Romolo Carpi was a member of the Società Cristoforo Colombo club and participated in many Italian weightlifting championships. He was selected as a member of the Italian tug-of-war team after the 11 July 1920 trial among 19 athletes, supervised by Professor Teotimo Marchisio. The first and more difficult of the preliminaries was to tow a sled loaded with a 100 kg weight. Carpi was for many years a consul at the Port of Genova but after the arrival of Fascism in 1923, he was downgraded to worker status. He died from pneumonia after falling into the water off the docks.