Gigi Riva’s passion, the giants of Sardinia and the incredible year of the championship
The story of the Cagliari champions certainly does not end with the historic championship won on April 12, 1970. On the contrary, an overwhelming period begins: for them, for Sardinia and for Italy. An intense season that brings new epic matches: from those of the championship, where the team fights to maintain its primacy, but must deal with bad luck, to those of the World Cup in Mexico, in which many of the teammates are called to play. A difficult season for the undisputed hero Gigi Riva, out of action for months after the injury in Vienna and pursued by the media in search of a scoop on his love with the mysterious “White Lady”. A season, in the end, of bittersweet farewells with the end of the Scopigno era. But in this magical and tormented story there is much more than football and its champions. There is a Sardinia that runs and renews itself becoming the protagonist, between the fluorite mines and the largest refinery in the Mediterranean, of the industrial revival of the country. And there is an entire Italy that fights to bring into modernity a society crossed by archaic discriminations, where divorce does not exist and wage disparities between North and South reign. Luca Telese recounts those unforgettable years with the narrative pace of the great novel of the people, of fathers and sons, of battles on and off the field. An immersion in the soul of a time and a land that intertwines matches and behind the scenes, covers of the «Monello» and radio commentaries by Sandro Ciotti, stadiums under construction and ancient megalithic architecture. Because history, when it becomes myth, is immense and inexhaustible.
