Sing a Song of Floyd

I have received a windfall missive from one of my men. Scouring the Italian countryside armed with Carte Blanche, combing the dusty courtyards of crumbling Tuscan villas', the great glassed front windows of grand old Northern hotel bars, peering through the tarred knot holes of sea-drunken Sicilian fishing lockers, they are searching for the stuff of cycling legend. Hand built to order, only about 50 Floyd bicycle frames were ever finished before the untimely and unfortunate death of Vittorio Verner in 1962. Details are few and hazy at best, but most of the myth surrounding the builders death revolves around a personal grudge with a member of the Bianchi team, whose company Verner was forced to leave after refusing to build a frame for Bianchi's show horse, Giancarlo Busi. Verner regarded Busi as a showboat and an ass, and wanted no part of his growing legacy to be attached to a racer whose results did not match his popular status, a furor which found no end of sensationalized reception in the manic Italian press. It was a year later, during the final descent of a club friendly in the mountains above Lake Como, that a stick found its way in into the front wheel of Verner's personal Floyd, and in the rain above Bellagio, coupled with the notorious inability of steel rims and leather brake pads of the time, Verner fell, was run over by the pack he was leading, and was killed. It is for these frames, these precious and groundbreaking bicycle frames, that I have come to Italy, and why I have enlisted the help of 6 old men, natives to their region and still mindful of a time when the forgotten Floyd was king of the road, to help me restore the Floyd to its former place of glory.