Personal Life and Death
Luigi Strada died in 1946. In 1950 Strada married Carlo Messori, a retired racing cyclist, and they opened a bicycle shop on the Via Varesina in Milan. He started to write her biography but he died in 1957 before it was completed and she closed the shop.
She lived alone in Milan for her last years, riding to her shop every day until cycling grew too tiring. She sold some of her medals and trophies and bought a scarlet Moto Guzzi 500cc motorbike. In September 1959 she rode the 'Guzzi' to the Tre Valli Varesine professional race. The motorbike fell off its stand when she got home. The weight was too much for her and she had a heart attack as she and the Moto Guzzi fell to the ground. She was dead by the time she reached hospital.
Her bicycle is among the collection at the Madonna del Ghisallo chapel close to Lake Como in Italy.
Read more about this topic: Alfonsina Strada
Famous quotes containing the words personal, life and/or death:
“Whatever an artist’s personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.”
—Willem De Kooning (b. 1904)
“I do believe that the outward and the inward life correspond; that if any should succeed to live a higher life, others would not know of it; that difference and distance are one. To set about living a true life is to go on a journey to a distant country, gradually to find ourselves surrounded by new scenes and men; and as long as the old are around me, I know that I am not in any true sense living a new or a better life.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Yet always when I look death in the face,
When I clamber to the heights of sleep,
Or when I grow excited with wine,
Suddenly I meet your face.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)