Cycling Nostalgia: Authenticity, Tourism and Social Critique in Tuscany

Abstract

Over the last 15 years Italian cyclotourists have been building a subculture around nostalgia for vintage cycling (bici d'epoca). Vintage-inspired races and gatherings such as L'Eroica (the hero) in Tuscany serve as the ideological and organizational foundation of a kind of cyclotouring seeking to reclaim the values of an older and ‘purer’ form of the sport. Riders and enthusiasts dress in pre-1980s cycling clothing and are by regulation not allowed to ride bikes made after 1987, the year clipless pedals and aluminium and carbon fibre frames began mass production. Heroic cycling, as it has come to be called, draws on a history of social and political engagement by cyclotourists and cyclotouring clubs in Italy. The Touring Club Italiano (TCI), founded in 1894, began as a club for bourgeois gentlemen in Italy's North who had an interest in cycling. The TCI quickly became involved in the Liberal political causes of the moment and began advocating for better roads and an improved tourism industry. The TCI's goal of making ‘Italy known to Italians’ serves as the historic foundation of bici d'epoca which has attached itself to other contemporary sociopolitical causes in Italy seeking to undermine Europeanization and preserve Italian agricultural and artisanal heritages.