DISRAELI DOCUMENTS
This leaflet describes the, rather tidy, Vittoria Giuseppina derailleur.
The winged women standing on the orb on the cover is Nike, the Greek goddess of victory and patron saint of training shoes. The Romans knew her as Victoria and the modern Italians as Vittoria. She is holding a palm frond in one hand and a laurel crown in the other.
In 1928 Giovanni Agnelli, one of the founders of the FIAT motor company, erected a massive statue of Vittoria, called the Faro della Vittoria, in Parco della Rimembranza (the Park of Remembrance) in Torino. The statue commemorates the tenth anniversary of Italy's victory over the Austro Hungarian Empire (and Germany) in the First World War. Agnelli was an active supporter of Benito Mussolini's Fascists and was made a senator by Mussolini in 1923. The erection of the statue and the figure of Vittoria became associated with the emerging idea of Italy as a triumphant, military and Fascist state. I am afraid that it is no coincidence that the Vittoria derailleur company, which was founded at the end of the 1920s and based in Torino, adopted Vittoria as its name and the winged goddess as its logo.
