Ippodromo delle Mulina

Ippodromo delle Mulina is the Florence racecourse where Duccio Chilleri and Marco Carrera deepen their friendship through horse racing and betting. Because the track’s entrance does not check identification, it gives the underage Duccio access to a more professional gambling world—and becomes a concrete setting for his break with the prosperous, carefully arranged future his parents had intended for him.

Setting and Access

Unlike clandestine gambling rooms and casinos, which Duccio could not enter while still a minor, the racecourse’s Mulina entrance asks for no documents. That practical omission opens a door: Duccio can skip school and spend entire mornings at the track, learning its routines and horses rather than waiting until adulthood to enter the gambling world.

Learning the Races

Duccio does not bet by improvisation. At the racecourse, older regulars introduce him to the secrets of trotting, while he watches the horses during morning training. The track is therefore both a venue for wagers and a place where he acquires the knowledge that makes betting a practiced skill.

Marco and Duccio at the Track

Marco increasingly joins Duccio, first during the valuable morning training sessions and then in the racing rooms in the afternoon. They also return for evening meetings at the Mulina, betting on horses they have watched or on horses they expect to win in combined races they have heard about. Together, they win much more often than they lose, turning the racecourse into a shared apprenticeship and a new stage in their friendship.

Narrative Significance

The racecourse marks a shift from the innocent Saturday poker games among friends, where the maximum win was twenty thousand lire, to a more sustained and professional pursuit. For Duccio, gambling is a means of cutting ties with his bourgeois destiny; for Marco, it is an activity he keeps separate from family life and from his other friendships, sports, and interest in girls. The Mulina thus holds two different meanings at once: a place where the boys’ shared talent brings them success, and a point at which their paths begin to diverge.