Giorgio dearest, your Parma lost against Verona, the air this Sunday was humid and cold, then the fog came down as if to hide the melancholy of your departure.
December is a month reserved for parties but, sometimes and it is becoming often, it takes away slices of life and you find yourself alone, struggling with thoughts and fears. It was you who wanted to show me the path of journalism, you asked me to write for the Gazzetta di Parma, baseball, I discovered Canco Paschetto’s throws in those Turin nights in via Passo Buole, humid and cold like today, “I’ll make you pay ”, you told me and you kept your word, a postal order announced two thousand and two hundred lire.
You traveled by train every day from Turin to Milan, a pack of newspapers and a couple of books, you loved Harold Robbins and his stories, Stiletto, Il Pirata, the Milanese editorial office of La Stampa was in Piazza Cavour, in Mussolini’s cold residence which later became the newspaper building, your desk was a camp of papers, clippings and books and books. You read whatever passed before your lively eyes, you told the story by barely rounding the r as is typical of the people of your land, you taught me that the origins dated back to the French domination and perhaps to the Obertenghi who also had Emilia among their properties.
All these lessons slipped between a trip to San Pellegrino Terme where Chiappella’s Inter gathered in the summer or the short journey to San Siro for the night matches of Milan and Inter. You played football and well in our unlikely teams of the usual six, seven desperate players, at Sporting in Turin or on the pitch of the Leonardo da Vinci hotel on foggy mornings in Cormano, you called us together and gathered us together on trips abroad, we played against the reporters Englishmen on a splendid green lawn in Manchester and Lou Macari, United’s maramaldo Scot, cut off all our socks in the dressing room while we were on the pitch running after the ball, you were angry, together with Sandro Ciotti, as I had never seen you before also because we took them from our opponents whose shirts also included Billy Wright, 105 caps for the English national team.
A few months ago you sent me the photograph of that event, the black and white snapshot showed Wright trying to stop you and me just to the side. Other clippings from the album of our time, we found ourselves in Parma between hams and club parties, Adorni was always there, Vittorio also left in December, the hours before Christmas as you decided to write the last word a few days before your birthday.
I see that the newspapers haven’t had time to remember you, even those, like La Stampa to which you had dedicated twenty-seven years of your existence, forgetful, cold-hearted, disrespectful, ultimately miserable people. Hi Giorgio, in the littorio palace in Piazza Cavour they took away the linotypes and the desks. It is cold.