco dei portici, il profumo del Pitosforo con i suoi fiorellini bianchi e carnosi e prepotenti.
Lo ammetto, Bergamo non è mai stata tra le mie città preferite eppure oggi sembra diversa, con quello scorcio lassù, con i portici dove stanno i caffè e i lampioni sembrano uova preziose sospese nel vuoto di quel primo pomeriggio caldo ma per niente afoso…Read more.
20TH MAY 2017 – #GIRODAYS | OROPA
Mirrors.
I like the paddy fields when the weather is good, squares of ground that reflect the light-blue sky, the white and frothy clouds in a mid-morning. There is a sleepy tractor, without driver, which seems to sink slowly in the static water. And a sudden flight of a heron, a few seconds’ show like one of those jerks in an uphill…Read more.
19TH MAY 2017 – #GIRODAYS | TORTONA
Tackle.
In cycling it means squashing like a sardine against the people trying to find available spots between hands, arms and bellies. Sometimes it’s art, I admit, a sort of calculation for winning at tetris. Ten people to overstep and bingo: ten points. For sure Tortona and its wind that brushed away the clouds turning the sky clear was unexpected…Read more.
18TH MAY 2017 – #GIRODAYS | REGGIO EMILIA
Stories of long returns.
Some time is needed to understand that it’s still you, still only a few are the windows with pink balloons compared to the people who swarm on their bicycle among the street of the city centre. I started slowly, I admit, by now I know that I can’t take the first day of Giro as I usually do, without noticing that I go too fast… Read more.
14TH MAY 2016 – #GIRODAYS | AREZZO
Outside the air shakes the pines’ peaks in this lost corner on the Chianti’s hills. It seems a fairy wood that has got the wood’s smell, the bark’s one. Little lights barely enlighten the gravel paths surrounded by the silence of a night that doesn’t seem of May. In the end this is how it is the first meeting with the Giro. A clash, more than anything else, a sort of head-on collision at three hundred km/h. You get a bit upset. It is how it is…Read more.
13TH OCTOBER 2015 – NATIONAL ANTHEM
From the highway you can see Lecco’s mountains: quite limpid in a day that started badly and that might have continued worse. But the air got milder and there is this shy sun of October that makes the early afternoon look like the sunset time
It’s the eve of the last Classic of the season.
In the almost desert hall of the hotel, I ask about Tony Gallopin to the girls at the reception desk…Read more.
25TH JULY 2015 – SIAMO CAN-NIBALI
In Modane there is the mountain’s air that makes the pois sheets wave on the town hall’s windows. There is the sun but you feel good with the sweatshirt. The only one I put in my suitcase. They tell that the French are good at make brioches but I didn’t find one since I am here…Read more.
24TH JULY 2015 – #ONTHETOUR | COURAGE
Smell of hot asphalt and shadow’s spots.
We wanted to go to the start but somewhere there was written that the road that takes to theToussuire would have been closed from eleven in the morning. Two hours before the start, eight hours before the passage. Impossible things, that someone not even if paid would go up for fifteen kilometres and then back down for other fifteen. Someone goes up by bike, it takes less…Read more.
23TH JULY 2015 – #ONTHETOUR | NAIRO TE AMO!
The cold sweat attaches to your body up here. The road that Napoleone wanted to go through the Alps. The road that rises with narrow elbows and that opens itself on the valley and then the lake that is lightblue and freezing like the air. The road is desert, the roadmen’s houses half abandoned, dark red against the almost cloudy sky. The Pass, a wooden restaurant made with that dark wood that was used for the chalets in the eighties and white plaster, a lot of little and motionless sheeps in the valley like the nativity scenes’ ones. A layer of clouds and then all white like the milk…Read more.
