Column Rik Vanwalleghem: ‘It is also remarkable that both Belgium and Italy do not actually exist, they are completely artificial constructions’

The Giro: the most wonderful race to follow for a Belgian cycling journalist. Because, regardless of the language, he immediately feels at home in the trans-Alpine country. Italians are raised with pasta and decibels, Belgians with fries (or chocolate) and verbal discretion.

Pizza and beer as levers

But otherwise the similarities between these two European peoples are striking. Both populations consist of hardworking individuals, very fond of their own environment, and therefore allergic to any form of government interference. They are no strangers to some anarchist leanings.

This is reflected, among other things, in exuberant traffic behavior that can only be forced into a civilized straitjacket with great difficulty. Italy and Belgium are always in the lead in European accident statistics.

On an economic level, Italians and Belgians prefer to organize themselves in the flexible construction of an SME (called an SME in the Netherlands). According to them, undeclared work and tax evasion is not a plague but a divine right. An extraordinary amount of creativity is displayed in the art of ‘trickery’.

The social life lubricated by a refined gastronomy and the way we know us underpins the social fabric. At no point do Italians or Belgians give the impression that they are going to reinvent hot water, as, say, the French or Dutch tend to do. Of course they also want to manifest themselves, but not with display and tough business, but with pizzas and beer as leverage respectively.

Two countries that don’t actually exist

On the international (political) level, they do not flirt with grandiloquent strategies or wild ambitions. Unlike the Dutch or Germans, Italians and Flemish people do not have a plan, they just draw their plans in a masterful way.

It is also remarkable that both Belgium and Italy do not actually exist. They are completely artificial constructions, formally assembled mosaics of semi-autonomous areas with their own culture and history. What do the stage locations of Turin and Naples in the upcoming Giro have to do with each other historically? Or Rome and Wolkenstein in Gröden?

Anyone who enters South Tyrol from the south after two weeks of Giro will again have the impression of crossing a national border. The rural interior in the hyperkinetic restaurants has been replaced by an Austrian-tinged coziness of fabric-covered wooden benches over which Strauss music floats. The waitresses are no longer sunglasses-showing mannequins, but Habsburg puppets dressed in puffed sleeves.

And of course, cycling is one of the biggest ties between Italy and Belgium (Flanders). In both countries, cycling has grown into the ultimate cement, a religion from which both countries gain a lot of social identity. There is a good chance that Wout Van Aert, in his first Giro, will immediately feel at home in the Laars. Although. Weren’t his father’s parents of Dutch descent?

Note: this column from our magazine was written and printed before Wout van Aert’s heavy fall, which prevented him from starting in the Giro.