Where Diego was now there is Di Lorenzo and Naples sings

It can be said that Napoli began to win their third Scudetto on a Thursday afternoon in July, in the closed locker room of Dimaro, just a few minutes from the first friendly of the season against Anaune Val di Non, the regional excellence of Trentino-Alto Adige. In one fell swoop De Laurentiis has just drawn a line on Insigne and Mertens, pieces of the heart and history of the club’s last decade; in those same hours, in London, Koulibaly is undergoing medical tests with Chelsea. Almanac in hand, the captain’s armband would go to Zielinski, in blue since 2016, or secondly to Mario Rui, more fuzzy and temperamental, in Naples since 2017. Instead Luciano Spalletti delivers it to Giovanni Di Lorenzo, and no one has anything to say about it. “I didn’t expect it to be my turn”, Di Lorenzo would say a few months later, whose surname curiously bears the traces of two great protagonists of Naples’ modern era: “Lorenzo” like Insigne, the former captain of Frattamaggiore who was never quite loved by his people, and “Di Lorenzo” which according to Google Translate is the literal translation into Italian of the Latin “De Laurentiis” (however, if the reminiscences of the high school do not deceive us, “Laurentiis” is ablative plural, so it would be more correct “Lorenzi’s”). In order to abandon ancient letters and return to the football field, within a few hours Di Lorenzo will become the second captain in the club’s history to win a Scudetto: they have named the stadium after the first, not only in Naples, and everywhere they call him God. In thirty years there will hardly be clubs in the Spanish Quarters that will keep a relic of Giovanni Di Lorenzo on display, as happens with the (very) alleged Maradona hair kept in a votive aedicule inside a bar in Piazzetta Nilo, the object of amused pilgrimages. But in its own way, his season has something evangelical about it: in the literal sense of the term, the announcement of the footballing good news brought to the city by Luciano Spalletti.