Naples and the Scudetto: everything is illuminated

Thirty-three years and many regrets later, the Naples returns to win the Scudetto, the third in its history after those of 1987 and 1990. Back then there was Maradona, today Diego is a memory that still warms the heart, a pain to share, a mural to pay homage to the Spanish Quarters. The new idols are called Victor Osimhen – the centre-forward with the mask who scores repeatedly – e Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, the Georgian who came out of nowhere to show a miracle. The Neapolitans call him Kvaravaggio and in the city – well yes – the first child called Khvicha has already been born: more than superstition, faith could.

If we limit ourselves to the technical aspect, it must immediately be said that there has never been – at least in recent years – more deserved scudetto than this one from Napoliwho didn’t just dominate the championship from start to finish but did it by expressing a brilliant game and appreciated at all latitudes, thanks also to the one who – with his sixty-four years – becomes the oldest Italian coach to have won the title: Luciano Spalletti.

By encroaching from the perimeter of the pitch, however, the Napoli championship takes on other meanings. Beyond the coin-operated rhetoric and the usual parade of clichés – the exaggerated partythe pizza with the colors of the team, the decorated alleys, the blue clothes hanging from one window to another, the usual misery and nobility on the piecework basis – there is a city that – as the New York Times – «he finally has a football team up to it”, assuming that Naples – understood as a place not of the soul but real – is already a city that – football – can also do without it. It is. And this is the most marked difference with the past.

There is no longer a need for the choral recital that accompanied Maradona’s team to triumph thirty-three years ago. No Neapolitan – apart from a few television appearances – feels the urgency, no one talks about it now Southern Revenge and shows off the pride of the club fighting against the established Power: old stuff, global-football has cut off the tops of the bell towers. Current football – with its budgets in the red and a very fragile system – is exposed to the slap of fate every day, so even such a significant victory – this blessed Scudetto awaited for a couple of generations – cannot become the password for the access to the next level of a new world.

Naples, the city, is earning that level and that horizon – with difficulty – in recent years. With a changed urban context, with the tourism. From Fuorigrotta to Vomero, there is a social geography so fragmented and different that it necessarily reflects that of the whole of Italy. The city is a melting pot of languages ​​and identities which perhaps – if only it had awareness and strength – could stand as a model, a pity that the excess of self-narration every time bogs down the mechanism and then – out of nostalgia, out of laziness, because basically it is the most convenient way to resolve the question – one always returns to the Naples of the noble fathers, from Eduardo to Troisi, passing through Totò and Pino Daniele.

The truth is that this shield was born from a Roman entrepreneur (De Laurentiis) and as said a Tuscan coach, a Nigerian center forward and a Georgian champion. If the passion is the same, the disillusionment has gained space. And – we can bet – when all the confetti and extinguished firecrackers have remained on the lawn, beyond the jubilation of flags, holy pictures and banners – that everything will never be forgotten, but will become archival material, for the next time, the next Scudetto, the next Napoli. Everything in Naples is illuminated this time. There is a future to reinvent and only one certainty: this time it was not the hand of God.

Other Vanity Fair stories you may be interested in

– Napoli’s last Scudetto: ten things you may not remember

– Who “killed” Diego Armando Maradona?

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