Italy-Brazil 3 to 2

The Return

It's July 5, 1982 to Barcelona, from just past 5 p.m. and the heat envelops the city, all the way up at the top where Sarrià Stadium ends the climb up Avinguda Diagonal, traveled from over 44.000 spectators of one of the most anticipated events of the Mundial in Spain: the last match of the "round robin" between Enzo Bearzot's Italy, the surprise of the tournament, and the highly favored Brazilian Seleção, full of unmatched talent and to who need only a draw to advance to the semifinals. to because of the nationality of the referee, the Israeli Abraham Klein, the match is not broadcast in Arab countries. But it is broadcast, for sure, on every other television around the world, in neighborhood courtyards, in stately palaces, in the improvised living rooms of poor houses, no doubt in a house in the Malaspina Palagonia neighborhood of Palermo, there where on July 5, 1982, again shortly after 5 p.m., an Italian family will arrange itself following its own ritual, its own liturgy to watch the match. Everyone will take the same seat as always, following the same habits of the lucky previous matches. If not, fate will inexorably follow the path of defeat.

If the first of the two events was broadcast live worldwide, the second - from it derived - was manifested in a Palermo house, but it was no less visible, because what took place in that house was a sequence of universal scenes, happening in each of the living rooms, courtyards, palaces connected for the match; thus a public and a private fact, a public fact and millions of private facts, together compose the fresco of Italian popular history. In that house, precisely 1.025 km from the stadium, like a sword piercing to half the Mediterranean, next to his father and uncle Peppe and other family members, is little Davide, 8 years old, unaware at the time that he is facing to a historical event, actually two: from on the one hand one of the most exemplary matches for understanding the spread of soccer across the entire planet, on the other hand the exercise of men who will be from models for his life, their emotions triggered by the observation of a movement taking place on the screen, therefore not present and yet so present, their exorcisms and their practices of a religious, almost magical nature. Twenty years will pass before that little Davide Enia decides to express all the evocative power of that moment in a form of oral storytelling, until the debut of the show that takes its name from the match: Italy Brazil 3 to 2.

Today, 20 more years have passed, the show has had 800 performances in all Italian theaters, to bring it back on stage - with the meaning "the return" to identify continuity with "the going", just like a soccer game - is the feeling that the already said always has new forms from represent, new listeners with which to place itself in dialogue: if then Davide Enia's intention was to get back in touch with the child he had been, with all the load of emotions that had remained entangled in the past and that the story would have been able to make resurface, now the process repeats itself again because perhaps in that story is contained the time in the act of transformation, of the individual and at the same time of the society it represents, until the renewal of the experience does not bring to materialize a kind of sensitive time machine, a very delicate device of relationship with the ages of one's life. In this way, a most fascinating dynamic is revealed, namely that as we grow, the historicized events, which are therefore narrated following a stable sequence of facts, change according to our transformation, so it is not true that history is immobilized and untouchable, but changes according to the progressive degree of maturation that we achieve through time. Therefore Italy-Brazil of '82, which has a result and a precise recurrence of facts in the 90 minutes, in the perception of the individual protagonists has changed, and this does not affect only the young or adult Davide, but every generation that has experienced it, in every corner of soccer cheering. It then triggers that game, which is also magical, of "where were we" when a certain fact has upset, positively or negatively, the order of our existence; sport-football among many is the most widespread-is nothing but one of the most explicit vehicles of social connection, which therefore naturally brings out the deep identity character of a nation. Abandoning, therefore, all regard for the snobbery that minimizes its value, it is not hyperbolic to call soccer cheering, so rooted to starting from one's most intimate context and expanding to the public dimension, the social glue that, in these times of extreme conflict, of open wounds in a prevaricating and repressive society humanly disrupted, in which fundamental human rights are denied, allows for the exercise of that sense of belonging, of pride for which to huddle, embrace, shout, thus recreating, in a fractured social fabric that has lost its carnality, the revolutionary experience of happiness.

This process, however, would not have equal force if it were not underpinned by the belief that joy can represent that enormous liberating adrenaline rush capable of provoking catharsis, through, however, the weapon of comedy and not of drama or tragedy; the narration, Enia's cunto, lulled by the musical concordance with the notes of Giulio Barocchieri and Fabio Finocchio, reveals comic aspects that surpass any possible aging because of the purity of the context in which they happen, determining that miracle of recognizability that makes everyone say, to have lived for a time and a space elsewhere in the exact same story. to Corroborating the journey to backwards is the occurrence of the inevitable: many of the protagonists, from Paolo Rossi to Bearzot, from Waldir Peres to Socrates up to Uncle Peppe, are now dead, so the relationship with the past takes on an even stronger character of evocation, through which the tale sinks into the epic dimension: between us and Socrates or Bearzot, today, is the same distance that there can be with Hector, or Achilles, Homeric protagonists of the classical epic who revive in the aesthetic gesture, in the disruptive characters, in the recurrence of epithets, in the green lawn of a soccer field instead of that of battle, there where disunited biographies find a cohesion and local affiliations become universal, where the wide-angle lens of the story opens the temporal gap through which from a clearing of poor suburbia where a ball kicked without shoes flies reaches a world championship, from childhood one conquers adulthood, from a television set up in the living room of a small house in a Palermo neighborhood appears before the eyes of every viewer of this show, as if it were, the game in one's own home, the real event in worldvision.

Simone Nebbia