Reader. Just over three thousand inhabitants, a monastery overlooking Lake Maggiore: the view alone is worth the trip, but you have to get to know it. November 7th. Summer is long over, Christmas is still too far away. And then Amsicora, April 12th. Gigi Riva passed by.
Pronounced jaw, Humphrey Bogart look, quadriceps declaring war and left foot. Above all. This is how Luigi, when he was still Luigi, began to change time and space, the sense of Sardinia for places and dates, elevating the Leggiuno and the seven Novembers. Thus the way of thinking about the past has changed, the way of talking about the 60s and 70s and of talking about ourselves. As Gigi's friends, first and foremost. Only Gigi.
È morto Gigi Riva
Someone in Cagliari only stopped to let him cross the road. Others met him in Via Roma. A smile so as not to disturb, a nod. That was enough to say I knew him. And then that day fifty-four years ago, when the camp seemed to have invaded the whole island.
For Sardinia and the Sardinians, connecting to Riva, to his memory, to those weeks suspended between the epic and the news, meant connecting to history. Remembering Riva has always meant remembering ourselves, retaining otherwise anonymous days, preserving glances and hugs. The people of this land have condensed the goal against Bari and the smile of their fathers, the overhead kick against Vicenza and the first times, the Prater and the infinite regrets that living entails.
We are the sum of the people we meet, we know. But never, as with Gigi, have the lives of Sardinians wrapped themselves around a single figure, letting themselves be carried away by his heroic successes and his human weaknesses, traveling between his silent places and his noisy days. They made them theirs. He, in return, changed Sardinia forever. Simply by passing.
