History beyond value

After several weeks of one of the warmer summers ever we get back as hounds looking for bicycles or accessories that deserve due attention for its history.
Our interest falls on a bicycle that had mocked us years ago just like an old jack rabbit did with the new hounds, and so we vowed to have to find it.
The bike on the spot is a Gitan with internal brakes levers, I know that bicycle enthusiasts have seen many examples like this and therefore concentrate their efforts on the most prestigious models of the most famous brands: Bianchi, Maino, Taurus etc. however in our opinion this bicycle is able to express something different.
To better understand the historical period of realization, let’s put the clocks back 77 years and let’s go to 1945, the year in which the Second World War finished, which devastated the country and also the social behavior.
However, thanks to the “European Recovery Program” launched in 1947 by the USA, better known as the Marshall Plan, the firms and the Italian economy itself are able to restart and with them the whole country, this was possible thanks to the great economic help (1.207. 000.000 $) together with the desire to build something good and lasting.
Thanks to the above-mentioned plan, the central-northern national territory is populated by a series of activities that want to take the big step: passing from simple workshops to medium-small industrialists, the examples that can be done are many and are not only related to the world of bicycles but also to household appliances, cars, etc.
The brand that made the model being analyzed is Gitan which was based in Caorso in the province of Piacenza, the name of the factory is due to the acronym of its founder Gino Tansini and has absolutely nothing to do with the most famous French brand Gitane.
The peculiarity of this model is the fact that despite the modest size of the company, the bicycle has nothing to envy to the most famous cycling brands, on the contrary, it tries to imitate them by copying some stylistic features such as the use of concealed internal brakes inside the frame.
The production compared to the leader (such as Bianchi) was infinitely more limited but the desire to keep up with the best was very high, so much so that the internal brake models produced by Gitan were two:

– entry level model (the one depicted in the pictures above) equipped with an internal front brake and a semi-internal brake at the rear with visible joints frame;
– the top model was instead equipped with completely internal brakes and invisible joints frame.

Nowadays we can assume that the efforts made to have one or more models with internal (or semi-internal) brakes in the catalog would be like proposing a car model equipped with an engine with six or more cylinders.
Gitan is just one of the many brands that ventured into these mechanical exercises and even if the economic value of the bike today remains rather modest, the historical value in our opinion is very high because these objects contain in their soul a story linked to the desire to build and to the smart people that characterized the prosperity of the post-war period.