3RD JUNE 2015 – ABOUT SILVAN
Luino and this its little hamlet sweetly bothered by the calm afternoon’s undertow. The lake and that stripe of sparkles gilded by the latest sun. The Hotel where tonight the BMC’s guys will sleep has light-blue shutters and an antique small walls that have been hearing the water’s breath for, who knows, how long. I find Silvan Dillier seated at a small table with Valerio Piva and Fabio Baldato, his sport directors. I greet him, I tell him that I found some traffic, maybe I am late. He smiles, he shakes my hand and gets up. We go into the hall together, looking for a calm spot where we can talk about him, about this Giro…Read more.
31ST MAY 2015 – #GIRODAYS | MILANO
Milano and the sky without colour, the antique paved around the Arco della Pace and the people who speak my dialect. Milano is a bit like home.
Especially when I come back from trips. Stazione Centrale or the freeway’s barrier with its dazzling lights at the nights when it’s late because you went somewhere to see the cycling.
“I am at the barrier” means that I’m almost home.
Also for the cyclists, today, this city is a bit like home…Read more.
28TH MAY 2015 – #GIRODAYS | MELIDE – VERBANIA
The hot-air balloon and all the children that go around holding the balloons with their hands. I don’t know why but when I was little often hot-air balloons went by my house. At a certain time they disappeared, they never came back. I don’t know why. I know that today I forgot the battery of my camera. Later or before it had to happen. I always remember it at the last moment, I knew that one time or the other I would have found the camera’s body too slight…Read more.
27TH MAY 2015 – #GIRODAYS | LUGANO
Pink curls in the afternoon’s light. Coriandoli that go and come back in the air of a perfect day. The sun as in summer, the light wind that shakes the pink balloons hung on the ferry in the middle of the lake. This is the usual perfume that talks to the soul. Wild even in a day like this. Smell of lake, of algae, of the undertow that comes back. Cycling that is like the life itself and like this water…Read more.
26TH MAY 2015 – #GIRODAYS | MORTIROLO
The climb’s procession. This is the almost holy part of cycling. The buzz of the people who walk uphill, the bike’s noise, mixed to the prognostics, at the passage times. The backpacks, the k-ways because you never know, the bars, the slices of cakes wrapped up in the foil, the panini. The essence of cycling is here, when the cyclists are still far away: people that do kilometres for an only goal, for only one passage…Read more.
25TH MAY 2015 – INSIDE THE HEART
The saddles drip of water, the bikes are held waiting and they reflect themselves badly in the never firm puddles. Under the awnings there is the rollers’ noise, all round the buzz of the people that watch, with the umbrellas one on top of the other. The Lotto Soudal is used to this Belgian weather. On the rollers there is Sander Armee with the time trial’s suit twisted on the hips. He drips sweat like the rain out there, sometimes he lifts himself up again…Read more.
24TH MAY 2015 – #GIRODAYS | MAROSTICA
Yesterday it was autumn and today, suddenly June. Marostica is the city of cherries. Along the road, at every stony terrace, at every path that goes into the countryside there is an ambulant with basket full of red fruits. And cherry trees. And then those clouds that tear themselves in the light blue of the sky. The alpini in the square plays the Italian hymn. Marostica is a strange turning point. The mountains of the last week begin and today they go up to Madonna di Campiglio…Read more.
23TH MAY 2015 – #GIRODAYS | TREVISO
It rains and the river that crosses Treviso seems to reflect a light blue sky that doesn’t exist. The noise of the rain that is amplified under the arcades is added to the one of the old mills squeezed between one house and another. The creepers red flowers of a balcony seem to be even redder, like the balloons of the Giro that are everywhere.
Treviso is a little enchantment of shiny shops and bridges and squares. There is a carousel with horses that seems a carillon. There is a man who rides in shorts on an improbable sonorous bike. A passer man passes and whispers: “Xe matto queo lì!” It’s just the Giro…Read more.
