There are places that seem to have fallen asleep beneath the dust of time, but just mentioning their name brings them back to life. Thus, on Friday, the old stadium on Via Pola will resurface at Cagliari's Mem as a living memory, ready to tell the story of a century of football and the city.
The meeting, organized by historian Mario Fadda, will be an opportunity to restore to the community a sense of belonging to a place that between 1925 and 1951 saw the birth of Sardinian football and the founding of Cagliari.
The conference "The Centenary of the Via Pola Stadium and the Pioneers of Sardinian Football," moderated by journalist Francesco Aresu, will feature Mario Fadda, the regional delegate of the Italian Sports Society, municipal councilors Giuseppe Macciotta and Luisa Giua Marassi, and Gianni Cadoni, president of the FIGC Sardinia Committee. They will be called upon to reconstruct the sporting, social, and urban value of that now-vanished field.
The day will take on an even deeper meaning thanks to the presence of the grandson of Agustino Cugusi, the Cagliari president who inaugurated the stadium in 1925. He will be joined by a delegation from Cagliari Calcio and several family members of the players who took to the field that day and in the years that followed, sharing memories and anecdotes that will help retrace the Rossoblu's epic origins.
The historical conference will retrace all the stages of the Via Pola pitch, from the first dusty matches to the club's years of growth, up until the move to more modern facilities.
It will be a journey down memory lane, a return to our roots to understand how a playing field can become a symbol of identity.