'Making Italians'? Cycling and national identity in Italy: 1900-1950

In the past two decades, scholars from various disciplines have underscored the key role performed by modern mass spectator sports in giving ordinary people a sense of identification with and participation in the 'imagined community' of their respective nations. Professional bicycle racing was clearly the athletic endeavor best suited to perform this role in Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century. With its distinctive blend of competition, spectacle and business, cycling emerged as the first modern spectator sport on the peninsula and remained arguably the most popular one until the late 1950s. As a consequence, cycling's spectacles and heroic champions offered unprecedented opportunities to break down the isolation of local communities and encourage a larger sense of mass participation in the nation. At the same time, however, the new sport mapped on to and inflamed older bourgeois anxieties and insecurities about the national community and its status in the hierarchy of European nations.