I’m still obsessed with Italy. While recently reading a book about Venice, The City of Fallen Angels by John Berendt (of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil fame), I came across this passage. It’s part of a conversation Berendt was having with an Italian who had made his fortune in the rat poison business:

“My little company became part of the famous economic boom in northern Italy. Did you know that here in northern Italy we have the highest concentration of businesses in the world? It’s true: There’s one company for every eight inhabitants. They’re mostly small, family-run companies. Like mine, and like Benetton, which is run by my old friend Luciano Benetton. Luciano was born and raised in Treviso, like me, and we both have our world headquarters in Treviso”.

This got me thinking about professional cycling, and I began to wonder what parts of Italy produced riders and cycling companies. I’m sure I’ve seen the city names numerous times before, but they may well have been telling me they’re on Mars. I’ve never made a conscientious effort to actually place the city names into a map, they’ve always been some abstract concept.

So I did some checking.

Here is a map of Italy broken down into its 20 regions:

Image source: http://www.big-italy-map.co.uk/

There are 85 Italians on ProTour teams. Here are the regions which produced this assortment of world-class cycling talent:

Region	# of riders
Lombardia	34
Veneto	17
Toscana	14
Liguria	4
Sicilia	4
Trentino-Alto Adige	3
Abruzzo	2
Campania	2
Emilia Romagna	1
Friuli-Venezia Giulia	1
Marche	1
Piemonte	1
Umbria	1
Basilicata	0
Calabria	0
Lazio	0
Molise	0
Puglia	0
Sardegna	0
Valle D’Aosta	0

It’s pretty amazing, 65 of 85 ProTour Italians came from three northern regions. And if you include the 186 Italians riding for what was formerly known as Div II squads the breakdown basically remains the same.

And then look where the all the cycling companies are located which produce the goodies which continuously drain our wallets:

Lombardia: Bianchi, Carrera, Castelli, Cinelli, Ciocc, Colnago, De Rosa, Guerciotti, Santini, Stella Azzura, Vittoria.

Veneto: Campagnolo, Elite, Fondriest, Gaerne, ITM, Nalini, Pinarello, Scapin, Selle Italia, Selle Royal, Selle San Marco, Sidi, Wilier.

Liguria: Olmo.

Piemonte: Briko, TTT.

Toscana: Viner.

Trentino-Alto Adige: Moser.

And here are a few more fun facts about the industrial productivity of northern Italy: (1) 94 percent of the total amount of the Italian enterprises (more than 4 million) have less than ten employees; and (2) Lombardia as a region has the highest GDP of any region in the EU.

Last year, based on the UCI ProTour rankings, Italy as a nation destroyed the rest of the world in accumulating ProTour points. Two nations had more riders (Spain with 103 and France with 98) but they weren’t nearly as productive. France is particularly weak, considering how many ProTour riders they have. It seems that they produce the pack filler of the European peloton.

Now, I know absolutely nothing about soccer, but I’d be curious to see a breakdown of where in Italy their players come from who play at a world-class level. Is there an (un)balance similar to cycling, or is there a more equal spread nation-wide? One of the appeals of the World Cup on a sporting level is that there’s really nothing technology-driven about it and pretty much any nation could potentially produce talent.