"The Patron of our Giro d'Italia must probably descend from a fiercely exploratory lineage. Fortune and audacity have always made a happy marriage in his heart: it was a safe bet that the Giro d'Italia would never suffer decline". This is how Bruno Raschi, the Divine, wrote about Vincenzo Torriani, heir to "a fiercely exploratory lineage". And yesterday, in Rome, at the presentation of the Giro d'Italia 2025, Torriani was pedaling through the memory of the Pink Race.

Two days ago I recalled Sergio Giuntini's book"Vincenzo Torriani and the Italy of the Giro" (Prospero), today I explain the book written by Gianni Torriani, Vincenzo's son. Titled "The Last Patron", published by Ancora di Milano, with a preface by Pier Bergonzi, an introduction by Sergio Meda and an afterword by Marco Torriani (176 pages, 19 euros, from 2017), it is not a biography, but an interview book (not only with him, but also with his closest collaborators) and a family album (and this time the family is not just the large cycling family), which gives us the image of the most famous half-bust in Italy, excluding the pope (with many journalistic and literary citations).

Torriani claims the invention of the car with an openable roof: "It wasn't an easy operation, also because it wasn't provided in most models, so they prepared it in the body shop by cutting the metal sheet on the roof in the shape of a porthole with a closing handle". He reveals a secret: "Raschi would sometimes rise to greet the public on the road, but he would quickly get discouraged and go back when he realized he was being mistaken for me (there was a certain resemblance between us two)". That's not all: "I also had my weak point: after eating, I always liked to take a short nap, this also at home: a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes were enough for me", until "Mario Fossati from 'Il Giorno' baptized this my post-prandial debacle as Torriani's 'hepatic sleep'". Torriani lists the "tools" of the trade: "My whistle and red flag absolutely could not be missing, which I used only in case of emergency and which, sometimes - I admit - went to print on some out-of-control spectator". It was not a tool of the trade, but infinitely more, the reliance on "Providence, in the Christian sense of the term".

Torriani talks about his travel companions, not only Raschi, but also Sergio Zavoli ("With the 'Trial of the Stage' we also changed the way of doing television, today one would say that with the 'Trial' we were the precursors of today's talk show"), the directors of the "Gazzetta dello Sport" organizing the Giro d'Italia ("It was undoubtedly with Candido Cannavò that I found more in tune. We already knew each other when he was the 'Gazzetta' correspondent from Sicily. When we made a stop there, he was my point of reference"), his relationship with politics ("I accepted and threw myself in, well aware of the risk I would have run if elected", "But it didn't go like that, for this I must thank my friend Gino Bartali who often accompanied me to rallies. I knew that for a few votes I was not elected and that there were many ballots canceled with Bartali's name"), also his difficult position in some very difficult moments, from Eddy Merckx's doping in the 1968 Giro ("The control procedures had been rigorously respected", "Counter-analyses also resulted positive", the continuation also thanks to the "guarantees of the Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs") to the death of a young boy crushed by collapsed stands in Terracina, also in the 1968 Giro ("That tragedy haunted the entire caravan and we reluctantly departed the next day"). Because Torriani, on this, was uncompromising: "The Giro had to continue, life had to continue".

As for the famous "Torriani pays" exclaimed by gregarious loaded with drinks after raids on bars, the Patron maintains that "I was the 'lightning rod' of what happened during the race, for better or worse. By character and by my way of thinking, I never backed down, but there is a limit to everything". As if to say that the declared payment never came to fruition.

Described as tyrannical and ingenious, lucky and audacious to use Raschi's words, "The Last Patron" gives us a less severe image than the one that appeared on TV, for example, in gratitude and, who would have thought?, in irony. When Gianni Torriani cites the portrait painted by Claudio Gregori, "Torriani was Napoleon. Italy was a land to be conquered"), Vincenzo Torriani retorts: "Perhaps I was not like Napoleon, but better so, for me Saint Helena was only my wife!". With an exclamation point.