From the copy left by the soldier Genisio on the Piave to the rooms of “Friends”, from the radio “Giringiro” to Casorati’s paintings: the story of a newspaper that has become a collective ritual, capable of transforming sport into a pop aesthetic that crosses generations, songs and lifestyles
It was a bit of a challenge and a bit of mockery. It was the warm night of May 27, 1918, that of the assault on Caposile, Lower Piave, to block the Austro-Hungarian bayonets towards Venice. Renzo Genisio, soldier of the Royal Army, left a copy of the Gazzetta dello Sport in a newly conquered Austrian trench: “This way they will know better that the Italians are not demoralized…”. Here is already the essence of that pink-colored sheet of paper for the young Italian nation: not a simple newspaper, but a flag to be planted in the ground. Sign of identity, maximum belonging. It would be the same in the years to come, in times of peace and then again under the bombs. And again during a long era of prosperity, between victories and defeats in the world of sport, the toy department of everyone’s lives. History has not changed even today, as Gazza turns 130 and has become modern, international, digital, social(e). It is a huge piece in the story of a country, as few other media around the world manage to be. It matters in Italian mass culture not only because it informs about sport, but because it makes it a national story, a daily ritual, a collective spectacle. It is an image that is always shared, on a bar table, next to a serene steaming cappuccino, or across the Internet, at the speed of light and with the strength of hard news. Thus, transforming itself every time, the Magpie can simultaneously be in a museum or in a talk show, in a film or in a docu, in a novel or in an author’s song.
