green-white-red flags said: "These people had found a superman. Outside Bartali's hotel at Aix-les-Bains, an Italian general was shouting 'Don't touch him – he's a god.'" A public subscription was started in his name in Italy, and Benito Mussolini was among the contributors. The approaching war led Italy not to send a team in 1939. Bartali won the Giro d'Italia twice before the war – in 1936 and 1937 – and once after it (1946). He won classics such as Milan–San Remo, the Giro di Lombardia and the Züri-Metzgete. His most famous victory was the 1948 Tour de France. 1948: Second Tour Bartali returned to the Tour in 1948 to find that many riders he had known had died in the war and that there were as many more who had started racing since he stopped (see below for Bartali's war record). He was so worried that he spent an evening memorising two dozen riders he did not know. The Tour started in a rainstorm and Bartali found he could identify nobody because the whole field was wearing waterproofs. He took his chance and found he was with Briek Schotte. The two finished together at Trouville, and Bartali took the yellow jersey. It was during that Tour that the leader of the Italian Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti, was shot in the neck by a sniper as he was leaving the parliament building. The writer Bernard Chambaz said: History and myth united, and a miracle if you like because that evening Bartali got a phone call at his hotel. In a bad mood, dubious, he didn't want to answer. But someone whispered that it was Alcide de Gasperi, his old friend from Catholic Action, now parliamentary president, who told him that Palmiro Togliatti, secretary-general of the communist party, had been shot at and had survived by a miracle. The situation in the peninsula was very tense amid the ravages of the Cold War. Italy needed Bartali to do what he best knew how to do, to win stages. The communists occupied factories and radio and television stations, and angry rows in parliament came close to blows. A revolt was looming. Then Bartali won three stages in a row and led the Tour by 14 minutes. An obituary says: Just as it seemed the communists would stage a full-scale revolt, a deputy ran into the chamber shouting 'Bartali's won the Tour de