Same passion but different worlds, different faces, near and far languages, different heads and ideas. Nine thousand souls, arriving from around fifty countries around the world and perhaps a few more. Nine thousand passionate pedalers who will meet for theHeroic on the streets of Gaiole in Chianti dressed to the nines. They will liven up the village, or rather the various villages, created around Casa Eroica which this year, with the Etruscan museum, has taken on the name of Chianti Origo. Inside Chianti Origo there is the cycle workshop Luciano Berruti which in two days of opening has already recorded hundreds and hundreds of visits. Then there are the beautiful bicycles that compete in the “Concorso d’Eleganza”, the protagonists of the “Beard and Mustache Competition”, the shop windows of the town that testify to an ancient love for cycling that will make you comfortable to enjoy the screening of the docufilm that the RAI journalist Franco Bortuzzo he dedicated to Ottavio Bottecchia, first Italian winner of the Tour de France. It’s Eroica time, it’s the Eroica weekend, it’s the “secular Christmas” that heroic people use to celebrate where “Everything flows” as Heraclitus explained better than anyone: what surrounds us, ourselves. You have to fly a little high to tell the essence of Eroica, which is not bikes, refreshments, wonderful dirt roads, weekends in the saddle which, as one time explained well “advertisement” which advertised an artichoke bitter, erase the stress of modern life…. It is now clear to everyone that Eroica is not a cycling challenge, an epic race, a granfondo or who knows what: it is a way of being and existing, a style that erases forms and conventions. In a word it is a “world” with everything that its world represents, the only one capable of creating a magical harmony of opposites which is the real secret to keeping everything together: cultures, people, passions. There are words that are in fashion and, nowadays, two recur more frequently now: narration and contamination. Well. The “narration” of Eroica, which explains a success that in about ten years allowed the “heroics” to conquer different and distant lands, from Chianti, to the Prosecco hills, to California, from Montalcino, to Castel del Monte sul Gransasso, in Havana in Cuba is its extraordinary capacity for “contamination”. Nicola Rosin, who is the president of Eroica, to explain this “blending” of worlds and cultures together, often says that Eroica is a bit like the “Curve” of a stadium, where people who live different and distant lives in everyday life find themselves side by side , who have different visions, different ideas, different origins and different stories. They find each other, cheer, rejoice and suffer as if they were one person, without prejudice and without barriers. For years, contamination was considered a threat by those who were more concerned with preserving what existed, a community, the family, essentially their own backyard. Contaminating, on the other hand, serves to bring into contact, to mix, to bring together things and people, each capable of bringing something, more or less everything is needed. It is contaminated in art, architecture, chemistry, knowledge and from the exchange something new is always born, almost always better. Thus this original and out-of-time cycling challenge has become Heroic, another adventure that goes beyond a vintage bike or a gravel bike, that goes beyond the many or few kilometres, from pedaling up a hill without putting a foot on the ground or trudge pushing. Eroica is a hug even between those who don’t know each other and are meeting for the first time. And it’s as if we’ve known each other forever…