Angiolino Piscaglia

Angiolino Piscaglia was born on 11 October 1932 in Novafeltria, a town in the Montefeltro area that is now part of the province of Rimini. He was the eldest of eight children. His father was a miner, a big and powerful man nicknamed Carnera, and his mother was a housewife. His father loved cycling but could not afford to race, and Angiolino later said he had inherited that passion.

He began on an ordinary bicycle, then raced on a machine built by the Paolucci workshop in Novafeltria, and became an amateur in the generation of Ercole Baldini and Arnaldo Pambianco. In 1956 he won the Coppa Giacomo Silvio Guelpa and a pre-Olympic selection race at Ottaviano, near Naples, but he was left out of the Italian team for the Melbourne Olympics.

Piscaglia turned professional in 1957 with San Pellegrino Sport, a team set up to bring the best amateurs into the professional ranks, with Gino Bartali as sporting director. He rode the 1957 Giro d'Italia, 22 stages and nearly 4,000 kilometres, and finished 79th and last, 3 hours, 32 minutes and 27 seconds behind the winner Gastone Nencini. As the last rider overall, the maglia nera, he received a prize of a two week holiday at Forte dei Marmi, which he took with two cousins. On the Monte Bondone stage, the day Charly Gaul lost the race, he was part of a break of 49 riders that worked against Gaul, and Nencini took the pink jersey; Piscaglia said Nencini remembered the help. That spring he also finished fourth in Milan-Mantua.

Nencini recommended him to the Legnano team, but Piscaglia missed the meeting to sign his contract because his young sister had died that day, and the chance was lost. People in Novafeltria raised money so that he could keep racing. In 1958 he rode for Lube-NSU, started the Vuelta a España, then raced for Molteni and Atala-Pirelli and finished 62nd in the Giro. From 1959 to 1961 he rode for Ghigi, the team of the Rimini pasta maker where he had also worked, placing 66th in the 1959 Giro and 85th in 1960 before abandoning the 1961 race. His other results included eighth places in the Coppa Sabatini and the Giro della Provincia di Reggio Calabria in 1959, tenth in the Tour of Sicily in 1960 and eighth in Milan-Vignola in 1961.

He often told the story of a Giro di Toscana in which he was losing contact on a climb and suddenly felt himself pushed along: Fausto Coppi had put a hand on his back.

After he stopped racing at the end of 1961, Piscaglia worked as a carpenter. Having taken a massage course in Bologna, he returned to cycling as a team soigneur, starting with Ghigi, and over the years looked after riders he named as Baronchelli, Polidori, Paolini and Bitossi. He then worked as a massage therapist at the state hospital of San Marino.

He settled in Borgo Maggiore, in the Republic of San Marino, and kept cycling well into old age, riding 40 to 70 kilometres on flat roads from spring to autumn. He still owned the Ganna bicycle he had ridden in the 1958 Giro. In 2022 he was guest of honour at the first edition of La Titanica, a vintage cycling event organised by the San Marino club Virtus Bike, where he wore race number one and was given a lifetime achievement award, and he returned for later editions.

Angiolino Piscaglia died on the morning of 11 October 2026 in San Marino, where he lived, on the day he turned 94. The cause of death was not made public. His death was reported the same day by Tuttobiciweb, which remembered him as a capable professional rider and a much appreciated soigneur, and by GiornaleSM, which carried a tribute from Virtus Bike. His funeral was held at 14.30 on Tuesday 13 October 2026 in the church of Borgo Maggiore.

Piscaglia was, in the words of the journalist Marco Pastonesi, the oldest living maglia nera of the Giro d'Italia, a symbol of the hard working domestiques of the 1950s who battled the time limit rather than the stopwatch. His memories of Bartali, Coppi, Nencini and Gaul, told in interviews for la Repubblica and Tuttobiciweb, preserved a vivid picture of Italian cycling in that era, and the San Marino cycling community honoured him as a living link with it.