Entrance 5 €, under 10 free Saturday, May 10 at 8:30 PM at the Bice Lazzari Cultural Center in Quero (BL), “Il Grande Torino. A postcard from a different country” will be staged
a show by Gianfelice Facchetti and Marco Bonetto
Music: Slide Pistons (Raffaele Kohler, Luciano Macchia, Francesco Moglia)

What is in the suitcase of a football player returning from a long trip or a memorable match? What objects, what things are kept in the bottom of the bag? There will be shoes, playing clothes, a tracksuit, socks, a captain’s armband; there will be a jersey swapped with an opponent, maps to explore the city where one has been, souvenirs to bring to those who stayed home waiting, local crafts, a doll, a jar of camphor to soothe sore muscles…
In the suitcases recovered from the wreckage of the FIAT G.212 airplane that crashed on Superga on May 4, 1949, there were many of these things but also much more: there were the rediscovered dreams of a generation and an entire country, ours, that had clung to that team as one would with something salvific when everything is falling apart.
Let’s imagine that on that day in ’49 nothing happened, no tragedy; let’s turn back the calendar and leaf through the album of memories: first postcard, second, third, until we find the roots and the protagonists of a page of history stuck in the eyes of memory. Names, surnames, places, dates.
The “Great Torino” was a postcard from a different country, from a place where people’s suitcases contained nothing because they had been emptied by war, they were poor and waiting to be filled again with everything: with material and essential things, but also with vengeance, dreams, life. The tragic tale of the boys in maroon jerseys speaks of the shattered dreams of a generation that, after the Second World War, rolled up its sleeves and tried to reclaim life in a thousand different ways. One of these was surely sport, first cycling then football, thanks to the Torino that everyone loved, from north to south. There was a hunger for life and for trust in something from which to start rebuilding. And there was also a thirst for revenge, for victories, for pride trampled for too long and ended up underfoot. In a resigned picture, it was sport that provided some support to the entire country.
For this reason, when the sky swallowed the “Invincibles” in maroon jerseys, everything came crashing down; it was a grief so powerful that it erased any hope for the future for many Italians. Remembering it 76 years later means tying back the threads of time and giving us back a fragment of what we once were and, in some way, what we would like to become again.
After “We were almost in heaven” and “The Football Tribe,” Gianfelice Facchetti concludes his trilogy dedicated to the world’s most popular sport, with a theatrical narrative that follows a podcast created a few months ago for Raiplaysound.A show by Gianfelice Facchetti and Marco Bonetto about the tragedy that struck the football team in ’49