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“Always”. It could end like this, with the Tweet of the team of which he has become, in order, a player, fan and symbol. Naples, as a team and as a city, mourns the death of Diego Maradona and with it the entire sports world, but not only. For the occasion, the blue that colors the Scudetto has been transformed into black as a sign of mourning. Fans, former teammates and opponents, condolence is a single voice for what was, if not the best footballer of all time (never ask this question to Naples), at least the most iconic. Just in these hours the mourning of the city was announced and the city enters the Spanish Quarter, dyed in blue and where the mural that represents Diego with the number 10 of Naples stands out, but more worn since then. They wear the shirts, while they gather in the square where a bar has turned on a projector on which the images of the goals move. A woman on the first floor hung a Boca Juniors shirt with the number 10, Maradona’s first shirt, on the balcony clothesline. Naples and the Neapolitans cry, incredulous, “the death of a child”, a person has given so much and received the same. Maybe even more. First songs and choirs to vent sadness and pain, then silence. As in a funeral rite, which it is, but in which they never wanted to participate.
From Pelé who promises to play in a divine place, to the pain of his coach, Ottavio Bianchi, so upset that he cannot speak, as well as former teammate Bruno Giordano. There are few words to find the words, more than anything it is social networks that express sadness. Lorenzo Insigne, heir to the captain’s armband, thanks Maradona with whom “I grew up listening to my family’s stories about your exploits, watching and reviewing your endless games.” Diego’s emblem is a refrain in all the memories of Neapolitans, starting with their former president, Corrado Ferlaino: “There is only a lot of pain, mine and that of all Neapolitans. Maradona was not just a player but he represented the spirit of Napoli for years ”. And then the moving greeting of the one who was the first to take his eyes off him and never took it off, Gianni Di Marzio, which only deserves to be read: “Forever the greatest in the history of world football and forever heart because I loved you like a son. A piece of my life goes with you. “
But it is not only sport that is dressed in mourning. The mayor of Naples, Luigi de Magistris, who in 2017 granted honorary citizenship to Diego, regrets him recalling how he “made our people dream, redeemed Naples with his genius.” Immediately after, he proposed to name the San Paolo in honor of the Argentine. Even Vincenzo De Luca, president of the region, in his farewell wanted to underline how he was “a great man of football, a great man of sport who, before the whole world, fell in love with Naples out of enthusiasm and without hypocrisy he knew how to discover and interpret it “. the soul. It helped rekindle his pride, uniting generations who knew how to love, understand and even forgive him.
The forgiveness of a life seasoned with excesses, drugs and rebellion in which Diego fell partly due to personal weakness and partly because “no one really helped him”, as a child present there says. But many believe that it was precisely that extreme attitude that made him human, a popular god capable of giving so much (to everyone) and, unfortunately, also taking away (only to himself).
Maradona and Napoli is a union that cannot be broken, so much so that not even a world semifinal has managed to put one against the other. Arrived in the summer of 84 as king, Diego left like a god. What he managed to create in his Neapolitan career goes beyond games, even surpasses the championships won, the only ones in Neapolitan history. Those that Maradona catapulted into were the years of Nordic domination, on and off the pitch. The Juventus of Michel Platini and Paolo Rossi dominated the championships and when she did not win, here is that Dutch Milan, with Ruud Gullit fresh out of the Ballon d’Or and Marco Van Basten.
Maradona embodied the revenge of Naples – and probably a bit of all of southern Italy – that led her to compete against those who thought it was a city of “earthquake victims.” He has become the spokesman for territorial injustices, for the discrimination suffered by a people, his own, who today recognize him due recognition.
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