The evolution of the bicycle world, narrated in a few commercials.
In the previous part of the article, which you find here (https://ailovetourism.com/bici-gravel-e-quel-concetto-di-liberta-parte-uno/ ) we discussed how this new type of bicycle is imposing itself on the market and also in sporting practices: the Gravel.
Part one talked more about the technical aspects of this new medium and gave less importance to its philosophical conceptuality of use.
Since I was a child I have associated spaces, movement and the desire for freedom with speed and the possibility, generally, of being in unfamiliar places. Because, this is what a bicycle and a means of transport generally inspires.
A route isn't just a line on a map, for many, it's a challenge and a world boxed in between two edges of a road. the gravel bike makes those routes fast, practicable, worthy of respect, coinciding with our idea of planning a bike ride.
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The Rampichino, the first impossible love
Following an order, it was 1986, and a new type of bicycle was making its way in Italy: the Mountain Bike (MTB). At the time a myth on earth was the famous : Cinelli Rampichino . A bicycle made in Italy, but with a sigh towards the States. A bicycle made of Molybdenum steel in Columbus tubes; we are talking about an era where aluminum was an aerospace alloy and carbon fiber was used only, and in part, on Formula One cars.
Those Columbus tubes that had thicknesses rolled to the millimeter, with specific shock absorbing and resistance functions plus today's geometries and hydraulic suspensions. You could see the resistance of a Romanian tank and all the details of an Italian Renaissance tailoring.
The advertisements, only and exclusively in the newspapers, portrayed a harlequin-colored Cinelli Rampichino in the center of a room with disparate objects: a telescope, a globe, suitcases, maps displayed everywhere ... an almost dandyish smell of adventure. For a teenager to see those images was, in a way, owning the world; on the one hand you imagined yourself rich (and to buy it you had to be in that orbit) but, also, adventurous and ready to get dirty with mud and dust to get to know the world.
In this panoply of adolescent musings, I watched an advertisement for the first Atala Mountain Bikes. Spot that I report below. An essential, fast, refined in its rawness advertising video. It could have been made in Nevada or Molise; horses that looked like well-paid extras; a bare-chested boy with a backpack (shamelessly Invicta, another 80s fetish), an artfully set up bivouac. That commercial also changed my way of thinking about Freedom itself. Obviously, I bought an Atala Mountain Bike and it was a bicycle that I took to the most unfair places in my area. I soon found that his frame was stronger than my floating ribs; two days of excruciating pain made me realize that going down a staircase involves distributing the weights on the back of the saddle.
Oh well there is, you learn error by error and rib by rib.
I assure you, that in that advertising passage there were in a nutshell all the elements of what would have been the other great revolution in the field of the bicycle planet: the Gravel.
Another spot, another round. 3t and lots of love
A commercial that further characterized the species: the advertisement of the 3T Exploro Max serious bike.
A synthesis between city environments and ignorant countryside, in its colors and atmospheres full of mists even in full sun.
Two bicycle lovers, not kids, can be seen in their way of planning a route, an adventure and a destiny not precluded by paved roads alone. Images of traffic marked by psychedelic horns and traffic lights colored only in black; after a few kilometers, in the bucolic countryside where the only witness is a tractor with less gearbox technology than any single 3T Exploro max. To close it all, the day has now reached dusk and a hot cup of tea or coffee, because you are cold and you pulse with heat inside, but your gravel bike feeds on silence and darkness in its fiber essence of carbon.
The evolution of freedom on two wheels. Compared to the Rampichino, your gravel bike in 2022 is part of a system where you organize your adventure; there are no more horses to keep you company but satellites and Cartographic GPS that show you in perfect darkness or in the rain where your emotions will fall into the freedom that you have chosen for yourself and that will reserve you the emotions you don't expect from planning alone.
Gravel bike: a means to savor emotions, like a mobile phone that is only based on the applications of your heart
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