L’ evoluzione del mondo delle bicicletta, narrata in pochi spot pubblicitari.
In the previous part of the article, which you can find here , we discussed how this new type of bicycle is imposing itself on the Market and also in sports 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 .
From a very young age, I have associated spaces, movement, and the desire for Freedom with speed and the possibility, generally of being in unfamiliar places. Because that is what a bicycle and a means of locomotion in general inspires.
A route is not 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, viable, and 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 into Italy : the Mountain Bike (MTB) . At the time a myth in the land was the famous : Cinelli Rampichino . A bicycle made in Italy, but, with a sigh toward 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 partially, on Formula One cars.
Those Columbus tubes had millimeter-rolled shims, with specific cushioning and strength functions plus today’s geometries and hydraulic suspensions. You could, you could see in them the strength of a Romanian tank and all the details of an Italian Renaissance tailoring.
The advertisements, only and only in newspapers, portrayed a harlequin-colored Cinelli Rampichino in the center of a room with disparate objects: a spyglass, a globe, suitcases, maps displayed everywhere … an almost dandy smell of adventure. For a teenager to see those pictures was, a bit, to own 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 in mud and dust to learn about the world.
In this panoply of adolescent musings, I observed a commercial for the first Atala Mountain Bikes. Spot that I reproduce below . An essential, fast-paced advertising video, refined in its rawness . It could have been made in Nevada as in Molise; horses that looked like well-paid extras; a shirtless boy with a backpack ( shamelessly Invicta, another 80s fetish), an artfully mounted bivouac . That commercial changed for me, too, the way I thought about Freedom itself. I bought, of course, an Atala Mountain Bike and it was a bicycle that I took to the most improper places in my area. I realized, soon, that its 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.
Whatever, it fits, you learn mistake by mistake and rib by rib .
I assure you, that in that advertising passage there were in nuce all the elements of what would be the other great revolution in the sphere of the bicycle planet: the Gravel .
Other spot , other round . 3t and lots of love
One commercial that further characterized the species: the advertisement for the 3T Exploro Max serious bike .
A synthesis of city environments and ignorant countryside, in its colors and atmospheres full of mists even in full sunlight.
Two bicycle lovers, no kids, one notices in their way of being a planning of a route, an adventure and a destiny no precluded by paved roads alone. Images of traffic marked by psychedelic horns and traffic lights colored only black; after a few kilometers, in the bucolic countryside where the only witness is a tractor with less gear technology than every single 3T Exploro max. To close it all, the day now come to dusk and a hot cup of Tea or Coffee, because YOU are cold and pulsing inside with heat, but, your gravel bike feeds on silence and darkness in its carbon fiber essence.
The evolution of freedom on two wheels. Compared to the Grampichino, your gravel bike in 2022 is part of a system where you have organized your adventure; there are no longer horses to keep you company but satellites and GPS Cartographers that show you in perfect darkness or rain where your emotions will fall in the freedom you have chosen and that will hold for you the thrills you don't expect from planning alone.
Gravel bike: a means to savor emotions, like a cell phone that is only basic to your heart's applications
Address: via Ammiraglio Millo 9 .
Alberobello, Bari. ( Italy )
📞 +39 339 5856822
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