Before football, a national sport dragged crowds and intellectuals.
On an autumn day in the year 1821 a young man with extremely composed manners, with an abysmal gaze and a furtive walk wandered the streets of papal town of Macerata. After a first unsuccessful attempt, he had finally managed to escape from his home a few kilometers away, in the village of Recanati.
At the same time, a few steps away from him, another man practically his own age was moving in a completely different atmosphere, welcomed by a crowd of hundreds of men, women and children of different social backgrounds; they were all patiently waiting to see him at work. Together, the Recanatese and his famous peer made their entrance, the first from the public, the other heading towards the changing rooms, in the most important city building: the Sferisterio. Here not a theatrical performance, nor a musical performance awaited them.
At the center, Carlo Didimi is preparing to beat (4 Live)
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The imposing architecture had been designed to host the most popular ball sport of the Italian peninsula of that time: the ball with the bracelet. That man, dragged by the crowd and acclaimed with every gesture, was called Carlo Didimi. The one we would call today a champion the ball, the object of veneration and enthusiasm, was devoted to a glory that would hardly have been due to any other profession in the world, at least at that time.
The young Recanatese was aware of this, whose gaze met Didimi’s; a different glory was destined to him, a fame paid for in the aftermath in the field of letters. When he was still nobody, the young Count Giacomo Leopardi in the mighty actions and precise launches of that athlete he saw the features of the contemporary hero:
“Echoing you
Arena and the circus, and you tremble appeals
The popular favor for illustrious events;
You thriving of the new age
Today the dear homeland
The ancient examples to renew prepares ». (1)
Sports event, lyrical and mythological at the same time, the ball with the bracelet was therefore considered the last transcendental expression of an anti-heroic time often denounced by Leopardi himself. How not to think about Pier Paolo Pasolini who defined football, heir of the aforementioned ball sport in order of popularity in Italy, the last sacred representation of our time.
Similarly, in that expectation heightened by a vibrant cheering and in the exaltation of the athletes, already comparable to authentic semi-gods, he anticipated all the power of the modern mass sports phenomenon. In Leopardi’s time, the ball with the bracelet was one of the purely European expressions of the ball played with the hands, in place of the overseas foot-ball. However these two sports were very different from the historical point of view.
The Sferisterio Maceratese today.
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In Italy, the balloon with the bracelet was established in the 16th century drawing its origins probably from the cordacorda, and in the nineteenth century it became a popular discipline and widespread throughout the territory of the Peninsula, not yet gathered under a single flag. Not only Leopardi but even Goethe he described this sport with great interest and abundance of details in his I travel to italy.
Towards the end of the 19th century, with the rubber vulcanization technique and the consequent possibility of replacing the heavy walnut bracelet with leather – given the greater lightness of the ball – the game split into two specializations: to Piedmontese, just with the small rubber ball, and Tuscan styleinstead with the heavier ball.
To score it was necessary to cross the limit of the opponent’s field with the ball, within the boundaries marked by the posts (the so-called sprint), or touch the opposing half of the court if the rival team fails.
In particular, it was this second variant that spread more quickly. And once again the football comparison remains fitting: if football proves to be a vehicle for national sports unification in the fascist period, the same strategy had already followed the ruling classes of the new united Italy as regards the ball with the bracelet. These had sensed its potential, and valued it as an element of future national cohesion already before 1861 as a distinctive feature of Italian popular culture.
What were the rules? The two teams consisted of three players each: a hitter, a shoulder and a full back. These were joined by a character extraneous to the game, the so-called tangerine, in charge of sending the ball to the batter, who had to hit the ball getting off an inclined trampoline, using the bracelet. Once the ball was hit, if a mistake was made, the opposing team secured fifteen points.
Wonderful testimony of the Piedmontese variant
This continued with fifteen points in fifteen points but unlike tennis, which is very similar in terms of scores, reaching forty points did not continue to the advantages, but the team that first reached fifty was the winner. To score it was necessary to throw the ball over the edge of the opponent’s court, within the boundaries marked by the posts (the so-called sprint), or touch the opposing half of the court if the rival team fails.
that Carlo Didimi he was therefore recognized for being one of the best hitters of the time. Probably, even if there are no rankings of the greatest football players on the bracelet, he was perhaps the best of all time (according to what was reported by the chronicles of the time and by the words of Leopardi). In reference to the context of the epoch it was his remunerationso much so that a champion could earn approximately as much as a modern champion in tennis, golf or motoring.
That game so rooted in Italian tradition and folklore disappeared from the great sports and media area in the big cities, surviving only in small villages like Mondolfo or Treia
In particular, Didimi asked per a his performance not less than 600 papal shields: to make a comparison, an elementary school teacher in the State of the Church perceived between 25 and 60 shields per year. Another certainly less good player than Didimi, Silvio Bencini, received in 1905 an engagement of 42 lire a day (cashed even when he was not playing or was ill), in addition of course to the game prizes. This price list clearly demonstrates how the bracelet ball was considered a sport worthy of glory and was still very popular in the early 1900s.
If for no other reason than its nemesis was just arrived harmlessly by sea in that Genoa and in Liguria from which the expedition of the Thousand had started, which had reconnected South Italy to the nascent Savoy kingdom by bringing together brothers already united by the passion for the ball on the bracelet. In a short time, however, in the Superb some English sailors, industrialists and Italian noblemen, together with travelers and patrons of the powerful England, began to play the ball with feet.
The Sferisterio di Cesena, inside the Rocca Malatestiana, in a photo from 1929.
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This had been happening for several decades in the empire of Queen Victoria and it was with surprising rapidity that that phenomenon exploded all over the world, if only because a quarter of it was the domain of the aforementioned Majesty. So the football it spread like wildfire, creating its champions and championships.
When fascism decided to make it a showcase of national cohesion and propaganda like what had once been the role of the ball on the bracelet, then those champions, those footballers, those formidable athletes who remained in Giacomo’s heart and eyes Leopards passed in the background.
That game, so rooted in Italian tradition and folklore, disappeared from the great sports and media area in the big cities surviving only in the small villages like Mondolfo or Treia, the town of origin of Didimi himself, to remain in the Marche context.
Perspective of the statue of the Province of Forlì at the Foro Italico.
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Yet when Meazza, Piola and Schiavio already took place in the Italian Olympus of semi-divine athletes, which had previously belonged to Didimi or Bencini, a last work was given to the ball with the bracelet: in 1932 the Mussolini forum, today Foro Italico. Inside, among the many statues representing the various provinces of Italy, the one dedicated to Forlì is striking.
An athletic and vigorous body, the gaze turned towards the opponent as a sign of challenge and a large bracelet in walnut, to eternally immortalize the ball with the bracelet among the great sports of Italy. The statue carved in stone seems to be waiting, as Didimi was: waiting to receive the ball from the mandarin, waiting to devote himself body and soul to his sporting enterprise, under the watchful and curious eyes of Leopardi:
«The sweaty virtude. Wait wait,
Magnanimous champion (s’a la fast
Full of years your valor contrasts
Strip your name), wait and it’s the core
Move with high desire. “(2)
(1) (2) The verses are taken from “A winner in the ball” by Giacomo Leopardi (1821)
In the cover image by Gianluca Palamidessi, Elio Germano plays Giacomo Leopardi in “The young fabulous” (by M. Martone, 2014)
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