The WorldCup which is taking place in Japan and Corea is having quite an unpleasant effect on me - it reminds me that I am really old. I support my team and I do not miss a match but the load of memories I carry within is so heavy that I feel almost embarrassed.
There is only one way out of this situation - put those memories down on paper, not moved by the impossible wish to bridge the gap but to prove, especially to myself, that my mind is still clear, able to delve into details and describe exciting moments gone by. For reasons that will soon be obvious, I recollect the date precisely - Sunday, June 10 1934.

The Opera Nazionale Balilla’s gymnastics performance had just come to a close in my little town in Veneto. For the first time the exercises had been guided by means of a microphone instead of a rudimental loudhailer’s cone. It had been precisely stated that this was a “piezoelectric” microphone, the same kind Mussolini used to make himself heard by the crowd in gatherings of ocean-like dimensions. We of Balilla did not march in the strict sense of the word for the simple reason that we wore rubber shoes which were compulsory for our gymnastics performance.
They made us sing the Balilla hymn but my thoughts were elsewhere, 500km away. And I had one question in mind, just one - to know the results of the WorldCup finals which had been played in Rome that very June 10 1934 between Italy and Czechoslovakia. The match must have ended as evening was already setting in and now and then a gentle evening breeze drifted in from the fields, making the air cooler. At the time there were only three radios in my town, all belonging to people who kept the volume high so football fans could listen from the road to the hoarse and already legendary voice of Nicolò Carosio.
I finally spotted the person who could give me the news I wanted to hear, Louis V, the captain of the local team, full back on the field, going by the footbal terms of the time.
I was lucky. They ordered us to halt as the authorities and the primary school teachers had to pass.
The dialogue that took place was not exactly as I repeat it now, sixty-eight years later. Questions and answers were rigorously exchanged in the southern dialect of the Verona area.
- Mr. Luigi, what happened in Rome?
- We are the champions of the world, Giulietto, but we had a hard time.
- And the results?
- 2-1 after the extra time. They scored the first goal, the Czechs did.
- Who shot the goal for us?
- Orsi equalized and Schiavio scored the victory.
- Are we champions of the world thanks to Schiavio?
- That’s right. Carosio said: right-sided goal, unstoppable, passed from Guaita.
From that moment I was not a Balilla returning from a gymnastics performance anymore, but just a happy little boy. Schiavio had scored, Angelo Schiavio, my hero, and I knew I had dreamt (I swear even now about this dream) that he would have been the one, with one of his goals, to make us world champions.
Once, when I was even younger than on that June 10 1934, they took me to the stadium in Bologna, it was called Littoriale. Schiavio was the centre-forward for the Bologna team and he scored five (or even six) goals against Pro Vercelli.
This is how, yesterday as today, a footballer gets into your heart and into your imagination - you think of him and you feel you are him when you play a game in the fields (this is how things went in my little town) with jackets and sweaters rolled up to make the goals.
I still identified myself with Schiavio, but I kept it a secret. Nobody ever called me by that glorious name, while amongst my friends and those in my age group some were nicknamed “Meazza” and “Mumo” Orsi, the Italo-Argentinian who played tangos on the violin, others “Combi”, when he played in goal and yet others were called “Monti”, the sturdy Luisito, he too an Italo-Argentinian. I do not have many other memories of June 10 1934. I knew that the exhausted Schiavio had been moved to the right wing and had scored from that position.
On his eightieth birthday (he was born in 1905 and died in 1990), he declared in an interview: “I managed to strike hard, on a half turn. They always said that it was an extremely precise shot, that skimmed just by the post. No, it was an instinctive, blind shot. To me the goal could even have been far off. I took the shot and that’s all”. It is right to say that the formation was Italy’s.
I will name them without looking up the almanacks: Combi, Monzeglio, Allemandi, Ferraris IV, Monti, Bertolini, Guaita, Meazza, Schiavio, Ferrari and Orsi.
And I can also name, by heart, the formation that won the WorldCup in France four years later, beating Hungary 4-2: Olivieri, Foni, Rava, Serantoni, Andreolo, Locatelli, Biavati, Meazza, Piola, Ferrari and Colaussi. Now it is all televised - goals, victories, defeats, joy and tears, mistakes, violence, fears and embraces. An electronic archive has already been prepared to assure the future does not miss a minute or even a second of what takes place because everything is filmed live, repeated in slow motion, commented and processed. I am probably writing of June 10 1934 as a reaction to this too. Of that distant day there remains the event of the only commissioner (that’s how they called him)Vittorio Pozzo, carried in triumph by his players.
And there remain old, yellowed newspapars and a clip filmed in poor light of the only cinema newsreel of the time. It may sound like a fairy tale, the story of a town with three radios and a little boy who wanted to know the results. But its not a fairy story.
Our becoming world champions did not disturb the normal peace and calm that reigned about the roads. That evening passed as all summer evenings - seated on my doorstep I awaited the little lamp that signalled the arrival of the white, longed for ice-cream cart. These words are not nostalgic except for the many, too many absent who memories recall.
I could make a roll call, if I wished - names, surnames, nicknames. It would be an attempt to win the unrelenting flow of time.
As an old journalist, I know it is already a great prize to be here, as a survivor, to delve into the infinite recesses of memory.
Traslated by Interpres sas