Basketball, the first match of the national team 100 years ago in Milan: 23-17 against France,

There was also the son of Carlo Canevini, the best scorer, with 9 points, of that 23-17 success over France in the first match in the history of the Italian national basketball team. One hundred years after that 4 April 1926, now more, now less, basketball met to remember the beginning of its Italian history: there was the 93-year-old legend Sandro Gamba, the most successful coach, there was Fausto Maifredi, federal president of Italy’s latest medals, there was Pierluigi Marzorati, the Italian with the most appearances in Italian history, 277 with the peaks of the Olympic silver in Moscow 1980 and the European gold of Nantes 1983. And the soul, “il Pierlo” as president of Liba, of this Milanese part of the celebrations with the RipartiAmo Basket initiative, which created an exhibition to retrace these one hundred years in 13 totems (13 like Naismith’s 13 rules of basketball): first stop of the exhibition, which will be traveling, the Belvedere on the 39th floor of Palazzo Lombardia.

celebrations

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Stage zero, however, together with the unveiling of a commemorative stele, was that morning in Piazzale Accursio, north-west of Milan, where one hundred years ago, when it was called Piazza del Bersaglio, the first of the 1568 national team matches had been played. Today there is a basketball court, the game a century ago was across the road at the Cagnola shooting range, which took its name from the counts who owned the land that starts from Piazza Firenze and which was in the municipality of Musocco before being incorporated into Milan in 1923, in an area that also hosted Alfa Romeo. Today the National Shooting Range is transforming into the future American consulate. Present at the celebration, among many, was also the police commissioner of Milan Bruno Megale: “It’s nice today that the birth of basketball, which is integration, inclusion, unites peoples, is being celebrated in a small suburban pitch… Milan is changing and investing in sport as union and identification is the best thing that can be done.”

the match

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It was Easter Sunday on 4 April 1926 and, with the tap-off at 2.15pm, there was no time for lunch for the seven Italians of the time, for the occasion in white shirts with the Savoy shield (and the French in blue): captain Brocca, the aforementioned Canevini, then in Caccianiga, Fedeli, Ortelli, Valera and Valli. Referees are the Italian Augusto Vitali and the French Beaupois. The coach, Marco Muggiani, was the brother of the founder of Inter Giorgio and of Arrigo who was the first president of the Italian Basketball-Ball Federation, born from an offshoot of the Italian National Gymnastics Federation. It was founded five years earlier in the Colombo Birreria in Milan, a few meters from the Duomo, already the “birthplace” of the National Alpini Association and previously also home to AC Milan. For this reason, to be honest, it was not the first match ever for an Italian team, but the first after the foundation of the Federation. A bit like in football, basketball at the time was played with three attackers, who that day were Alberto Valera (who finished with 6 points), Giannino Valli (8) and Carlo Canevini, and two defenders, on this occasion Guido Brocca and Giovanni Ortelli. The score was 12-6 already after the first twenty minutes of the game. Where it all began.