Bella Figura

With the Giro due to start in just a few days, this seems as good a time as any to say that I love Italy -- and the Italians.

Some of this affection was passed on by my Father -- a fellow cyclist and lifelong admirer of Italian food, wine and music.  He took me -- as a small boy -- to Naples, a city which -- twenty years earlier -- he and his RAF colleagues had enthusiastically attempted to flatten, then fallen in love with.

Ever since, I've shared his love of the country memorably characterised by Dave Stohler's Dad in Breaking Away as one where "the men shave their legs, but the women don't shave theirs."

I admire Italian design and their passion for the really important things in life -- like cycling.

Across thirty years of velo-obsessiveness, most of my bikes have been Italian, running on Italian hardware.  

But one thing which has begun to grate a little recently is the Italian insistence on their innate superiority in dress sense.   Certainly there was a time when Italians -- especially Italian men --were better dressed than their fellow Europeans, but I think that may have passed.

Filippo Pozzato is at it again in this month's Cycle Sport -- a man possessed  by the worst peloton hairdo since Laurent Brochard, and wearing a leather jacket he appears to have borrowed from a Neapolitan pimp -- lectures other riders on their clothing deficiencies.  Most of these alleged deficiencies -- he claims -- are because the riders in question are not Italian, and therefore not blessed with innate style.

His argument is weakened slightly by appearing in the same issue as Dave Millar - a man with a real sense of style, and no need to resort to iffy perms and giant designer logos.

And weakened further by these pictures -- admittedly of two of my favourite cyclists of all time. Separated by forty years, but united by a shared inability to look in the mirror before going out.

Not everything Italian is automatically stylish. Enjoy the Giro.