Coppi e-bike

He was born in Castellania (Alessandria) on 15 September 1919, the fourth son (the fifth, Serse, would be born in 1923) of Domenico and Angiolina Boveri, owners of a modest plot of land where maize and vines were farmed, barely enough to support the family. Having attended primary schools with little success, he did not want to “serve out his time clinging to a clump of soil” like his fellow villagers, who “ate bread and spit to buy more land, expand their landholdings, make up for too many births”. Preferring to learn a trade, at the age of thirteen he moved to nearby Novi Ligure to work as an apprentice at a delicatessen, where he intended to learn pork processing. Commuting by bicycle often between Novi and Castellania, he felt his passion for cycling growing, already nurtured by hearing the adults in the farmyard of his father’s house describing the feats of Girardengo, Novi’s Champion of Champions.