22ND MAY 2015 – #GIRODAYS | JESOLO
The countryside flows towards Jesolo. Here it was all swamp then the drainage came and arose the farmhouses. Almost all the same, in the middle of the fields till where the eye can arrive. Horizon and again horizon and then the Lagoon. The Sile. The water brings the legends afloat, the bed is a hand of fate, the fish flow above with the water, with the seaweed.
Silence of places that seem uninhabited under this grey and low sky. The rain.
The sea, grey as well with a light blue reflection far away.
And the beach umbrellas that are open for the Giro at the Lido, the soggy sand.
And again the rain.
All flat so far. A road along the countries that used to be marsh and maybe it still hides some forgotten stories.
Sprinters, the last chance.
The rain that doesn’t stop, a couple with short pants that has taken a bit of barrier and has sat down waiting…Read more.
20TH MAY 2015 – #GIRODAYS | IMOLA
The pole position’s stripes are even more lucid and even whiter on the asphalt soaked of rain. Somewhere there is still Ayrton’s breath here. This morning Murilo Fishcer had a helmet with Brazilian colours. Senna written on the side.
To them he was a kind of God. He, who used to talk to God everyday, was a boy that felt awfully in debt with life. Because of money first and because of the luck and of the talent then. He wanted to give back.
Ayrton.
Last martyr of a sport that was becoming too dangerous. Ayrton who believed in tears: they aren’t made to be hidden. Because sensitiveness is a precious gift.
Ayrton who that morning of May stayed for a long time with closed eyes in his single-seater car. Giorgio Terruzzi tells that to everybody it seemed pain for Roland Ratzenberg died the Friday before. It was maybe awareness instead. It was that famous sensitiveness that put him in contact with himself. It was like he knew…Read more.
10TH MAY 2015 – #GIRODAYS | GENOVA
There is this sea giant that leaves the harbour like a huge white whale which shines in the sun. On the back, thousands little figures greets waving their hands. Arrivederci Genova. A city that is like all the other big cities: really beautiful in its intimate heart. Today down there the Giro arrived. And now that the sun makes the water shine and light up the houses on the hills, I can still feel people’s roar on the finish line, the endless arms outstretched towards the hurdles. I shudder thinking about it again. Thinking again about what cycling does in a afternoon like many others: it overturns the rules, stops everything, takes time and delete it. Fatti sentire, Genova here there are the guys you waited for. Glistening with sweat and effort under a sun that seems full summer, maybe with the shorts ripped by a fall, some blood mixed with kilometres…Read more.
9TH MAY 2015 – #GIRODAYS | SAN LORENZO AL MARE
The blue sea, that kind of afternoon’s blue when the sky is clear, the sun is behind the shoulders and it draws long shadows. White the square between the starting dais and the busses (or what is left), two swarthy women with white hair are seated on a bench. The others are empty and the wind folds the palm, the sea barely froths. There is the usual silence of the after stage. A bit of sadness, a bit of tiredness…Read more.
8TH MAY 2015 – #GIRODAYS | IMPERIA
There is the scent of gorses, the kind that grows in clusters on these hills. Smell of Liguria, rough and good. There are the frogs croaking during the dry and almost warm night, with some far crickets. The little lights scattered in the dark of the hinterland make this place look enchanted and far from everything. And maybe it is… Read more
13TH APRIL 2015 – WHITE. BLACK.
White like the double line after the circuit’s lap. The bell that tells the end. The sun in the eyes. The mute scream of Dege that at twenty-six years old has got his Paris Roubaix.
Black like the dust mixed with the sweat that draws the fatigue’s wrinkles on the skin. The holes in the moments when you have to be ahead…Read more.
9TH MARCH 2015 – WHAT MAKE YOU BREATHLESS
Emotions is a word that I like always less. Devalued, debased, mistaken, mistreated. Maybe is truly always harder to write without slip in the terrible mess of the useless emphasis. However cycling need to keep a sort of logbook, of those written without too many corrections, with the ink’s spots on the dots because the nib was held for too long there…Read more.
E mi alzo sui pedali 