75 years ago the worst foul in Italy: Gimona smashes Pesaola, life ban. But De Gasperi...

Once upon a time there was a tibia, a fibula, a prince and a prime minister. Put like that, it seems like a title worthy of a Lina Wertmüller film, but it was a Sunday in the championship in February, exactly fifty-five years ago. With a few turns of the hand to go, the protagonist of the afternoon was still Aleksandar Arangelovic, Roma's Serbian striker who had scored a brace, in that Roma-Palermo match that the Giallorossi would later win 2-1. Also on the pitch wearing the Roma jersey that Sunday was Bruno Pesaola: the Argentine, twenty-five at the time, was in his third and final year in the capital; his career would then continue for two seasons at Novara, then at Naples until 1960, to then end with the football that counts at Genoa, in the 1960-61 season.

Once the 87th minute of that twenty-seventh matchday had struck, it happened that Aredio Gimona, Palermo midfielder, while one of the last plays was developing in another portion of the pitch, pounced on Pesaola, hitting him with extreme hardness on the right leg. Breaking it, literally. Almost as ruthless as the murderous tackle, was the report that emerged from the x-rays: Pesaola's tibia and fibula were shattered. For the time, the chances that his career ended there were very high, in percentage terms. History would later demonstrate that Pesaola's footballing life would be characterized by a high longevity; in any case, Gimona's foul remains one of the most violent, as well as gratuitous, fouls in the history of our Serie A in the Second Post-War period. At this point, we must return to the "title" that opens our story, because in the background of that screeching of joints we can hear the echo of a legendary refrain that reaches all the way to Palazzo Chigi.

Let's put some order in the chaos of references. The president of Palermo in those years was Prince Raimondo Lanza di Trabia, a bon vivant and "inventor" of the physical location for the transfer market negotiations, namely the Hotel Gallia in Milan. On the eve of the match with Roma, who in that second half of the season needed points to pull themselves up from the bottom of the standings, the Prince had covered his tracks by stating that the Romans would put pressure on the referee. Certainly, the histrionic Rosanero top manager had been a good prophet about the fact that the referee Matucci would let the match get out of hand. Not everyone knows that the Prince, who committed suicide in 1954, precisely because of his premature and dramatic death, would have inspired the solitary nocturnal wanderer imagined by Domenico Modugno for the most painful of his lyrics, namely "Vecchio Frac". However, the Prince, when he decided to end it all, was only thirty-nine years old. The digressions, around that violent tackle by Gimona, do not end here: another excellent name to mention in the non-football sphere is that of the then Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi, because the statesman personally committed himself to act as a mediator between the two footballers. The mediation was so successful that Gimona, who also went to visit Pesaola in the clinic, saw his initial life ban reduced first to a two-year ban, then to a few months.