Nino Benvenuti and those fists who made the best Italy

Frontier people are close to the identity with which the story on several occasions plays dice; as if the destinies of men were not going there; the days of their lives that no one will return to them; the crumbled walls of their homes; Their luck luggage set up with that remaining heart that pulsates in his throat before escaping. Frontier people know what it means to live in that no man’s land where the wrong of those that history has condemned and for a while, but just enough for the pain of the peoples, the reason explains the reason explained in the books of those who will learn it without the distinctions and the nuances of the truth. And it ends up that the boundaries will bring them inside; Precisely because since you are born to when you grow in the meantime they have changed: someone will have been able to go beyond them, someone else will have suffered them; still others will have been swallowed.

Istria

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Not only because of a metaphor. They were called and called Foibe; karst cracks of historical memory, filled by the dust of forgetfulness; Ignores, or perhaps removed from those history books where a liberation is celebrated from which thousands of Italians of Istria, Dalmatia and the city of Fiume appreciated only the difference between escaping and falling. Guilty for fascist wasting, which he considered missed Slavs there, before; For the retaliation of Tito’s partisans, who persecuted them for a mirror motif, later. When Giovanni Benvenuti was born there, on April 26, 1938, Istria island was in Italy, then he became Yugoslava; Today it is in Slovenia. How to say to come to light with the stigmate of the refugee, of the exile. If not immediately, thereafter in a short time. In “your” land that after a few years would no longer have been such. Ozna, the secret police of the Yugoslav regime; Gelid and ferocious acronym at the same time to synthesize expropriations, removals, eras; What was nothing more than an ethnic cleaning, with the difference that there was no time to talk about it, there was no intention above all, in the chessboard of the delicate balances just created. And then those who end up in a crevasse, linked to a boulder or a family member, has no right even to the echo of his pain. Rinascere, a second time, as a predestined athlete, in the proportions and movements that in a child body already kept the embryo of the champion. After seeing his older brother, Eliano, taken and taken away, one day, for no other reason that it was not the fault of that Italian surname, so bitterly ironic if related to the contempt by the invaders.

Rome ’60 and then …

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Giovanni known as Nino Benvenuti for the nationalpopular mythology of an Italy who wanted to start being carefree, even at the cost of appearing naive, is a couple of cheeks in the heart of the economic boom. An image that in addition to being winning also had the merit of being reassuring, adjective the latter that goes almost beyond the fullness of its meaning, thinking that only twenty years had passed since the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century, more or less and that the memory of the “foreign foot on the heart” was far from healing. Before the spotlight light turned on, there was a dusty and creaking bicycle with which she had to arrive in Trieste to train: fifty kilometers before starting to work in the gym. An Olympiad denied, that of 1956, only because fate had spread the carpet of glory for four years later: an Italian flag under a sky of the same color, in Rome ’60. In the custody of the gold medal, a dedication autographed by Jessie Owens. But more galvanizing than the medal, if possible, the Val Barker trophy, which went to the boxer who had been technically more equipped with the tournament. Welcome with his style if he deserved it, blowing him to a mediomassimo who already called “the mayor” to the Olympic village, this Cassius Clay.

Mazzinghi and Griffith

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Even embarrassing to remember what would come after, because it is not only history of boxing, or sport in general: it is history of Italy, of the costume of the nation. It tells of nights on the radio or night warehouses in front of the monumental televisions with the cathode tube; of contrasts between Montecchi and Capulets of boxing cheering for its rivalry, also dialectic, with Sandro Mazzinghi: the latter indomitable fighter, welcome the architect of a dancing struggle, of distances chiseled by his direct meeting. And, to grow, the narration crosses the ocean, because the dance of Nino the Istrian witch the gaze of the judges of the Madison Square Garden, when the real trilogy of pain represented by the comparisons with great Emile Griffith starts.

Epilogue and morality

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World champion, in the champion world, Nino Benvenuti, thinking head and unconventional choices, in an Italy and in a time when the athlete was certainly not asked to reason, unless ever to take sides. At the antipodes of his boxing Apolla and impeccable, all the Dionysian anger of Carlos Monzon, faced and lived, as well as immediately, to the apogee of a career that against the Argentine would have known the descending phase of the parable. Lived with style, that too. And precisely on the basis of this authenticity, the Italians after those epochal defeats have deeply sorry, as is obvious; But they never dreamed of moving away, by a sample that remained such also in the aftermath of the lucid recognition of a greatness of others that proved to be greater than their own. Everything he had lived and suffered gave a deeper meaning to what he would conquer over time; Precisely for this reason it is natural to say that thanks to Nino Benvenuti the Italians have not only celebrated great victories: they also felt better.