2023-06-10 15:54:00
Time.news – ‘Who kidnapped Roger Federer?’ by Piero Valesio (Absolutely Free Books, 226 pages, 18 euros) is a novel with a double bottom. On the surface, an amusing thriller, written by one of the best pens of Italian sports journalism, set in 2040 on the eve of the Italian tennis internationals.
The protagonist is obviously the Swiss champion, perhaps the strongest tennis player of all time, certainly the most iconic. Federer arrives in Rome to be elected president of the most important sports organization in the world, but something unexpected happens. A full-blown spy story, Valesio’s novel, never predictable, with an interesting ending. The mystery in the sports field is a trend not very popular in contemporary literature and reading these pages you don’t understand why.
WTA Open International BNL D’Italia at the Foro Italico, Rome
The scenario is that of a city and a world different from those we know today, where climate change has left deep marks in people’s lives, even the protagonists of the novel. All sport on the planet is in the hands of transnational organizations at war with each other: and Federer could have the task of opening a new page of collaboration between the “belligerent” subjects. Of this plan A of the novel it is good not to tell anything else.
Plan B, the second drawer of the casket, is not necessarily accessible to all readers, even if anyone can try to open it. We must know then that Piero Valesio, reporter, has been reporting (TuttoSport, but also Sky, Messaggero) for almost 40 years the main world sporting events, the Olympics, Formula 1, athletics, football. But above all tennis. He was director of the Supertennis TV channel for four years and head of communication for the Roman tournament. The Foro Italico was his first home for many years.
Roger Federer
E the Foro Italico is the ‘co-protagonist’ of this screenplay (they’re going to make a film about it, you’ll see) written for a publisher who was also a long-time reporter, Daniele Azzolini, another champion of sports journalism of the last few decades, director of ‘Ok Tennis’, a leading signature on tennis for Paese Sera, l’Unità, il Messaggero. He too resided at the Forum, where he coordinated the press room in the years of Adriano Panatta as tournament director. These two gentlemen know the temple of Italian tennis like no other. Environments, circumstances, characters, even tics of a universe, the tennis stadium, the ideal theater of an international intrigue that is much more than probable.
Sports fields – as is well known – are places of the spirit, even before that of the bodies. Places where the life of men takes place in all phases, where feelings, tensions, passions, even loves (hates) are resolved – with winners and losers – inside a rectangle of grass, one of red earth, sometimes a delimited ring by elastic cords and – for ease of use – within a pre-established time. Two out of three sets. Reproduction for the purpose of entertainment of human conflicts. If war is nothing but the continuation of politics by other means, said von Clausewitz, sport is a plastic and faithful representation of war, in streaming or in the grandstand, it changes little (but the corridors are also important, that’s where they wear out crimes and kidnappings are planned). Nadal and Djokovic like Hector and Achilles, Italy-Germany at the Santiago Bernabeu like the clash between the Romans of Marcus Aurelius and the Germanic barbarians in the woods of Pannonia.
© AGF Foro Italico, Campo Nicola Pietrangeli
Here then is the kidnapping of Roger Federer in a hotel in northern Rome a stone’s throw from the red earth of the Forum acquires – in Piero Valesio’s story – a particular flavor for those who know those changing rooms and those grandstands, for those who have had the good fortune to cross the basements of Campo Pietrangeli, the former Centrale, and believed he was being chased by the ghosts that inhabit them.
Or for those who have played on those fields and know well the faces of the guardians, those of the keepers, the butlers of this enchanted labyrinth, where Roger Federer has appeared many times and – for now – never disappeared. In the yellow written by Valesio and published by Azzolini there is a lot of Northern Rome, the slang of Ponte Milvio and its surroundings, but also rites and rituals of the Capitoline sports palaces. Also of this hidden drawer of the novel it is good not to ‘spoilere’ anything else. But the sensation, for those who know those places a little, is of having read not a yellow novel with a surprise ending, but a page in the crime news of Il Messaggero, or Il Tempo, if you prefer. A story of small heroics and great pettiness.
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