Roberto Pelucchi, journalist of the Gazzetta dello Sport, has died

Sunday morning, 11.31. “Hello “Pelu”, how are you?”. On the other end of the phone, the voice is just a little tired. “Better, come on. I no longer have the pains of the first few days. And then they told me that the worst is over. The doctors scolded me because I’m a bit lazy, I don’t drink much. But Thursday they should discharge me. Then oh well, I’ll need a some time to go back to what it was before”. “Pelu”, on the other hand, will never come back. When we learned of this at dawn yesterday morning, we were petrified, dismayed. And that bright rising sun turned into a terrible black hole that swallowed us up with a very heavy load of sadness and pain. Roberto Pelucchi, a talented journalist who has been with the Gazzetta dello Sport for 17 years, has suddenly passed away, snatched from his life on the night of Monday to Tuesday at the Galeazzi Institute in Milan, where he had been hospitalized two weeks ago. And a death like this, a few hours after receiving that comforting news, is even more difficult to accept. Actually no, it’s really unacceptable.

nice person

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He left us at just 50, the age in which we draw the first big sums of our existence, but also the age in which we still have many projects and many ideas to cultivate. And he had plenty of ideas and projects, children of that head in constant ferment. Only 50 years old… he didn’t even look it, “Pelu”. A handsome person, with that air of an eternal boy who hid his professional rigor, as well as intellectual honesty, freedom of thought, goodness of mind, verve, wit, irony and above all self-irony, surrounded by a good dose of shyness and of modesty: he didn’t like the spotlight, he preferred to stay behind the scenes to do his job as a scrupulous, upright and precise journalist, without bragging about it.

cub

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He had begun his adventure in journalism when he was a little more than a teenager, when he was still attending the institute for surveyors, and he already preferred to deal with balloons and bicycles rather than estimation or topography. His first training ground had been a small newspaper in his city, Il Giornale di Bergamo Oggi, a ramshackle cradle but full of enthusiasm and talent. He had cut his teeth spacing – so he used to then, early 90s – everywhere: from a third category match on the edge of a mangy football field to a city council; from the finish line of a cycling race for pupils to classic press conferences. Brancaleone was the puppy of that Army, eager to learn and improve. And it was already clear that that road that had just been traced would take him far. Also because writing well was easy for him.

the pink leap

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With the closure of the Giornale di Bergamo Oggi, and in the meantime he became a professional, after a parenthesis at the weekly La Voce di Bergamo he landed at L’Eco di Bergamo, the historical newspaper, where in those three years he perfected his talent climbing more and more the ladder importance of his area of ​​competence, sport as the central field and Atalanta increasingly the theme of his beautiful pen. Then the big leap to the Gazzetta dello Sport, the dream he has cherished since the beginning of his career. It was 2005, he arrived on tiptoe, humble, ready to make an important contribution. Of writing, competence, precision, imagination, continuous search for the truth, attachment to the color pink and to work: first to football, then in the online editorial office, finally to Sportweek. He knew how to do everything (very well): from investigations to “cooking”, from interviews to gleaning.

straight back

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He was a straight-backed journalist, not at all willing to compromise. He wasn’t reverent, much less deferential. When the Calcioscommesse affair exploded in 2011, he dealt with it with obsessive pique and without making any kind of discount. He too became the target of heavy insults from a fringe of Atalantini fans, which he did not hesitate to denounce. His biggest disappointment, however, was not so much cashing in on those unacceptable epithets spewed out on a website – “infamous”, “bastard”, “man of m….” – as much as having the case rejected by the judge because “in the sporting arena a generic insult can also be used”. He devoured newspapers, our beloved “Pelu”. And especially books. He also wrote two: the novel The Treasure of the Goddess, dedicated to “his” Atalanta, and Le voci della Domenica, a passionate homage to sports commentary, to write which he had archived something like five thousand documents. His masterpiece.
Goodbye “Pelu”, we miss you already. And yes, you would say that is too obvious. But today we can’t say anything else.

the funerals

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Roberto Pelucchi’s funeral will be held on Saturday at 9.30 in the Church of Azzano San Paolo (Bg). Today (from 2.30 pm) the funeral home in the Sala del Commiato, also in Azzano.