From movies to football, the drama turned comedy by Aurelio De Laurentiis

Aurelio De Laurentiis of Naples beautiful and fun he created and saw several. It couldn’t have been otherwise for someone who works as a film producer, someone who has a trained eye for comedy. And yes, the first laughing comedy you produced came three years after your film debut. First he ranged between eroticism, detective stories, dramas. You began in 1977 with Mario Monicelli’s “Un borghese piccolo piccolo”. The man who gave us the saga of “Christmas Holidays”, who institutionalized the Cinepanettone to accompany our Christmas days, debuted with one of the films that have left us the most sadness and bitterness in the mouth, the film that marked the end of the comedy Italian.

His football history was no different.

He also started there with a drama, the lack of promotion to Serie B in the 2004-05 season. That team wasn’t even called the Napoli sports club (as it had been in the years of Maradona’s dream), but Napoli soccer. Napoli had gone bankrupt, had restarted with him from C1. Lost the playoff final against Avellino. Added insult to drama. Then the football film kicked into gear. The promotion to Serie B the following year, the repurchase of the name, Serie A, the Italian Cup, the scudetto almost, the beautiful football signed by Mazzarri and Sarri, the Ancelotti illusion. He could have got the Scudetto earlier, it didn’t come. Spalletti thought of it in the year in which hardly anyone expected it. Cinema sometimes works by paradoxes.

Cinema got to know football as early as 1931. First appeared Rodolfo Volk, a good-looking Fiumano center forward in the part (albeit uncredited) of a wealthy marquis in Guido Brignone’s Heartbreaker. He really embraced him a year later in Mario Bonnard’s “Five to zero”, a film inspired by the Roma-Juventus match on March 15, 1931 and finished 5-0. Here Rodolfo Volk played himself.

Football met cinema much later, on July 18, 1986. It was then that while Wagner’s “Cavalcata delle Valkyrie” resounded at the Arena Civica in Milan, Silvio Berlusconi landed by helicopter in a similar and opposite style, “Apocalypse Now”. That Milan was a good film, which from the following year was filled with special effects: a terrifying Dutch duo (Gullit and Van Basten) to which was added the following year the third (Rijkaard) to conquer Europe and the world.

Aurelio De Laurentiis was never Berlusconi, yet he is his most successful continuation. Beautiful football as an identity, the need to follow one’s love, victories as a collective exaltation, of the people, and as a personal exaltation. Football as a visceral passion, beyond lost money, anger and disappointment. Things that disappear in an instant when the Scudetto scene arrives.