This is how our newspaper, in 1896, was born on green paper from the merger of two cycling magazines
It happened in Milan in 1896. On Friday 3 April La Gazzetta dello Sport was born, initially printed in twenty thousand copies on green paper. The parents are happy, namely Il Ciclista (the father) and La Tripletta (the mother), who huddle at the foot of the cradle and cuddle the baby. It is from their union and their love that the new newspaper comes to life. The publisher Raffaele Sonzogno, a man who thought about culture, convinced that it was the pillar on which the nation, which had become such just over thirty years ago, should have supported itself, urged its birth, as if it were an expert and wise midwife. Gazzetta’s father and mother met in Milan in 1895. Il Ciclista was born in Milan, again by Sonzogno’s will, thanks to the idea of Eliso Rivera, born in 1865, a lawyer from Masio, province of Alessandria, a socialist who loved to defend the farmers’ causes against the landowners and who had always stood up for social equality in the face of the overflowing tyranny of capitalism without rules. The Tripletta, however, was founded, again in 1895, by Eugenio Camillo Costamagna, born in Turin in 1864, who had the habit of signing himself as “Magno”, a nickname which was not unrelated to his powerful build. Rivera and “Magno”, lovers of sport and cycling in particular (by far the most popular discipline at the time), started a family, settled in a few rooms behind the Duomo, in via Pasquirolo, and, with the help of three editors, bent over their desks, designed what would become the new creation. They didn’t intend to talk and discuss only cycling, and they wrote it from the first issue. The objective was to cover all sports, and Costamagna, who in his youth had been a passionate elastic ball player, pushed hard on this aspect.
La Gazzetta, daughter of Il Ciclista and La Tripletta, was to be a point of reference for the entire territory of the Kingdom of Italy: results from everywhere were collected, everything that happened in the most remote and forgotten areas of the country was accounted for with an attention to detail and precision that would forever be the hallmark of the new newspaper. Which came out twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays, precisely to recount the events that had taken place in the middle and at the end of each week. On the morning of April 3, 1896, with their hands still stained with ink and their eyes ringed with fatigue and tension, Il Ciclista and La Tripletta, beaming parents, went out into the dawn of Milan and shouted to the world that their daughter had been born, who everyone, soon, very soon, would hear about.
