"A successful exhibition thus becomes a permanent museum. And the opening is scheduled for Thursday 30 November 2017 in Alessandria. Palazzo del Monferrato".
The project has made its way with the approval of all stakeholders and institutions, finding broad popular and formal consensus, with the patronage of the Piedmont Region, the Province and Municipality of Alessandria, national newspapers such as La Gazzetta dello Sport and La Stampa, of organisations such as the USSI, Coni and Federciclismo as well as theInternational Cycling Union. Important sponsorships are still to come, such as that of the Sport Office of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers.
On the frame of this bicycle project is the awareness of promoting a means of sustainable mobility that is also a product of design, which has given much tolocal business in the years of its greatest artisanal development and which in recent years has been receiving renewed attention on an international level, experiencing what has been defined as a sort of renaissance.
There are several reasonsfor this success, as explained by Gian Paolo Coscia and Roberto Livraghi, president and secretary general of the Chamber of Commerce of Alessandria, which is the real ecological driving force behind this initiative:
"Among the reasons for this success are certainly the interest of institutions in sustainable mobility policies, but also the attention of citizens towards physical activities to be carried out out in the open air; the appeal of slow tourism that respects the environment. There is also the fascination of heroic cycling, the stories of an authentically popular sport, the emotions aroused by great champions and their followers, the interest in collecting models that have become legendary, the proliferation of events, such as cycle-historical events, linked to reviving the passion for two wheels. Since the bicycle contributes to the transformation of the city, some scholars have gone so far as to speak of a possible urban planning of the bicycle, at a time when infrastructural systems designed for motor transport are increasingly invading our cities and our lives, but are also revealing their inadequacy.
Aware of this new culture of two-wheelers, in 2016 the Chamber of Commerce, in collaboration with the Municipality of Alessandria, launched a rediscovery project, called Alessandria città delle biciclette which found substance in an exhibition held in the spring of the same year in the exhibition spaces of Palazzo del Monferrato.
The project idea represents a novel reconstruction of the role played by the provincial territory in the history of cycling, the bicycle industry and sports journalism.
FromCarlo Michel to Giovanni Maino, from the Borsaline to the Circolo Velocipedisti Alessandrino, from the rivalry between Giovanni Cuniolo, known as Manina, from Tortona, and Giovanni Gerbi, nicknamed the Red Devil, from Asti, to the stories of great champions such as Costante Girardengo and Fausto Coppi, the exhibition told the story of the central role played by the province of Alessandria in the origins of the cycling myth and in the countless lives it has had since then.
In fact,this territory, with its facilities, first and foremost the Museo dei Campionissimi di Novi Ligure and Casa Coppi in Castellania, with its cycling routes in the hills and on the plains, with its cycle-historical events and above all with the presence of a large number of enthusiasts, can credibly propose to tell the extraordinary story of the beginnings and the success of the sport of two wheels in Piedmont and Italy.
