Biciclette d'Epoca 74: Antonio Colombo, personal archive between art, bicycles and design (Vintage Bicycles - English edition of Biciclette d'Epoca

Biciclette d'Epoca 74: Antonio Colombo, personal archive between art, bicycles and design (Vintage Bicycles - English edition of Biciclette d'Epoca

The history of the bicycle – as we have said many times – is also the history of our country. The way it clearly captures and reflects the way Italian society moves, alongside industrial evolution, paints a faithful portrait, sometimes unexplored or untold, that tells us a lot about our past and helps us look to the future. I was recounting this – more or less in these terms – at the Radio Eroica stand after introducing the participants in the Bicycle Elegance Competition, now in its fifth edition. Bicycles become a pretext, a means of transport that can be 'pedalled' with the mind as well as with the legs. Studying them means studying a beautiful part of Italy. This is a thought that often comes to mind, especially when I spend time with the people who are part of the pantheon of those who have been the leading figures in Italian cycling over the years, developing futuristic and daring ideas through it, the result of a journey that is both entrepreneurial and creative. A thought that – obviously – came back to me with a vengeance after I 'interviewed' (a term that seems a little reductive to me) the man who was the first to treat the bicycle as a design object, Antonio Colombo, a figure linked to the Cinelli brand but who has gone far beyond that, even if not all of us have seen it. In general, I like Antonio's shoes. I know that may seem like a meaningless statement, but the way he still chooses to walk through the world today – colourful and unconventional – fully reflects the way he shook up Italian cycling production, which at the end of the 1970s was in many ways trapped in a comfortable comfort zone from which not everyone wanted to emerge. Antonio Colombo, on the other hand, found himself walking and then running along paths that he invented himself, or almost, losing and regaining his balance by following his own intuition and mixing things that no one else before him had dared to mix. Art, design and bicycles, in a cocktail where everything has its own role and meaning. An approach and a story that belongs to Colombo's Archive, a mystical place nearing completion in the south-east of Milan, which I hope everyone will one day be able to see, where Antonio talks about himself, starting with the rationalist furniture produced by the family business in the 1930s, which is anything but a minor detail in history. Because, listening to him and reading his words, you understand how models that literally made cycling history came about, such as the Cinelli Laser or the Rampichino, which we wanted to explore in depth in this issue, which is not a monograph but certainly says a lot about Antonio Colombo. And in this sense, the cover had to feature a remake of one of the most iconic photos in the history of cycling: Colombo with the Laser designed by Keith Haring, courtesy of our friend Andrea Bonfanti, author of excellent books including "Laser Project". These are the stories we like to tell on our pages: the tip of an iceberg that sometimes goes much deeper than we imagine, but is always worth exploring. TODAY AS YESTERDAY Eroica News - Eroica Concorso d'Eleganza - AVI - NUVI - RSC - VCC - The future of Eroica Caffè PORTRAITS Gino Eroico COVER STORY: COLOMBO'S ARCHIVE THE BICYCLES Ganna Giro d'Italia 1939 - Umberto Dei Bordino 1938 - Centaur 1876 - Masi Special Pista 1968 - Internal brake restoration - Bianchi D 1899 - BGA Velectrik Tourist 1937 - Routens Randonneuse 1952 - Cinelli Laser Prototype 1981 - Cinelli Rampichino Airone 1985 PEOPLE & CHAMPIONS Runaway Words: the legend of the giant - Raymond Poulidor - Franco Ballerini - Stefano Gaggero - Ambrogio Morelli VELOCULTURE Books - The reborn jersey - The origins of racing - Part I