What Nicola Pietrangeli won and who he was

Nicola Pietrangeli was a prince. Once upon a time. But this is not a fairy tale, it is the story of a life. Inside Pietrangeli’s there was everything, so much that it is even difficult to imagine the container: success, women, adventure, triumphs, chic. And tennis, of course, an excuse to travel more. Pietrangeli passed away at 92, an age you couldn’t read on his face. It was still bright, present, round. The face of a man who had taken life without asking permission. “How many times have I heard myself say: ‘Of course, if you had trained seriously you would have won more’. And I coldly replied: ‘Yes. But you know how much less fun I would have had'”. It had become like a proverb. And so you, shy, tired by the small issues of life, every time you heard it you thought: then you can live like this too. Because nothing in Pietrangeli was taken for granted. Is there something that scares you?, they asked him who had already turned ninety. “Boredom,” he replied.

passport

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Nicola Pietrangeli was truly a prince. It was written on his passport: Nicola Chirinsky Pietrangeli, born in Tunis in 1933. But the story starts from much further away, a true family saga. The grandfather, Michele, had emigrated from Abruzzo. He took a boat and docked in Tunis to work as a bricklayer. He bought himself a wheelbarrow, then two, then a horse, became a builder and, according to Pietrangeli, “raised half of Tunis”. He married a Neapolitan, they had five children. One was Giulio, Nicola’s father. His mother, however, was a Russian noblewoman who fled the October Revolution. “Anna, daughter of the Tsarist Colonel Alexis von Yourgens, already married to a count”. If not, what a fairy tale it would be. Suddenly the good life in Tunis ended. “My father was the only one to have the American racing car. He was very wealthy, but everything was lost. He was expelled, not because he was a bandit, but because they chased away all the rich professionals to requisition everything from them. He spent more than a year in a concentration camp with two brothers, and then they sent them away. My mother and I were also expelled: we spent Christmas night 1946 on a fourth class ship headed from Tunis to Marseille”.

Russian and French

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A life as an adventure, a lifelong adventure. Nicola was thirteen years old when he finally arrived in Italy, and spoke only Russian and French. He started playing football in the street, so he learned to speak other people’s languages. The one he played, how his tennis would later play. At first his friends called him Er Francia, for that rounded r and the accent of a fallen nobleman. There was irony, that too Pietrangeli learned. “Until I was nineteen I played football better than tennis. I was in the youth sector of Lazio. When the club decided to send me on loan to Serie C at Viterbese I left football: as a child I dreamed of being an explorer, I thought that with tennis I would travel more”. He chose the Parioli club, northern Rome by constitution. With tennis he took everything, victories, celebrities, jet-set, spotlights, newspapers, magazines. Not without reason. Nicola was talented, he was handsome, he had very blue eyes, like those of a prince (a great classic, right?) and he knew how to live in the big world. He told it not long ago in a book with an ancient title: If it rains, let’s postpone it. The phrase we always said when meeting. If it rains, we postpone: this was done when the fields still couldn’t be covered. If it rains, we put it off: we should say it even today that it’s no longer here. A life in tennis, that of Pietrangeli, and that tennis has made great. Between 1959 and 1961 Pietrangeli was number 3 in the world. He won the Roland Garros twice, in ’59 and ’60, and the Italian Internationals twice, in ’57 and ’61. He played 164 Davis Cup matches, winning 78 in singles and 42 in doubles. Eighteen times on the scoreboard at Wimbledon, in the semi-final in 1960, when he took none other than Rod Laver to the fifth set. In singles he retired in 1974, in doubles he continued until the 1977 US Open, paired with his successor Adriano Panatta.

davis

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Pietrangeli was the non-playing captain in 1976 in Chile, when Italy won the first Davis Cup, the only one before Sinner. He said he had no merit, “the players go on the pitch”. But one yes: that of having brought them to Santiago, with Italy having split politically in those days. “We returned secretly. We spent three days in Rio, waiting. Upon arrival there were only family members and the president of the Federation. We returned as if we had stolen that cup. It was a shameful episode.” And his relationships with his Azzurri were never idyllic. In ’77 he led them to the final again, in ’78 they eliminated him. “The reward was a kick in the ass. The gang of four organized a plot to send me away. We didn’t speak to each other for five years. Everyone has their own character with their own ego. The truth is that they were four excellent players, divided on everything. Panatta and Bertolucci always kept to themselves. Barazzutti and Zugarelli, ditto. I was the glue, so much so that after my dismissal they were eliminated in the first round, when Adriano let himself be beaten by a Hungarian waiter.” Elegant, narcissistic, egocentric, he didn’t like comparisons much. Because, gentlemen, Pietrangeli was Pietrangeli, come on. But he didn’t deserve to end up remembered as the one who gnawed at the successes of others: Panatta’s, then Berrettini’s, now Sinner’s. He felt like the first, at least in chronological order, and who could blame him. “I always say to the kids: in the meantime, learn to lose, because everyone is capable of winning.”

field

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They named a field in the Foro Italico after him while he was alive, which he liked a lot but it made him think a little about death. “My funeral, in a thousand years, will be held at the Pietrangeli stadium. First of all, because there is parking, then because there are three thousand seats. I’m sorry that I won’t be able to attend, to see who comes and who doesn’t come. In case it rains, we could postpone it, putting the coffin in the underpass. I’m still deciding on the music, even if My Way at the exit wouldn’t be bad.” He became friends with princes and kings, by blood or not: he hung out with the lawyer Agnelli and Umberto Marzotto, he played with Sean Connery, Charlton Heston, Virna Lisi. Tennis unites, Pietrangeli’s tennis was dazzling. “I have made my twenty years of tennis a splendid parenthesis of my life.” He loved, indeed he loved. And he was loved by beautiful women. At a very young age he married Susanna Artero, who bore him three sons, Marco, Filippo and Giorgio, but then cheated on him with a younger man. He always said that the story of the playboy had been embroidered on him by others, but he had never denied it, why not. With Licia Colò, who was thirty years younger than him, he had a very long, cover story. Yet so true that it even led him to leave northern Rome. “For her I moved to Casal Palocco, it was a great proof of love”.

touch

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Nice backhand, great touch, excellent athleticism and also a good flight game: thus he became one of the best tennis players of his era. He never stopped frequenting the clubs, the boats, the marinas, the roundabouts on the sea: perpetually tanned, his shirt always a little open, like a man of the world, and the gold necklaces, the branded watches, the clothes full of sun and wind. In Monte Carlo he was the other prince, in Gstaad there were Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the stands to watch him play, in Rome he played cards with Marcello Mastroianni. You wanted to see Pietrangeli because he was so shiny. In Paris, after a match Davis won against the French in ’56, he met Alain Bernardin, the owner of Crazy Horse, and became engaged to one of his dancers. Orlando Sirola, his partner in a double that made history, accused him of associating only with the rich, only high-class people, but that was how Nic built his second life. “I’ve been doing Pietrangeli my whole life and it wasn’t that bad for me”. So much so that, at a certain point, they named a docufilm after him, one of those that are so fashionable today: “Nicola vs Pietrangeli”. But no duels, he got along very well with himself. In October 2024, when Lea Pericoli, with whom he had shared 65 years of tennis and friendship, died, he didn’t have the strength to go and say goodbye. “What would I like to say to her? Goodbye, wait for me and book the table.” A table, or maybe a field. And if it rains, we postpone.