The downside of being a nice man with a strong history behind him is that they then abuse you. I absolutely abuse him, Giancarlo Antognoni. I nail him for an hour and a half with plausible and absurd questions, knowing full well that beauty often comes out of the absurd. “He kept me for an hour and a half, as if I were Belen…” he says, half exhausted and pleased, to his friends, who are already ready to raid with any excuse to free him from the clutches of the “abuser”. He is waiting for me outside the agreed café, a stone’s throw from Coverciano, his Florentine hideout. Elegant in the camel Montgomery, his face which over time has become a fascinating crater between wrinkles, furrows and dimples. We meet Furio, Ferruccio Valcareggi’s son and the other friends of the bar, dozens of stories and faces that every story and every face can tell us a Jack London story. For me Antognoni is better than Belen, not only because he kicks the ball with a full neck and when he kicked he looked at the stars. I definitely understand that he is better than Belen when I see him chasing after the two grandfathers who had been sitting at the next table until a minute earlier to bring them back the envelope they had forgotten. In short, the class of man, on the threshold of his seventies, has not lost its luster. He matches that of the twenty-year-old footballer. Not to mention the availability for questions, photos, autographs. Smiling and docile. Everyone calls him “Captain”, he in Florence like Totti in Rome.
Antognoni talks about his Florence
