When the wooden cover was lifted off the ground and the players came out of the "den", I began to get agitated, a sort of personal warm-up, ready to follow the progress of the game with stops and shots that inexorably ended up against the player's back. unfortunate fan who suffered on the bench just below the one where my father held me on his knees. I was six years old the day I met Philadelphia for the first time, the sacred temple of world football and the surreal space of the time dilation of a country that it was no longer there and that it would slowly turn into a playground with different values and priorities.
Six years, sixty years ago. But the "visceral" relationship with that shirt and that place was tragically born much earlier, when the fog and the Superga hill swallowed the plane, opening the doors to the legend. I was born just a month ago and since then my nourishment has made use of a natural supplement: the sense of belonging to another Turin where the weakest found the unity and strength to make a difference. And so Il Filadelfia was until it existed, until the "puppeteer" decided that the time had come to overthrow the myth. Then, by a strange twist of fate, the witness of the other Turin passed into the hands of a newspaper La Gazzetta of the people.
And when her voice became too authoritative and listened to, she was silenced by an obsequious judiciary. From that moment the history of the city has slipped like this, all concentrated on solving the problems of the big factory, on satisfying its wishes, on taking on the weights of its mistakes.
And it is significant that just when a hostile world dissolved by emigrating to distant countries, all of a sudden all the bureaucratic obstacles, the fears of Coni, the doubts about sports credit (even the forgotten Vidulich had tried to rebuild it), the perplexities of the Sala rossa advise , have disappeared. Today the "Fila" is reborn. His first stone will actually be the last of those knocked down by a world that fortunately no longer exists. It is not a story that begins but a journey that resumes after an all too long pause.
And it's not difficult to imagine, around that stone, a circle of children from every country holding hands ready to take the field in sport and in life to build a new legend. Let's start again. Go Bull, Go Turin.
