In the 1940s, the cyclist Gino Bartali was probably the second most famous person in Italy. The most famous was, of course, the country’s fascist leader, Benito Mussolini. Ethically, the two men could not have been more different.

While Mussolini passed anti-Jewish racial laws that, following the Nazi occupation of Rome, Naples and northern Italy in 1943, led to Jews being sent to the death camps, Bartali cycled thousands of miles across Italy to save his fellow countrymen.