I WAS ALSO JUST PLAIN HUNGRY. That first night in Gaiole, I went to a café with some other riders and destroyed a plate of tagliatore in a wild boar sauce. I was already looking forward to the tour's ristoro stops, which promised traditional fare: salame, prosciutto, riboletto stews, and the original energy drink, Chianti. I was eager to gourmandize on the fly. The affable Eroica director, Claudio Marinangeli, dropped by our table with his beautiful daughter, whose name I didn't catch. "Ees very far," she said with a lovely pout when I told her I was doing the long course, "but good you try!"

By Saturday, Gaiole was hopping with cyclists signing in at the gymnasium, which had been transformed into a museum of the bicycle, with turn-of-the-century Peugeots and 1950s Bianchis hung on the walls. In an adjacent park, vendors hawked pre-derailleur bikes with Rube Goldberg manual shifters and all manner of other catnip for the cognoscenti. Anticipating the chill of Sunday's pre-dawn start, I picked out a pair of gloves and a tri-colored cycling cap with earflaps. One or the other, not both, I chided myself, budgeting. Like a dumbass, I tossed the gloves back.

Mingling as best I could monolingually, I managed to bump into some vintage Brits, one of whom, 72-year-old Trevor Smith ("international courier and lover of women"), was a national champ who'd once raced against Coppi himself. "I have a story to tell," he said with a rhetorical flourish of his Guinness. "It was a beautiful sunny day, not a cloud in the sky, and we're all coming down the mountain like the blazes when I feel a spatter of raindrops. What's this? I say to myself. Then I see up ahead: It's Fausto Coppi with his johnson out, raining piss all over everybody."

Five hours after that night's Heroes' Feast, I sprang out of my bed at the B&B and was soon stuffing my face again: pani santi ("little pastries"), various regional pork products, and plump, ineffably wonderful Chianti grapes. In the village square, a throng jostled under harsh klieg lights. Some riders had a tweedy Roaring Twenties look: slouch caps, goggles, aluminum water flasks clipped to the handlebars. Eddy Merckx–style striped caps and canary-yellow Cinzano jerseys were favored by sixties aficionados. Wool-clad Italian iron men with handlebar mustaches and tree-trunk legs pushed squat little bikes, spare tubes wrapped in figure eights around their shoulders or slung across their chests like ammo belts. We got our brevet booklets stamped, mounted up, and were off under a black, star-pricked sky.